Failure to Communicate is introducing a new semi-regular feature, the AI Farmers Market!
AI creative work is usually an unfortunate choice and always a bad look, but there are some places it infects pervasively – low-budget indie movies, LinkedIn slop posts, and perhaps most notoriously your favorite local Farmers Market. While produce vendors working on micro-budgets can be forgiven their transgressions, the same is not true for multi-million-dollar brands. The AI Farmers Market highlights the shortsighted, miserly brands that are cutting creative corners and eroding consumer trust and standards, barfing garbage onto your timeline just to save a few bucks.
Made the mistake of scrolling Facebook Reels and, man, look at this…
Roku, you had $4.7 billion in revenue on $2.1 billion in profit last year, you are not Sister Sage’s Discount Incense Emporium. Welcome to the AI Farmer’s Market.
What’s so funny about this awful foray into slop graphics is that Roku already has a widely recognized visual identity – two of them, in fact! There’s the standard “Everyday Illustration” visual identity they use across most of social media, a lazy riff on Corporate Memphis which might make some folks (me) gag but is nonetheless, you know, an actual respectable design style.
And, of course, they have the iconic Roku City design palette, which is a natural fit for Roku Advertising’s creative work because over time the screensaver has turned into its most effective brand platform.
This is a particularly insidious use of AI creative because of the brand using it and its position as a trendsetter and multiplier. The ad is not from Roku, but Roku Advertising, the DIY ad platform. The implicit message is, who needs professionals? Make your own crappy ads, they don’t even have to be good! They could look bad, they could even look like this, nobody will be mad at you! Why hire a designer or, you know, take the time to become passably good at making creative?
That’s a sucker move. You’re only two lazy prompts away from making… whatever this is…
So while your typical billion-dollar brand using AI creative is like someone contracting a virus and bringing it home to their family, this is more like an infected person getting on a series of packed airplanes. It’s a super-spreader event.
Like all AI content, it’s lowering the bar for what’s considered “acceptable” and, to mix the metaphor a bit, that lowered bar will open a floodgate of uncanny, smooth, noisy trash ads across your respective FYPs. “Hey, look at this, we made it so bad even you can do it!”
I’m not someone who particularly respects advertising as some artistic medium – it’s not – but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have standards. The people who work at the ad store are telling us themselves.
Send your own submissions to the AI Farmers Market with links and/or photos to inbox@commsfail.com.