Jeremy Somers on building an AI-assisted creative agency, 80:20 in Humans + AI, AI-amplified storytelling, and the future of agencies (AC Ep48)

“True creativity comes from humans because it stems from our unique individual experiences of life. “

– Jeremy Somers

About Jeremy Somers

Jeremy Somers is Founder and Director of AI-assisted creative agency NotContent.ai, and of We Are Handsome. He has extensive experience as a Creative Director, working for brands such as Asos, Canon, Mercedes-Benz, Qantas, Spotify, and W Hotels.

Websites: 

www.notcontent.ai

www.jeremysomers.com

Instagram: @notcontent.ai

Beehiv: notcontent.beehiiv

What you will learn

• Exploring Jeremy’s journey from analog to digital in the creative industry
• The pivotal role of generative AI in transforming creative processes
• How notcontent.AI merges AI tools with human creativity for enhanced productivity
• Addressing common misconceptions about AI replacing creative jobs
• Strategies for integrating AI into traditional creative agency workflows
• The future of creative agencies in an AI-driven world
• Insights on maintaining human creativity at the core of AI-assisted outputs

Episode Resources

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Claude-3-Opus
• ChatGPT 4o
• Fireflies (transcription tool)
• Whisper Memos (app)
• Canva
• Ethan Mollick
• notcontent.AI
• Generative AI

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Jeremy, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Jeremy Somers: Hey, Ross, thank you for having me.

Ross: So you’re a leader in AI-assisted creative agency work. Tell me more. Tell us more. 

Jeremy: The story begins long before the world of generative AI and AI creativity. My career and life history have always been about creativity. And I started in traditional analog photography, when I was in my teens, and trends went through the whole transition into digital photography. And then I taught myself graphic design. And then I learned it through a very, very early Photoshop version on a bubble, iMac, and the colored ones. And then started working in some of the very first digital agencies in Sydney. And learning through the transition of like, there was no social media and other social media, there is no e-commerce now there is e-commerce, so it’s in digital agencies working on big brands, Nike, and Pepsi, and Microsoft, Samsung, etcetera, etcetera, through this whole transition. And so a lot of my career journey has been in transitional periods of, like, massive shifts in the thing that I’m doing, not just the tools that are available to us, but just societal level shifts of how we communicate as designers and creators and branding people to the outside world. 

And I happened upon open APIs, Darley white paper very early on, probably coming up on, two and a half years since it was released, I think I’ll check that. But I haven’t found this like paper and nerdily, read through the entire thing, and then read through it again. And then I fully understood what was going on, I had this moment of, sort of cinematic-like, flashback, flash forward moment of, I see the end result of where everything I’ve ever done, creatively, how I’ve done, it has changed, but this is going to change everything in a way, which we’ve never seen before. So I have this, Pivotal epiphany. And I was like, whoa, okay, how can I learn more? One, and two, once I was able to learn more, and you know, so your generative AI suddenly became a thing. I was just like, rabid for learning and looking at tools and learning about who’s doing what and how to kind of get access to it as a creative and as an agency owner, and I happened into the right places at the exact right time. And did a whole bunch of testing things and playing around and just like nerding out on stuff and taught me a whole bunch of new skills and the new taxonomy and way of thinking, and then I thought, okay, how can I take all of this time that I’m spending and turn it into something commercially viable? And I see this end result? 

We’re not there yet. The technology is not there yet. The people are not there. we’re so, so early on all of this stuff. But how can I, if I can translate it into some sort of commercial vehicle now? And then we’re talking two years ago, I’ll set myself and be way ahead. I’ve seen all of these massive other shifts, and I recognize this is the start of a shift. And I was never early on anything else. So maybe I could be early on this one. That’s how we get to notcontent.AI is one of one of the world’s first creative agencies, today’s AI assistant.

Ross: So, AI-assisted creatives. Let’s dig into that. So I mean, you’ve been talking about image generation, of course. There are other forms of communication, occurring, words and videos and smells and all sorts of things. So let’s have a look at the high level, and perhaps you can sort of dig down into detail. So what does that mean, when you’ve got creatives as in presumably creative humans working with tools, and how together they’re creating something better, faster, cheaper, more superlatives in whatever way? 

Jeremy: That’s it. So along this journey over the last two years, one of the recurring themes that we’ve seen out in the public through mainstream media, even through our social platforms, and especially like places like LinkedIn is like, oh, no, all of the creatives are going to lose their jobs because these tools are doing their jobs. And that’s true to a certain degree. But one thing that I’ve really learned having done this, is that I actually think that true creativity, which comes from humans, because it comes from our specific individual experience of life, and the things that I’ve taken in are the things that are my output, that is not going to be replicated by AI, to the degree that humans are able to do it. Ai is an open slate, it’s like it’s an encyclopedia of everything. And so if it knows everything, it knows nothing until you ask it something super specific, but true creativity and the true creatives and the way that we’re able to think based on my individual inputs, I think the true creatives are going to be more valuable moving forward, not less, and maybe to an amplification of, you know, 10x 100x. 

And I realized that because what I was seeing as gendered AI became more accessible to call it the masses, there was no creativity. We were suddenly given a series of tools that allowed our imaginations to run absolutely wild, and do anything that we wanted. And as a group, what we did was the same exact thing that everyone else was doing. We were all able to see the output because of social media, and the platforms that existed, even some of the tools and platforms themselves. I was like, oh, as a group, we’re not very creative. This is why I have, you know, sort of a long and storied career spanning multiple different industries that are widely separate from each other from fashion to like, lighting design, for rock concerts, to graphic design, to photography, because the thing that kept me going was my ability to think creatively and have the output be agnostic, but it doesn’t matter what the output is.  I just needed to learn a series of tools to be able to design lighting for a rock concert. But the true creativity came with me sitting with a piece of paper. 

So true creators are going to be the ones that stick. And that’s why I say AI-assisted creative, whenever I’m talking about this, because the AI is my assistant, the AI is whoever’s working with the studio, the agency, the AR is our assistant in a whole bunch of ways. And as you allude to, not just image generation, and now video generation words and too much more intense degree, as we’ve been doing over the last six months. From a strategy point of view, so much creative work that we do is strategy-based and needs a strategic baseline to be able to produce really interesting ideas. And then, the AI is really good at taking the grunt work of the production. 

Ross: I’d like to dig into that. What I describe as humans plus AI workflow, where humans and AI are both elements in a sequence or network of things which create a wonderful output. So let’s talk about strategy. So, unpack that, where does the human do? What does the AI do? What’s the process?

Jeremy: So let me give you the overarching, like, finding that I, that I really figured out. Of course, the regular 80/20 rule that applies to everything in life applies here as well. And I was really like, how does it apply, then I figured out it actually applies backward. Based on what I’ve just said about humans and creativity, right? Humans are doing