It's back!

Fall 2023 BrXnd Ad Turing Test

After the success of our first BrXnd Ad Turing Test, we will be bringing it back for a second time with new teams and new rules.

For the unfamiliar, the “Turing test” was a game proposed by famed computing pioneer Alan Turing as a way to test the intelligence of a machine. In his original thought experiment, he wondered whether you could build a computer that could fool a person into believing it was human.

With the rapid growth of AI tools and some examples of uncannily good ad copy and images generated by machines, we believe it’s a perfect moment to ask the same question of advertising experts: can they correctly identify whether an ad was produced by a computer or a person? We’re betting that recent advancements in AI make this way more difficult than people would believe.

For our test, we will be recruiting an esteemed panel of judges from across the brand and advertising world to make the call on whether AI is up to the task of besting human creatives. The format will be a print ad—8.5x11–for a fictional brand that will be distributed to all participants. Humans and computers alike will have one month to deliver their best work against the brief to the panel, who will attempt to guess whether the ad was made by a computer or a person.

We are recruiting two types of participants for this event:

Creative teams: These teams will represent the humans and will produce on-brief ads in a traditional way.

AI teams: These teams will represent the machines and be responsible for producing on-brief work entirely with models. The full rules for these teams are available upon request and will be distributed, but the basic gist is that entrants must use a model/combination of models, but may not do post-processing, such as placing logos or text programmatically (without a model).

Rules

The spirit of this event is that we want to get an accurate picture of the current state of AI in the advertising space. To that end, we are asking human and AI teams to work off the same brief and assets to produce a final ad product that will then be judged by a human jury of marketing leaders from across brands and agencies.

Although there is no prize outside a commemorative trophy, we do want to create a fair playing field that ensures an accurate portrayal of the capabilities of both our human and computer participants.

Let’s get onto the rules.

Rules for all participants (human and AI)

  1. All participants will be given a set of materials. These materials include a brief, a logo, and other brand assets. 
  2. All participants will be given four weeks to generate ads. Although you may generate as many ads as you wish, you will be asked to submit only one ad to the jury.
  3. All participants are expected to use the materials provided and generate an on-brief ad submitted in print-ad dimensions at 1,024 pixels in width by 1,325 pixels in height.

If you are a human, you can stop reading at this point. Those are all the rules you must follow.

Rules for AI participants

To ensure we are getting an accurate view of the technology, there are additional rules we are expecting our AI participants to follow:

  1. Your system needs to use AI to both generate all the components of the ad and assemble the layout. You are not allowed to generate the pieces independently and plug them together using other technology or to handcraft the final layout.
  2. Generation needs to be an end-to-end single process that only uses the assets you are given by us as inputs. You should be trying to get as close to “push a button, and an ad comes out” as possible. If you are using systems in a similar fashion to hand-crafting an ad, you are out of bounds.
  3. Any other assets (images, copy, or otherwise) used in the ad need to be synthetically generated using an LLM, Stable Diffusion, etc. Systems that curate or copy media from elsewhere online for creating the ad are not permitted.
  4. No post-processing of the ads may be done. This includes but is not limited to adding text, placing a logo, rearranging the logo, choosing a font, any kind of cropping, color grading, filtering, normalizing, or otherwise once your system generates the ad. Basically, you can’t just generate stuff and then stitch it together using ImageMagick. 
  5. As part of the submission, you will be asked to record a short video showing how the ad is generated.

Jury

To be announced.

BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
About

Who is behind this?

Noah Brier

BrXnd is the brainchild of Noah Brier. Noah has spent the last twenty years operating at the intersection of marketing and technology—first at award-winning agencies, and later as an entrepreneur. In 2011 Noah co-founded Percolate, the world's leading content marketing platform. Percolate worked with brands like Uniliever, GE, and Google and was backed by Sequoia, First Round Capital, and Lightspeed. The company was acquired by Seismic, the leading Sales Enablement Platform, in 2019.

Tim Hwang

Tim is a researcher working at the intersection of law, policy, and emerging technologies. He formerly led global public policy for Google on artificial intelligence and machine learning and was director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. Most recently, he was a Research Fellow at the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, working on topics of geopolitical competition around AI and the security impact of deepfakes.

Want to participate?

Interested in taking part as either an AI team or a student? We'd love to talk to you. Please be in touch.

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BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—
BrXnd is coming back to NYC on May 8, 2024 for another full day of marketing and AI—