Much of the extra time in my workday I spend reading your OOH posts, articles, viewing photos of billboards, analyzing new media tech platforms, attending OOH related conferences and shows, and writing my own opinion pieces. I enjoy reading what my OOH colleagues have to say.

I’ve become accustomed to many of your writing styles, attitudes, grammar, humor, mood swings, mis-quotes and some ramblings. That’s ok. We’ve become friends in most cases, even if we have never met in person.

But at the least I knew that it was your writing. Your style, your brevity, your huffing and puffing, your engaging, original thinking. It was a way for your audience to get to know you, like you or hate you. I know, I go through this same scenario on a weekly basis.

But with the advent of artificial intelligence, lots of current pieces just don’t sound like you.  Just scroll through your LinkedIn feed any given day now and most pieces read the same, as if one writer has been tasked to write all the posts, articles, columns, blogs and press releases. They can be wordy, lengthy, some boring as all get out, many without making one substantial point even when using big words. They can lead nowhere, giving us bloggers, writers and prolific social media posters a bad name and dwindling audiences.

There’s nothing wrong with using spell-check or some ChatGPT features to make pieces more interesting and grammatically correct, I am an advocate of that. However much of feeds have become a cure for insomnia. They are generic and safe.

My point being you don’t sound like this in real life. I’ve had engaging conversations with many of you, and you don’t talk like this. If you did, I’d stop talking to you.

We are the OOH advertising industry, we run on visuals, creativity, originality and spontaneity. When we lose these, we become nothing more than a fast-growing software application, sometimes generating incorrect or nonsensical copy. With this shift in “editing” you sound robotic.

It’s called generative artificial intelligence, or AI, and when you use it to write whole articles, pieces, columns, stories or whatever you want to call them, you lose us and do a great disservice to the value that is OOH. You might as well not sign your name to them, just credit the AI source.

We are fortunate to have these incredible writing tools at our disposal, but let’s not allow them to take over how we communicate. Be you, be original, write like the person that I like hanging out with.

Take a break from pressing the easy button. It’s becoming too obvious.

Insider’s Note: Nick Coston has been writing opinion pieces for the OOH industry for 10 years now. His weekly pieces also appear on Substack where you can view the last 2 years worth. Full-time, Nick is the VP, Sales and Sales Strategies for Moving Walls, the Singapore based media and ad tech giant, here in The America’s.

If you are interested, here is Nick’s Substack LINK

To receive a free morning newsletter with each day’s Billboard insider articles email info@billboardinsider.com with the word “Subscribe” in the title.  Our newsletter is free and we don’t sell our subscriber list.

Paid Advertisement