Actually, does the job title “proofreader” exist in adland anymore? I know the creative equivalent, the finished artist, caught more than a couple of potentially embarrassing mistakes before the artwork was sent to the printer at the agency where I started my marcomm career.
Though the proofreader as a standalone position may have disappeared, in some ways, now that we’re in our AI era, that role has expanded to each of us.
One town hall participant at the recent AI Marketing Strategies said: “I treat the creative output of anything that AI does as a rough draft, and it has to be a 10/80/10 formula … 10% of my time is upfront prompting it in the right direction; it does the 80% in the middle; and then I have to spend that 10% to get good work.”
Similarly, Ogilvy Global Chief Innovation Officer Carol Reed said during the Future of Digital Summit that humans always need to have the final judgment when it comes to using AI in their creative process: “There’s ways to have [AI] be there, but don’t ask it to do your work. Don’t ask it for the end result.”
And though copy is not specifically called out in those examples, the last touch by a human still matters. Is the copy accurate? Does it meet brand style and voice? Does it echo brand positioning? Does the copy back up the objective for this particular piece of content?
And through all of this – our collective partnership with AI – the main challenge is not the technology, it’s ourselves.
Under deadline pressure, it can be easy to try to save time and skip that additional check to get the project out the door. Under budget pressures, it can be easy to try to be efficient and think, “It’s probably fine.” And under the “I have too much on my plate” pressure, it can be easy to rush through the post-AI review to move on to the next project.
Those are very real pressures. And it takes self-discipline, pride in doing your work right and even a corporate culture that has a human-first approach and values quality, to ensure you don’t give into those pressures.
Ultimately, it is up to each of us to uphold the attention to detail and quality that those proofreaders of (not too) long ago upheld.
After all, delivering quality work is a vital way to ensure your agency or employer rises above the competition.
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