“What IS that?”
Perhaps The Unknown is indicative of a lurker in all of our lives – one many of us are not sure is a helper or a hindrance…
I’m not even going to ask if you’ve heard of the now-infamous Willy Wonka Experience Glasgow, I’m sure absolutely everyone with access to a smartphone has. It is undoubtedly the largest fiasco of the year, perhaps even the decade. And what propped up the event, ultimately leading to its failure? Our friend we love to hate. AI.
As we learn more about this rainbow-tinted catastrophe by the day, the word AI keeps cropping up. From the promotion of the event to the actors’ (calamitous) scripts, it seems Billy Coul’s marketing strategy relied heavily on the tool. And the whole thing has served as a textbook lesson as to why we can’t trust automation to do everything for us.
Especially when it comes to PR.
Why We Can’t Rely On AI In PR
I’m not doubting the effectiveness or helpfulness of AI in PR, in fact, I’ve had lots of conversations at recent networking events and it now seems most communications professionals are using it in some capacity. But, over the last few years, there have definitely been plenty of shaky blogs and nervous tweets questioning whether our jobs will succumb to AI in the next few decades. I think the ‘Willy Wonka Experience’ reaffirms why they absolutely won’t.
Something AI will never be able to master is individual creativity and the value of human emotion. The script written for the actors was likely pulled from all sorts of resources surrounding the story of Willy Wonka and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, some of it old and some of it newer. But only a real person with real experience can pull on their expertise of what consumers enjoy, what evokes emotion and of course – what is relevant to the day. There was a huge missed opportunity to link into Wonka, which was released only a few months ago. Not to mention, a whole lot of the script was complete gibberish, that doesn’t even look as if it was proofread at all. At this stage, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine the event ran entirely by robots, the fact a human was behind it is actually even more bizarre.
Plus, a real PR person with real PR experience would have handled the whole fiasco with much more grace. I mean, the event would never have gone live in the first place. BUT, if by some means it slipped through the smallest crack possible and did, the crisis management thereafter would have been much more effective if the whole thing was propped up by people and not AI.
Not only was the creator’s sob story of having to cancel his destination wedding and moving out of his home entirely irrelevant and a little tone deaf, but many think the business missed an opportunity to open the event back up and recoup losses through keen social media users who wanted to go to the event exactly as it was. Perhaps whilst it was so prominent in the press, House of Illuminati could have explored this avenue, used ticket sales to refund the guests who were missold the experience, made a donation to charity and put the whole thing to bed once the news cycle died down.
We’ve all seen how TikTok can turn the most ordinary things into viral sensations overnight – think Binley Mega Chippy and Tandor Curry House.
So I think for now, if the Wonka Experience is anything to go by, our jobs are safe. AI isn’t going to take over the world just yet, and our experience, compassion and creativity simply cannot be compromised by automation. How’s that for some good news on a Tuesday? 😌
Thank you as always for reading and for supporting me, and always happy to continue the conversation on my socials. Read my other blogs here whilst you wait for the next one.
Jessica Pardoe | PR, Marketing and Communications Blogger | See All Posts By Jessica Pardoe 