Q&A with Ben Hopkins and Morten Legarth

Ahead of their appearance at Digital Day Scotland on April 24, we caught up with Creative Directors Ben Hopkins and Morten Legarth.

What’s been your favourite campaign to work on recently and why?

Daisy Vs Scammer for O2. Daisy is a chatty AI granny designed to waste phone scammers’ time. It’s exactly the type of work we love, a solid creative idea, enabled by cutting-edge technology to tackle a real-world problem that benefits people’s lives.

As Creative Directors, what or who inspires you creatively?

A healthy mix of traditional and brand-new sources of culture. It is extremely inspiring to see what emerging artists are doing with new technology like AI, but marketing is about addressing real-world challenges facing brands so finding creative solutions that combine the two is important.

In what ways has AI-driven marketing improved or changed audience engagement and interaction?

For most brands it hasn’t, yet. It’s typically big brands with innovation as a part of their moat or smaller brands that see AI as a way to accelerate past their rivals that are reaping the benefits. Many brands are talking the talk but in reality, most are still waiting it out on the sidelines for the AI dust to settle before moving from internal experimentation to real-world deployment.

Looking ahead, what trends do you foresee in AI’s role in shaping the future of marketing?

It’s already hard for brands to stand out on social media, especially with organic content. Well, that’s nothing compared with what’s to come. A deluge of AI content, created at scale in minutes and hours not days and weeks is hitting our feeds, all designed to beat the algorithm. But the thing is, it’s not that great. If brands want to stand out without paying through the nose they need to embrace these new means of rapid content creation and fuse it with superior creative and cultural thinking.

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