Fred & Farid launches AI production studio Aimagination

Independent agency network Fred & Farid is launching a global production studio, Aimagination, to work with clients and other agencies on marketing campaigns driven by artificial intelligence. Aimagination is designed to offer a blend of human and machine output, bringing together experts in generative AI with those in human concepting to produce campaigns quickly and inexpensively without sacrificing the strategic alignment that marketers need for their brand campaigns. Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here The Paris-based agency has been experimenting with AI for some time—it recently held AI art exhibitions in both Paris and Shanghai—and co-founder Fred Raillard told Ad Age he’s personally become obsessed with it. Now, Raillard said, he wants to find ways that clients and the industry can benefit from what he sees as AI’s inevitable encroachment on the creative process. “You can see a lot of super talented AI artists out there, and you also see a lot of super talented advertising people,” he said. “What I’m struggling to see at the moment is a structure where we reconcile those two levers—with conceptors who are fully into generative AI but have the advertising mindset and understand brands.” Raillerd said he’s personally generated 10,000 AI images as he’s worked to learn the space, and that others in the company have created up to 50,000. Along with the generative AI chops in the creative department, he added, Aimagination has AI experts across other disciplines, such as legal. More from Ad Age: Top 5 AI activations of 2023 “We need to really understand what we can do, whether it’s Midjourney or DALL-E—what we’re allowed to sell to clients,” he said. Super Bowl commercials Tracking the latest brand and agency plans Enter here Aimagination is a joint venture between Fred & Farid’s Shanghai and Los Angeles offices—Raillerd called it an East-meets-West initiative. Current clients include The North Face in China, cognac brand Louis XIII in France and climate group Fridays for Future in the U.S. “As a nonprofit, we’ve been incredibly impressed by the speed, cost efficiency and also the quality of Aimagination’s productions. It’s completely changed what we now know is possible with our visual campaigns,” said Katharina Maier, a lead Fridays for Future organizer. As part of the launch, Aimagination has posted scores of images and videos on its website, as creative examples of what clients can expect. Watch three of the videos below: While acknowledging AI’s threat to working creatives, whose human skills could be matched or surpassed by machines, Raillerd said AI brings plenty of positives for marketers and creatives. Among them are radical production cost savings, better speed-to-market (particularly useful for brands reacting to culture in real time) and environmental benefits. “I’m not denying AI has high energy consumption, for sure, so it’s not completely sustainable, but it’s still way more sustainable than shooting,” he said. The main benefit for creatives, he added, is that there are no limits aside from one’s imagination. This can be daunting for those who find constraints useful, he said, but is a huge opportunity for those willing to embrace the uncertainty. “We’re all threatened, in a way. And that’s the ambiguity of this experience—it’s super exciting but also super frightening,” Raillerd said. “It takes something like a jump into AI to say, ‘OK, now it’s just me and my imagination. Am I able to do an ambitious, relevant prompt? At the end of the process, am I able to do a relevant curation of the 100 images I’ve just produced?” Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here Agencies everywhere have been incorporating AI into their workflows in recent years, but few have launched stand-alone units dedicated to AI production. One agency that has is Havas, which launched its Prose on Pixels unit last summer. Raillerd said Aimagination will constantly evolve as AI does, adding that change will likely be the only constant for creatives in the space for the foreseeable future. “The image we had was, there’s a big dragon arriving in our industry and we’ve clumsily tried to climb up on the dragon instead of staying on the earth and looking at it flying away,” he said. “So, yes, it’s clumsy, but at least we’re on the dragon.”

Fred & Farid launches AI production studio, blending conceptual creative with generative tools

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