It’s been just over a year since I joined Panoply Media as its first Chief Product and Technology Officer. That milestone seems as good a time as any to take a step back, look more closely at the industry we operate in, and think about what we’re building for the future.
These past few weeks, I’ve been working remotely from the tiny fishing village in Cape Breton where my parents live. There are no billboards and the mountains block most radio signals.
Growing up here, CTV (it was called ATV back then) was the only television station that reliably reached our farmhouse. I still remember the excitement when, aged seven, CBC arrived and doubled our available TV channels.
On Sunday mornings, my younger siblings and I would wake up early and stare at the colour bars on the television, waiting for the signal to start broadcasting at 8:00 a.m.
One of the CBC shows we were waiting for was Switchback. Fellow children of the ’80s may remember it. It was…different. It defied categorization: a strange fusion of music videos, celebrity interviews, contests, features and… puppets?
I told you it was hard to categorize.
But we loved it. It stood out because it was out of the ordinary. And it understood its audience in a way no other program did at that time.
Back then, content was scarce and our attention had relatively few places to go. Today, the opposite is true. We carry an effectively infinite supply of content in our pockets, available every second of every day.
And now AI is making it easier and cheaper than ever to create even more of it.
That presents marketers with an interesting choice.
We can use these tools to produce more — more content, more messages, more variations, more impressions — or we can use them to get better at earning the increasingly scarce resource that actually matters: human attention.
Working from Cape Breton has taken me back to a quieter world. One that provides more moments to breathe and live in the moment. And it’s made me think more about the role the advertising industry plays in the noise people experience every day.
So how can marketers be part of the solution instead of simply adding to the problem?
I’ve got some thoughts. And increasingly, they’re informing how we do business at Panoply.
Don't add to the noise
It’s easy to understand why consumers often have a love/hate relationship with advertising.
There’s already so much noise. We’re bombarded by messages on every screen — from the smallest in our pockets to the largest in our family rooms. And that’s before we even leave the front door.
Technology has given marketers an extraordinary ability to reach people. But the ability to reach someone doesn’t automatically give us the right to their attention.
When the form and content of a campaign actually connect with its intended audience, it’s a truly satisfying moment. But it really shouldn’t be that unusual.
Intelligent content, aligned with genuine audience understanding and thoughtful, strategic placement, creates something very different from simply generating another impression.
It creates signal instead of noise.
That distinction is becoming even more important with AI-generated media.
AI has given our industry an extraordinary ability to make more things, faster. We’re all on the receiving end of the slop grenades and we know this isn’t what audiences want.
The opportunity isn’t to use AI to fill every available space with another piece of content. It’s to use technology to understand audiences better, make smarter decisions and ultimately create messages and stories that are more relevant, more interesting and more worthy of someone’s attention.
Respect people's attention
Time is a precious resource – now more than ever. As marketers, our worst offense (among many) is wasting someone’s time. There’s no getting it back again.
If we want people to give some of that finite resource to a brand, we need to first understand them. We need to do the work to make it the content and the audience fit.
Where and how do they live, work and play? What do they care about? What are they trying to accomplish? How can a brand help enable the things they love — a sporting event, a medicine that keeps their family healthy, a more affordable financial product — without degrading the experience at the same time?
This takes research and empathy.
At Panoply, that means putting audience understanding at the heart of the planning process: using data, research and technology to understand not simply where an audience can be reached, but where a brand has a legitimate opportunity to add something worthwhile.
As strategists, it can be easy to become absorbed by KPIs, reach, frequency and efficiency. Those things matter.
But we also need to remember that the “audience” we’re targeting is made up of people.
Use technology to become more human, not less
This might be where there’s the biggest danger of losing our way. We’re at a weird depressing fascinating point in human history. Over the last century, we’ve seen brands become cultural forces in our lives.
But brands are not human. Clever storytelling might make us believe they share some traits with us, but they’re not us.
And now we’re throwing the robots into the mix.
The rise of artificial intelligence is incredibly exciting. A central part of my role at Panoply is helping our team integrate AI into our workflows in ways that enhance human expertise rather than replace it wholesale.
It’s also why I wrote this article from scratch rather than simply getting ChatGPT to spit out a first draft. (And yes, I use em dashes on my own.)
AI is a great thought partner. It can improve efficiencies, help us interrogate data and uncover opportunities we might otherwise miss. Used well, it can give talented people more time to do the things humans are particularly good at: judgement, creativity, empathy and originality.
But there’s another possible future.
If everyone uses the same tools to create more content, more quickly, we risk creating a vast sea of technically competent but sterile work that all looks and sounds remarkably similar.
Humans need more humanity, not less. It’s definitely easier and cheaper for us to pump out generated strategies and content. But the audience will not care. At all. Ever. So what’s the flippin’ point?
As we’ve said at Panoply before, this is where our craft matters most: using AI as an enabler, not a shortcut, and resisting a race to the bottom in quality and impact.
The brands — and marketers — that figure this out will have a much better chance of genuinely connecting with people.
Everyone else will just make more noise.
So, where do we go next?
I keep coming back to those Sunday mornings in Cape Breton.
My little brother and I are sitting in front of the television, staring at the colour bars and waiting for Switchback to come on. (My sisters sensibly thought we were idiots.) Obviously, I don’t want to go back to two TV channels. But there’s something from that experience worth preserving.
Our goal should be to make audiences feel a little more like I did waiting for Switchback to come on television.
Great media and great marketing can still make people genuinely want to pay attention. It can surprise them, entertain them, help them, make them think, and occasionally even make them feel something.
In an age of infinite content and AI-generated everything, there’s market pressure to load up the slop cannon. That makes quality and craft a higher bar than it used to be. It should still be the one we aim for.
