Inside AI’s growing role in agency reviews—how it is transforming the pitch process

Much has been documented about the significant impact AI is having on creativity, with many agency holding companies investing millions of dollars into the technology to keep pace with competitors. But less well-known is the way AI is affecting the pitch process, which can be an expensive strain on agencies. Agencies are using AI to more efficiently kickstart a review, lay the foundation for strategy and rapidly assemble spec work. The technology is helping agencies save time and money, and allowing shops to test and fine-tune their creative ideas before presenting them to clients, according to multiple executives interviewed by Ad Age. “Ninety percent of the pitch process is table stakes,” said Justin Billingsley, global chief growth officer at Monks, formerly known as Media.Monks. “We need humans focused on the 10% that matters, and we need machines doing the 90%.” Agency Review Tracker Stay up to date with the latest account reviews Click here Clients are less concerned with potential legal and ethical risks associated with AI when shops use it during a closed review, and are using pitches to uncover how the tech can make their business more efficient. But there’s a catch: Agencies are trying to determine, based on the specific review, how much they should reveal to brands about AI’s influence on their operations. “There’s a fine line of what story you tell the client,” said Jeff Bowerman, an executive creative director at digital shop Dept. Below, some of the ways agencies are employing AI in pitches. Also read: How to navigate AI legal risks in advertising Managing the initial tasks A request for information (RFI) is the first step agencies must take when competing for new business. While essential, these forms can be quite tedious and repetitive. About “50% of RFIs are questions that we answer multiple times,” said Lindsay Bennett, VP of corporate communications at Gale, who also oversees new business at the Stagwell agency. To that end, Gale recently rolled out a Business Resource Access Data Bot (or BRAD, an homage to Gale CEO Brad Simms), a tool trained on Gale’s history and data. While BRAD can’t handle the RFI entirely by itself, it provides a solid first draft, Bennett said. “We can get, let’s say, 50% of the way there in a couple of hours, and therefore we’re able to complete the entire RFI process in a day or two versus a week or two,” Bennett said. Below, an image of BRAD responding to a question about Gale’s core values. Data collection and building strategy Earlier this summer, McKinney released an AI new business tool that evaluates how brands are performing on attention—based on the agency’s proprietary definition, which includes momentum, affinity and intensity—against competitors. “BrandAI” then helps the Cheil Worldwide shop quickly develop a strategy during pitches. If, for example, a brand is trailing behind competitors in momentum, BrandAI may recommend the company focus on earned media and social strategies, which McKinney can then develop a plan around. Below, a deeper dive on how the tool works below. BrandAI has made a “tremendous” impact on McKinney’s use of time during pitches, freeing up executives to spend more time on solving a prospective client’s problem, said Jasmine Dadlani, chief strategy officer at the agency. “We’re able to bring ideas to clients faster in the process, get a temperature check from them and know whether or not we’re on the right path,” Dadlani said, adding that, because the agency has data from the outset, BrandAI prevents McKinney from ever “redoing” work during a pitch. And BrandAI gives McKinney more time to focus on human interactions. “Before, data folks and the strategists would spend a lot of time chasing this data, and sometimes the qualitative component of our research would get sacrificed for that,” Dadlani said. Now, McKinney can combine AI-powered research tools with people “in the flesh” conducting ethnographies, shopping with consumers in stores and more. From a data perspective, AI is helping democratize the pitch process, some agency executives told Ad Age. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Many holding company shops have “had years of having these robust insights and analytics groups, but most agencies have not,” said Jared Belsky, CEO of Acadia. But now, with AI, every shop has “a fair chance to compete in the insights world.” Ensuring brand safety AI is also allowing shops to evaluate their creative ideas during a pitch. Rehab Agency created a product called Stress Tester, which allows agencies to test their concepts against a group of synthetic personas, helping determine specific audience reactions. Tim Rodgers, founder and chairman of Rehab Agency, said Stress Tester is particularly beneficial as more and more brands face backlash from consumers over marketing efforts. Using Stress Tester, agencies can tell prospective clients, “‘We’ve tested this against your audience, and here’s the result,’” Rodgers said. Marketers are “looking for new creative ideas all the time, but they also need the confidence that they’re not going to get fired,” he added. Influencer marketing shop Whalar created an AI tool that allows the agency to quickly curate a list of potential influencers from its database based on the client’s brief. The tool also has a speech-to-text feature, which helps better refine the search. For example, if a company is looking to market a migraine tablet, Whalar’s tool can find influencers that have recently spoken about having a headache—information the creator may not include in the caption or comments. “If you think about it, manually, that’d be almost impossible,” said Simon Moss, chief product officer at Whalar. “You’d have to scroll through and listen to every video to work out what people are talking about.” From there, Whalar has a tool, called ORCA, that quickly vets creators and identifies any potential brand safety hurdles. Previously, the agency may have spent “half an hour per creator” doing this work, but ORCA is “taking that down into seconds,” Moss told Ad Age. “This is a game changer for us,” Moss added. “It gives us 200x speed in terms of that upfront work that needs to go into making sure the creators we’re presenting and going to be working with on a campaign are brand safe.” Tackling spec work Multiple agencies told Ad Age they are using AI tools, such as Runway, ElevenLabs and DALL-E, to quickly create spec work, which can be a great financial strain during pitches. “There are two big costs in pitching for new business. One is the opportunity cost of the time of everyone involved that could be doing other things. … And the other is the hard costs in preparing materials,” said Monks’ Billingsley. AI “dramatically reduces that second bucket.” AI can cut time spent on spec work from “a week to half a day” and slice hard costs by roughly 95%, according to Billingsley. But for all the talk about how AI won’t take away work for creatives, it already has. Dept has traditionally called upon freelancers to help with storyboarding during pitches, but now technology is fully capable of filling that need, said Bowerman. “I can’t see ourselves ever hiring them again,” he added. The client view Many marketers still have trepidation about AI as it relates to legal and ethical concerns. In fact, 80% of multinational brands are worried about their agencies' use of generative AI, according to a recent report from the World Federation of Advertisers. But that wariness doesn’t appear to extend to agency pitches, where AI-enabled work won’t see the light of day, according to several executives and consultants interviewed by Ad Age. In reviews, marketers are interested in learning how the technology is going to help streamline work and provide efficiency, said Michael Miller, founder of marketing consultancy Consiglieri. Gale’s Bennett shared with Ad Age a list of questions brands have recently asked the agency in RFIs, many of which focused on AI’s broader impact for clients. At least in the early stages of a pitch, brands are asking less “about their data or privacy,” said Bennett, adding that five out of the last 10 RFIs Gale has received have included questions about AI. “It's more intrigue and interest,” she said. (Some brands are, however, demanding stronger AI safeguards in their contracts with agencies.) A-List & Creativity Awards Enter for a chance to be recognized as the best in advertising Submit your entry here Miller said agencies should focus on more AI’s practicality, rather than highlighting proprietary systems or tools in reviews. If they can demonstrate, “We’re going to use AI to get to round one creative … this much faster, and that’s going to impact the amount of money that we're going to charge you, that would be more meaningful,” said Miller, a former VP at T-Mobile. Where the tension lies During pitches, agencies are trying to “read the room” and determine how much they should share about how impactful AI has become, said Ryan Kangisser, chief strategy officer at MediaSense, which has recently handled media reviews for Amazon and Unilever. “The biggest risk for agencies is that the client says, ‘It’s going to take you half the time, and therefore we want to see a material reduction in your fees,” said Kangisser. “That’s where, candidly, I’ve seen tension in pitch processes.” Bowerman affirmed that notion. “You don’t want to label the fact that we can use robots to do all this stuff,” he said, “because you have procurement on the call and they start going, ‘Well, this is really good. Why don’t you just use this for the final ad?’” There is still a limit to technology’s use, Bowerman said, adding that Dept has “yet to do a pitch where we’ve used AI to come up with ideas or strategy.” Agencies need to find the right balance in explaining AI to marketers during pitches, especially as clients continue to move more work in-house, according to Kangisser. “They have to work out with each review, based on the brief, how best to assemble [AI] in a way that doesn't disillusion the client into thinking that it's a black box, which is also a risk,” he said. Instead, agencies must make clear the technology is “truly complementary or supplementary to how they work and how they deliver value.”

Inside AI’s growing role in agency reviews—how it is transforming the pitch process

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