Helping hands
At Seven West Media, AI has become an integral tool for senior graphic designer Jessica Hankinson and her colleagues in their quest to produce brand and marketing assets in support of the he integrated media company’s various activities.
“Whether that is through print ads, digital, video, audio, radio, events – the whole shebang comes out of our marketing team,” Hankinson said.
For the past year the creative teams have been augmenting their outputs using Adobe’s Firefly generative AI tools, which provide a prompt-based capability for image generation.
“As a creative it can be really hard to explain what’s in our heads to non-visual people,” Hankinson said.
“So even just putting a few keywords into this platform to describe the picture that we are seeing in our minds, and being able to have something come up, is so much faster than if we are to sketch it out.”
Initial success with ideation led the teams to consider how it might also assist with customisation, and helping the team to quickly storyboard ideas.
As comfort with AI has grown, its use has increased across the group, with the video team now using AI features in Adobe’s After Effects for tasks such as stem separation (isolating different audio elements) and cleaning up dialogue.
Having travelled to Adobe’s annual Max conference in Miami last year Hankinson, said she was excited by demonstrations of new capabilities, including the ability to create a whole video production generated by AI.
“Authenticity and audience trust are key in our industry, particularly as public scrutiny around AI in media continues to grow,” Hankinson said.
“When used, AI is typically part of a broader creative process like storyboarding or mixed media artwork, not a replacement for human storytelling.
“Our focus is obviously making sure that we are very reactive to the way the public are responding to things, so if they’re become more comfortable with the use of AI, perhaps we’ll evolve into using it more. For now, the plan is to use it more for workflows and streamlining things. But, as AI evolves, so do we.
“I don’t see AI as taking over our jobs. If anything, the need for content is creating more jobs. So, I see it as counteracting the fact there is such a need for all this content and it’s helping us keep up. It’s helping us get it out there.”
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