Paper Moose has marked its 15 year anniversary alongside the launch two internal products, Moose Review and Portal.
The Sydney-based creative agency, outlined its position on AI as it unveiled two products built to address the growing automation of knowledge work.
Paper Moose, which began as a filmmaker collective operating out of a garage, used the milestone to publish its thesis on where human creativity sits within an AI-driven industry.
Central to its thinking was a distinction between tasks requiring raw intelligence, which it argued could be automated, and those that required what it described as geist, a German term for the spirit or X-factor that animated genuinely creative work.
It argued that current AI systems, due to the way models were trained and validated through reinforcement learning, were structurally unable to replicate this quality.
It was direct in its assessment of competitors moving in this direction. It described the growing ecosystem of agencies promising fast and affordable AI creative as “misguided.”
It said: “AI excels at anything that can be tracked via a benchmark and optimised through reinforcement learning. You can train a model to play chess because there is a verifiable outcome: win or lose.”
In response, Paper Moose developed Moose Review, an AI creative testing tool used to assess advertising effectiveness against a framework drawn from marketing science research. The framework drew on the work of Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Field, Karen Nelson-Field, Orlando Wood, Daniel Kahneman and others.
Moose Review operated by polling synthetic focus groups through a battery of structured questions, with results said to mirror real human subgroups by up to 94 percent.
The tool has conducted more than 20,000 reviews and was designed to allow agencies to test concepts before production spend and finished assets before media commitment.
The agency also developed an internal software platform called Portal.
Portal is a custom app that can consolidate scheduling, documentation, financial tracking, strategic research and media implementation into a single system. The platform was designed to automate intelligence-based agency operations and free up capacity for creative thinking.
Paper Moose said its broader view was that AI would not replace creative agencies but would force them to operate with leaner structures, faster turnaround and a sharper focus on the creative work that could not be automated.
