The Ad Generator

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

The Ad Generator is a simple site that’s kind of fun to watch. It’s not a business at all – it was created by Alexis Lloyd as part of her thesis project at Parsons The New School for Design.

She’s taken “words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans,” and remixed and randomized them to generate new ones. She then takes “related” images from Flickr (I assume using Flickr tags) and generates fake advertisements.

Her goal is to “show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold.”

Yep, that pretty much sums up most advertising.

How long before real advertising creative is done by algorithm? Based on the quality of some of the results, it could be done right now.

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