The binary ate the creative

Curing Advertising’s bipolar disorder

Bread or butter? Rise or shine? Procter or Gamble? When you substitute the word ‘and’ for ‘or’ in these iconic pairings, we render them immediately comical and rob them of their potency.

But this is effectively what the once intelligent, artful, and creative worlds of marketing and media have been doing since they became so swooningly enchanted by their Silicon Valley seducers.

In his book ‘Everybody Lies’, Seth Stephens‑Davidowitz may have flagged year zero of this nonsense as 2000, which was when Google ran the first ever A/B test to test the optimal number of search results to display on a page. While the underlying technique wasn’t new - previously known as randomized controlled experiments or split testing - the digitizing and heavy reliance on it was. Suddenly, the technique was at the center of every tech company’s process, with insiders at Microsoft and Facebook complaining about the need to run hundreds of them every day.

But it didn’t stop there. Tech’s rising star throughout the oughts started to dazzle the media and marketing industries. In their giddiness, they gobbled up tech’s new toys, casting aside perfectly good - often far superior - ones. The Technorati’s ideology intoxicated our neophiliac industry. But as tech’s toys littered our business, so began the strangulation. Innovation, marketing, and even media and entertainment all succumbed to the charms of the simple, the speedy, and the binary to their detriment. As with any romantic obsession, the creative industries fell behind on their studies while they romped around in a carefree, fail-fast, algorithmic trance. In the background, tech wasn’t courting the media business; it was coming for its lunch. While we were making googly eyes at Google, they were A/B testing YouTube channels into existence and writing a new rule book that locked creative into a binary neverland.

But tech’s methods, when used to a fanatical degree, chafe in the creative spheres, causing unintended consequences that we’re only now reckoning with. For starters, a binary mindset renders nuanced distinctions necessary for art, psychology, or society instantly puerile and mindless, as we pit non-opposing entities against each other. Why the urge, when seeing two concepts, to reflexively make them fight? I’m picturing a 4-year-old boy at the breakfast table with his action figure fighting literally everything - from the butter dish to the cereal box - vanquishing them all with a loud roar. Perhaps this isn’t that far-fetched when the majority of these tech companies were staffed (if not helmed) by hoodie-clad pubescent males.

If not regression, perhaps we simply lost our marbles at the start of the century. The list of ‘Or’s’ we earnestly pump out today might look more at home in a Monty Python sketch. Creativity or efficiency? Digital or beautiful? Humans or AI? This is ontological nonsense that misdirects and thwarts us. What on earth happened to the far more productive ‘and’?

Did we not create these things to serve the other? Those of us who started our careers before tech’s Stockholm syndrome of media was in full effect might still remember a more pluralistic workplace. The econometrically-minded among us will know that Binet and Field have long proven empirically that creativity drives efficiency in advertising, so situating it in the enemy camp is not only idiocy, but wastes an opportunity to harness it. And through Adam Morgan, we now know that businesses can’t afford to be dull thanks to his work in ‘’The Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull.”

I’m not sure if my 18 years in America have distorted my perspective (as it roughly corresponds with this period of binary nonsense), but I was educated to regard debate and dialectic reasoning as necessary to advance ideas, not to set them in mindless opposition to one another and seek domination of just one. Could our era of political Punch and Judy be connected to this same tech-centric ideology?

But let's return to advertising. How might we cure our bipolar disorder?

Why have our so-called creative colleagues insisted on upholding this see-saw economics? Tech’s gain is not humanity’s loss. Humans and AI do not need to go to war. Although it might not seem that way right now. If you look through the lens of ‘or’ it is very easy to get dragged into the panic - and I’d not blame you.

People are losing their jobs, their dignity, and their nerve because trigger-happy leaders are making decisions based on the ‘or principle.’ A Sophie’s Choice that demands that you either kill your human child or disinvest in your robot one. This false but convincing case is propagated by - yep, the tech and finance classes, who tend to view things in terms of shekels, tech, and zero-sum games. And it doesn’t help that the only real market success stories are AI-related at the moment.

We must break this 20-year spell and replace this absurd choice by substituting these puerile ‘ors’ for optimistic ‘ands.’

Every era loves to situate its systems and language in the beloved tech of its age. While we waxed poetic about the wheel, we applied cycles to fortune, life, and death. In the machine age, we projected mechanics into biology and psychology to attempt to see more profoundly. And space rockets helped design our cars and kitchens in the 60s. The last age was binary and may have infected our communication, politics, and creative industries. But the first quarter of the 21st century marked the birth of adolescence of digital tech and its testosterone-fueled regressive energy. And we’re now entering a second act, where we have the chance to grow up, and the technology accompanying us is remarkably polyphonic.

The AI age, therefore, promises to be more pluralistic and conversational. As this technology promotes learning and agency, rather than dogma and decision trees. And the more you converse with it, the more you get from it as it borrows from more complex ideas about humans and amasses knowledge over time. You could say that it is helping us get wiser as it playfully cross-pollinates categories and topics that have no business being connected. You can ask ChatGPT to compare seemingly unrelated concepts like a compost heap and nuclear fusion or a jar of coffee and Afghanistan, and it will give you both coherent and laterally inspiring answers.

But we still need an empowered human in the mix to want to combine these ideas. Because AI is designed to make the masses happy. While it will make an infinite number of connections, it will make those that please you a priority, so it tends to build to average tastes. Systems designed to keep the masses happy inevitably produce a ‘Schelling point,’ which is the term for when products (such as cars) all start to look the same after being designed by committee and surveys. Creative made by humans doesn't do this because the best of it is born of human suffering or some equally edgy emotional trigger. Good creativity requires human frailty, pain, or vulnerability.

So can we move beyond our bipolar disorder by realizing that it’s all about humans and AI?

AI’s less rigid permissiveness is rather well suited to humanity’s non-linear idiosyncrasies, so is a much better enabler than those earlier tools that boxed us in. Perhaps after the digital age, we’re arriving in a new human age. The previous age that turned every tic and nuance into measurable ‘science’ should be followed by one that marvels at the wonder of humans again. And there is much evidence that a new curiosity for humanity is upon us AI has pushed the topic into debates among ‘experts’ way outside of the usual spheres of social science. That the most sophisticated tech ever prompts a return to a human age might sound a tad ironic, but it took something as seemingly unfathomable to finally bring us back to our roots. AI can help us regain an appreciation for our talents hidden behind inflexible tools for so long.

And it will help us expand our definition of progress. To combine things rather than endlessly and mindlessly force clashes, and ultimately the squashing of each other. A human conversation between friends isn’t a war or a legal battle. It is a free-flowing, living, growing entity that evolves and becomes more beautiful. The bulk of today’s workforce was brought up in a digital age that forced them to surrender their humanity to technologies and binary narratives so as to guarantee numerical ‘performance.’ This generation needs a reset. Let them invite the magic back in.

Far from it being the frivolous antagonist of efficiency, organizations must be trained to realize that it’s their responsibility to uphold creativity for the sake of effectiveness. That it is, in fact, fiscally irresponsible to sideline it. And how beautiful things become when they're built to support each other, or when we constructively debate. The romance and emotion from art, psychology, and philosophy will thrive when it’s paired with, not pitted against, technology.

This shift calls for a return to thinking that demands that opposites not only coexist, but actually strengthen one another, rather than fight. Proctor didn’t fight Gamble, bread isn’t an alternative for butter, and we don’t rise or shine. We rely on both sides to create something stronger and more meaningful. When we stop forcing false binaries and embrace the power of “and,” we create a future where tech amplifies humanity. And ideas flourish through collaboration.