Marc-Antoine Pinard, left, of the tech company Levio, and Yanick Bédard, right, Sid Lee’s executive vice-president of innovation, digital, and strategy, meet to discuss the use of artificial intelligence in advertising at the Sid Lee office in Place Ville-Marie, Montreal, Que., on Sept. 18.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
There are many ways in which the offices of the Montreal advertising firm Sid Lee would be unrecognizable to a midcentury ad man.
Instead of two-martini lunches and Scandinavian furniture, the self-described creative agency that came up with the Toronto Raptors’ We The North campaign has fizzy water on tap in its white-on-white temple of millennial cool. No one smokes. A woman is CEO.
Maybe the biggest shock to the system of a time-travelling Don Draper would be a new aspect of Sid Lee’s business: its use of artificial intelligence. The company recently began a partnership with the local AI specialists Levio to change how they work and the results are enough to make a Mad Man’s head spin.
But as the world grapples with the potential of artificial intelligence – saviour or scourge or somewhere in between – Sid Lee has a disarmingly humble answer about what the technology means.
“It’s Play-Doh,” said Yanick Bédard, Sid Lee’s executive vice-president of innovation, digital, and strategy. Somewhere between a tool and a toy. Decidedly mundane. Above all, said Mr. Bédard in a recent interview at the company’s downtown Montreal headquarters, AI is allowing them to focus more on the creative parts of their job by ironing out many of the boring parts.
As Montreal gets ready to play host to thousands from Canada’s AI industry for the two-day ALL IN conference starting Wednesday − including deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio and federal AI Minister Evan Solomon − it may be a valuable corrective to some of the hype and dread surrounding the emerging technology.
Employees at the Sid Lee office take time out to play a board game in one of the open spaces.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
For an industry like advertising whose stock-in-trade is big bold brainwaves that can change a business’s image – Just Do It, Because You’re Worth It, Where’s the Beef? – AI might seem like an odd fit. Why would Nike or L’Oréal pay an agency millions of dollars to ask ChatGPT for slogans?
It’s never that simple, Mr. Bédard said. The agency’s copywriters might start by bouncing concepts for a new campaign off of AI, allowing it to come up with iffy ideas that the writers can play with and punch up.
But isn’t coming up with those sketchy early ideas the fun part of the job?
“Not the first hour,” replied Mr. Bédard emphatically. He used to be a copywriter. In that first hour, you’re mostly crumpling up pieces of paper and flinging them at the wastebasket. In this case, AI is mostly replacing a lot of missed jump shots and stale silences.
This is the dirty little secret of artificial intelligence, said Marc-Antoine Pinard, chief technology and AI officer of Levio, the Montreal tech company that Sid Lee recently tapped to help it navigate the technology. For all its pretensions to “boil the ocean or change the course of humanity,” he said, AI is often most useful at mastering the banal.
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When the burrito chain Chipotle wanted to save on the time employees spent preparing food, it zeroed in on one culprit: guacamole. Peeling, pitting, and chopping avocados was taking up an inordinate share of workers’ time, and it was tedious and tiring and messy, Mr. Pinard said. So the company hired a tech company to program a robot that could process an avocado in mere seconds and make vats of gooey, delicious guacamole, freeing employees to spend more time on the finer points of burrito artistry.
Sid Lee has started using AI to chop a lot of its own proverbial avocados. When the agency started working with a client in the past, like Rona or Loto-Québec, someone at Sid Lee had to assemble a “fact pack” about the company: its financials, its footprint, its customer profile. It mostly involved a lot of googling, but could take up to 20 hours. Now, AI can scrape the internet for most of that information, leaving the same employee with more time to analyze the data.
When another Sid Lee client, the grocery chain IGA, wanted to respond quickly to the Trump administration’s tariffs by promoting its Buy Quebec credentials, the agency summoned the malleable, Play-Dohy power of artificial intelligence again.
It took one of the dozens of 3D characters it had created for IGA in collaboration with the Montreal animation studio SHED and used AI to reanimate them lip-synching dialogue for the new ad – a weeks-long process compressed to about a day. The spot was still their idea, using their creations, with little of the fulfilling creative work subtracted from the process.
“It’s our vision brought to life – we don’t want to just press play,” said Julien Roub Charland, creative technologist at Sid Lee. “If we lose the craft, then we shouldn’t use it.”
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As he spoke, Mr. Charland was using AI to fill in the yellow T-shirt of another IGA character on a laptop. If he wanted to cut that character out of her background, instead of painstakingly passing his cursor over her outline like a pair of digital scissors – a task “everyone hates,” he said – he could just get AI to do it.
At the end of the week, AI will fill in his timesheet, too – another avocado effortlessly chopped.
The people at Sid Lee are well aware of the ethical dangers when artificial intelligence and creativity overlap: university students cheating on essays, deepfakes that dubiously repurpose the likeness of real people, or AI slop published in newspapers.
The agency isn’t about to start depending on AI to write its jingles, both on ethical and quality grounds. It still hires real musicians, although it might have them “co-create” with artificial intelligence by toying with the sound of a string section, say – not so different from digital music technology that has existed for decades.
“Do we really want to kill the singer and songwriter?” Mr. Bédard said. No more than Sid Lee wants to kill the advertising copywriter. Maybe Don Draper wouldn’t be so disturbed by the AI revolution after all.