By Todd Russell
It’s Sunday when I’m writing this piece, a couple months before this will be published on a free play game Sunday, so there will be a game before this is done to play.
Was pondering what Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are up to with AI: completely AI advertising.
It sounds like nothing any of us that might/could/will be subjected to, and yet maybe there is a way advertising online could morph into something gamers would play, pun intended, attention to.
“What Mark is describing here is a vision where a client comes to Meta and says “I want customers for my product,” and Meta does everything else. It generates photos and videos of those products using AI, writes copy about those products with AI, assembles that into an infinite number of ads with AI, targets those ads to all the people on its platforms with AI, measures which ads perform best and iterates on them with AI, and then has those customers buy the actual products on its platforms using its systems.” – Mark Zuckerberg says ads will soon be handled entirely by AI | The Verge
The old ad system is, in my opinion, permanently broken. Instead, an advertising system that could work is completely playable ad games — with leaderboards, with score chasing. Think of them like a new form of couponing. Many, many years ago my stepmother would meticulously clip coupons. There is an active group of people that would be more than happy to play games and earn discounts and/or even free games.
This seems like a much more viable way to advertise to people, giving them a chance to do what they are already doing, make ads an active experience vs. a passive and intrusive experience. That’s what we have now, intrusion, and all it does is drive people away. Stop intruding upon whatever we’re doing and become a part of what we’re doing. If AI is making all the content, why doesn’t it just generate games.
As an example of how something like this might work, I’m using a fictional auto insurance carrier called “Save On Your Auto Insurance” and use an AI game generator called CaisualAI (https://caisual.com/). The text prompt to create this game is as follows:
The AI generator created a splash screen with controls and instructions:
Save On Auto Insurance, an AI Generated Game, can be played here: https://caisual.com/g/rgwjv0n205nrwhth
Share your highest score in the comments.
Got 170 playing on the phone.