Creature London aims AI tools at charities and scale-ups

Creature London is announcing the addition of two generative AI-powered tools to its services, aiming to make its campaign creation process faster and more cost-efficient for clients.

The first is Impala, an AI-powered tool created to help brands quickly reach market-tested strategic brand propositions, and the second is Magic Ant, a production arm that will allow clients to obtain creative assets for campaigns at a faster and cheaper rate.

Impala will point clients who are uncertain about their creative direction towards a selection of market-tested propositions within the span of a week. According to the agency, it is designed for clients who need to get to market quickly but are hampered by budget or time constraints.

“Basically, it’s an AI chat-driven tool that will generate propositions that are innovative, interesting and really quick,” Dan Cullen-Shute, chief executive of Creature London, told Campaign. 

“We can then ask a human creative, get some very quick creative expressions and then use AI again, which is where the second proposition comes into play to generate high-level creative assets that we can test very quickly.”

The launch of Magic Ant (given its name “because ants are incredibly powerful creatures that build incredible things”) comes in the wake of the agency's claims that clients have run into the limitations of traditional production methods. It is designed to offer faster, easier and more cost-efficient creative solutions to clients more likely to have budget limitations – including start-ups, scale-ups and charities.

According to Cullen-Shute, there is a “growing subset” of clients who need work that is quick, high-quality and affordable. “We think that using AI, plus the smart, creative misbehaviour that we humans can bring to bear on it, is a brilliant approach,” he said.

Creature London is currently using Magic Ant to produce a campaign for Child Poverty Action Group, an organisation that helps combat child poverty in the UK.

The agency's team claims that it is enabling it to provide the charity with “degrees of execution and creative production finish that they never would have been able to achieve in the real world”.

Following industry concerns about generative AI stifling creativity and posing a threat to employment across adland, Cullen-Shute noted that there is a “huge amount of cynicism about AI at the moment” – a sentiment he hopes Creature London's latest services can challenge.

Calling the growth of AI “one of the most exciting things” to have happened to the advertising industry, he emphasised the speed and scale the technology will bring to major brands and organisations in their campaign creation processes.

“There are obviously bigger, wider questions about AI and the rise of machines – but also, us helping charitable organisations or scale-ups do better than they would have done otherwise isn’t going to be the thing that leads to the apocalypse,” he said.

“This is about how we can use it to create a good impact for our clients, which means seeing how we can test things really, really fast. And that can only be a good thing, as far as I’m concerned."

Andrew Gibson, chief strategy officer at Creature London, also told Campaign that while the agency's AI offers will be great for producing campaigns at speed, input from its human team will still be at the core of its creative delivery process.

He said: “Human creative instincts are the deeper truths that exist within us and machines have still yet to pick that up. We’re at a really exciting point where we can now create, produce and uncover new ideas, inspiration and ultimately executions – but that’s always going to require creative prompts from people.”