Attendees at the inaugural ANA AI for Marketers Conference, held at the Margaritaville Resort in Hollywood, FL, may have spent a little time "nibblin on sponge cakes" and "searching for their lost shaker of salt", but it was the insights into the impact, opportunities, threats, and use cases of AI in advertising that provided real pirate's gold.
During the course of the two and a half day event, brilliantly emceed by ANA Executive Vice President AI, MarTech, and Marketing Futures, Michael Donnelly, nearly 350 marketers (both in-person and virtually) were treated to a wide berth of topics that either are already or will very shortly be, impacting every facet of the advertising business. From workflow process to legal challenges to frameworks on how to introduce Generative AI into your (or your client's) organization, industry luminaries from Shelly Palmer, Shiv Singh, Alan Schulman, Jill Cress, and companies such as Claritas, Adobe, Amazon Ads, Resonate, ETS and many others shared experiences, best practices, recommendations, and personal insights into AI's use in marketing and the ad industry.
The conference wrapped up with an illuminating CEO-to-CEO interview with 4A's Marla Kaplowitz and Razorfish's Josh Campo on the impact that AI is having on agencies, in particular creative agencies.
Campo minced no words when directly asked by Kaplowitz about the fear of automation overtaking and displacing talent in the agency world. "We were pretty blunt with our people in January 2023 telling them the machine is not going to take your job. The people who know how to use the machine absolutely will take your job." He believes that the speed of the evolution of technology, in particular when we hit AGO (Artificial General Intelligence) when "Innovation will be born of the machine itself" will potentially lead to commoditization of the marketing industry where product differentiation "will become less and less because the speed of innovation is so quick". He sees the importance of solidifying the emotional connection that a brand has with its consumer as a key element that agencies will still be able to do better.
Campo admits that some clients are more willing to jump into AI than others. Yet even those clients that are not ready are not ignoring the din around AI. They still want understanding. So, we have taken an approach that is really about education. We have a conversation with clients, educate them on what we know, educate them on the perspective on how this will shift the industry and the different ways that GenAI will impact their business.
According to Campo, Razorfish has conducted over 60 different engagements or talking sessions around AI over the past year. More recently they are beginning to see those education sessions turn into projections. Razorfish has executed between 15-16 different AI pilot tests.
Kaplowitz and Campo discussed several use cases. The first was a reimagining of the always unused car manual that sits in your glove compartment. Training an LLM on all of the car manuals, owners can ask the AI questions such as "What car seats will fit in the back of my car?" and the AI will come back with three brands and three models that will fit into the back of the car according to the specs. Kaplowitz pointed out that the idea could be extended to manuals for all types of durable goods such as refrigerators and washing machines.
One theme that came up a few times over the course of the conference was that of simulated audiences, a method where AI trained on audience data can then be engaged with as a pseudo-virtual focus group. Campo explained that Razorfish was approached by one of their clients who has a very "challenging audience that they're trying to reach". In order to gain a much more in-depth understanding of that audience, Razorfish trained ChatGPT on a particular persona and fed it a pretty large set of data. Then, through conversing with the persona, Razorfish (and their client) was able to get a much better understanding of the media consumption habits and creative preferences of the audience. Says Campo, "It's not directly coming up with creative. So, where we have clients who are, perhaps, more cautious about using any GenAI created assets, this is actually pretty far from that and a safe way to talk about how we can leverage AI in a bit more managed risk on that continuum."
Another way that Razorfish is helping its clients gain confidence in AI driven creative has been its participation and commitment (via its parent holding company Publicis), to the C2PA (Coalition for Content, Provenance, and Authenticity). C2PA is an open technical standard which provides publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media and creative, ensuring that what they are seeing is original and authentic. This is critical for a creative agency. Says Campo, "It is important for us to safeguard creative. We are in a fundamentally creative industry. We need to protect that."
When asked what he would tell an agency who is just beginning to engage AI, Campo shared a key nugget of advice: start small. "I think there's so much to learn and there's an incredible opportunity to fail. It's better to start off with some small initiatives on how you can leverage these AI tools and grow into it. It is not a small undertaking to take your CRM data and have an AI platform, whichever one you pick, understand and train on that data. That is not a simple thing without risk. I would say you need to start walking before you run."
Attendees at the first ANA AI for Marketers conference took their small steps to become better educated and there will likely be many more ANA AI conferences for them to continue their journey.
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The opinions expressed here are the author's views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillage.org/MyersBizNet.