Agencies and AI—how major shops are using artificial intelligence

As major marketers consider capitalizing on new forms of artificial intelligence, ad agencies see a rich opportunity to become mediators between the AI technology and the kinds of insights they can offer brands. Holding companies including WPP, Publicis Groupe and Omnicom Group are rapidly deploying new enterprise tools to serve some of the largest and most influential brands in the world. Internal use cases are also being explored, as are developments to platforms launched years before ChatGPT landed in the mainstream last fall. Also read: A guide to AI jobs in marketing Witnessing so much activity from so many players, Ad Age has compiled an index of major agencies, holding companies and consultants and the ways in which they are using AI. This record is meant to be a living resource and will be updated with new developments and use cases to come. More: IPG Mediabrands to use Google generative AI models Click on a link to scroll to the corresponding agency. Accenture Song Dentsu Horizon Media Huge MNTN Omnicom Pereira O’Dell Publicis Stagwell The Brandtech Group WPP Wunderman Thompson Accenture Song Accenture Song is benefiting from a $3 billion investment in AI made by parent company Accenture. This funding covers assets, tools, acquisitions, research and talent over the next three years. One such tool is AI Navigator for Enterprise, which leverages generative AI to help clients determine how AI at large can fit into their businesses. Examples of this process include helping a hotel group manage customer feedback and a judicial system handle hundreds of thousands of documents. Accenture will also channel the investment toward developing industry-specific AI models—some of which may end up looking like Salesforce and Meta’s ad-focused AI tools. Accenture Song will likely see an influx of new talent as well, as part of Accenture’s pledge to double its AI staff to 80,000 people. In an interview with Ad Age in May, Accenture Song CEO David Droga said that generative AI is “not going to sort of marginalize just what we do—it’s going to get rid of the messy mediocre middle.” Read more: Accenture leans into AI with $3 billion investment Dentsu Dentsu has inked deals with two major AI companies in Google and Microsoft. Both deals essentially cover the same ground and are intended to bring the tech giants' AI tools into Dentsu’s employee toolkit. The deal with Microsoft, for example, offers Dentsu access to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI technologies, including GPT-4—the foundation of ChatGPT. (Microsoft has special access to OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, as part of being the lab’s exclusive cloud provider.) Google brings to the table its Vertex AI and Duet AI generative models. Combining these AI capabilities with proprietary data, Dentsu has developed its own AI tool, Merkle GenCX, which is intended to enhance customer experience management for clients. For its Latin American business, Dentsu offers AI Playground LATAM, a set of solutions aimed at improving client efficiency and speed. Dentsu also maintains an internal group called AI Connective, which shapes the strategy behind these developments. AI Connective consists of client-facing teams, engineering teams and solutions teams across the company. Read more: Dentsu strikes AI deal with Microsoft Horizon Media Night Market, Horizon Media’s e-commerce unit, unveiled an AI-powered tool in January meant to optimize media investments across retail media networks. Dubbed “Neon,” the platform digests data in the form of reports on client sales metrics and return on ad spending. Neon’s predictions for optimal investing span retailers and other third-party channels, including Amazon and Walmart. The solution is mostly intended for consumer packaged goods brands, such as Hershey, an early Neon experimenter. But Night Market hopes to expand the offering to categories including retail, health and wellness and financial services, Randy Browning, its president, previously told Ad Age. Also read: A guide to retail media networks Huge Huge is leaning on AI to power an agency revamp it launched earlier this summer. The Interpublic Group of Cos.-owned shop is currently offering two primary AI tools. The Living Intelligence Value Engine (LIVE) uses AI to sift through data points both traditional and non-traditional—such as cultural semiotics—in order to uncover insights for clients. These insights are intended to increase understanding of audience perceptions and predict consumer behaviors. The Creative Capital Index (CCI) is another AI-powered tool, though with the purpose of optimizing internal creativity. CCI works like a stock market index, assigning values to various brand assets in terms of how they can enable creative problem-solving and innovation. These values can be measured by how they fluctuate over time, as well as how they compare with industry benchmarks. Through 2023 and 2024, Huge plans to launch more AI-powered tools that are built on the data foundation provided by LIVE. Read more: Huge relies on AI to revamp its business MNTN MNTN announced its own generative AI-powered ad solution in June. Dubbed “Viva,” the platform enables clients to use generative AI to create and edit their video content, and supports a range of media types. For example, a client could combine stock footage, AI-generated content and owned assets to create a single video using Viva’s capabilities. Viva, like its industry counterparts, is an AI hub, not an AI tool itself. This means that it integrates various third-party AI models, offering clients a platform to do creative work with a handful of options. Viva includes application programming interfaces (APIs) from OpenAI, text-to-speech software company ElevenLabs and AI music generator Soundraw. Read more: MNTN unveils AI-powered video editing platform Omnicom Omnicom is leveraging the partnership route to develop its own AI strategy. It has deals in place with three of the biggest players in the AI field: Google, Microsoft and Amazon. Each of the deals looks quite similar, consisting of integrations between the tech companies' generative AI models and Omni—Omnicom’s internal marketing and data platform. The partnerships seek to bolster Omni into a well-rounded hub for clients to access generative text and image capabilities. As part of its deal with Microsoft, Omnicom announced Omni Assist, which is a ChatGPT-based chatbot. Omni Assist is embedded within Omni, and aims to help with audience development, planning activation, measurement and optimization. Read more: Google, Omnicom strike generative AI deal Pereira O’Dell Pereira O’Dell’s approach to AI is focused on internal experimentation. The agency has a lab, made up of four people as of March, with the intention to finish one experiment a week. These projects are mainly focused on generative AI, such as crafting and tweaking videos from prompts. For example, the agency reimagined a scene from “Pulp Fiction” in the style of an Atari game, as well as a scene from “Joker,” but all the characters are made from knitting. The agency’s efforts in the AI space are relatively contained compared to industry counterparts; Co-founder and Creative Chairman PJ Pereira previously told Ad Age that this approach gives the lab the freedom to work without being worried about revenue. Pereira, though, is open to bringing the work to clients if it proves worthwhile. The agency just hired a new executive creative director in former Meta global creative product lead Juliana Constantino, who will oversee the intersection of data and creativity, such as AI tools. Read more: Pereira O'Dell hires executive creative director Publicis Publicis has invested some $11 billion in AI-powered technology, CEO Arthur Sadoun said on a recent earnings call. This funding primarily supports data and tech division Epsilon, which it acquired in 2019; digital consulting firm Sapient, which acquired a full stake in Publicis Sapient AI Labs earlier this year; and Marcel, an AI talent management tool. Marcel, in particular, has fronted Publicis’ efforts in the AI space. The tool launched in 2017 as a central hub for employees to be used for any number of purposes, from internal staffing and learning new skills to finding data-driven insights for clients. At the time, many in the industry sneered at Publicis for investing in AI over submitting work to major award shows. Publicis unveiled a clap-back campaign at this year’s Cannes Lions. Publicis also maintains an internal AI hub called PublicisGPT, which groups together generative AI tools from various companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Adobe. And this month, Publicis-owned SaaS platform Profitero launched a generative AI-powered version of its commerce analytics software. Read more: Profitero launches AI-powered retail analytics Stagwell Stagwell has positioned AI as a primary component of Marketing Cloud, its suite of martech tools. PRophet, created in 2020, uses machine learning, natural language processing and semantic search to identify journalists most suitable for a particular pitch. The tool goes one step further—predicting how an article from that journalist will skew. Generative AI has also been embedded within the platform to help with pitch creation. Stagwell’s Code and Theory network also has a partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to develop AI-powered capabilities for the former’s clients. The two entities inked the deal in May. In general, Stagwell is using AI to analyze data for the purpose of saving time. Other applications include producing storyboards and reducing the costs for processing invoices, Chairman and CEO Mark Penn recently told Ad Age. Also read: How PR agencies are using AI The Brandtech Group The Brandtech Group has taken the acquisitory route to keep up with AI advancements. The company acquired digital marketing group Jellyfish in June, with the intention of training its employees in all things generative AI. Two weeks after the deal closed, The Brandtech Group acquired Pencil, a platform that uses generative AI to predict the kinds of ads that might work for a brand. Together, the two entities have been developing a solution that consolidates a host of AI tools, including ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, to fit a variety of media integrations, such as TikTok and Amazon Ads. Ad Age Media Summit Hear from industry leaders during October event in NYC Register here WPP WPP in May announced a partnership with Nvidia to create an ad platform built on generative AI technology. The platform, currently unnamed and without an explicit launch date, hinges on Nvidia Omniverse, the software company’s cloud hub, which will integrate creative tools from various partners, including Adobe and Getty Images. With the help of generative AI, the platform will allow brands to create 2D images and videos, as well as 3D simulations for advertising purposes. WPP is also using AI internally across numerous aspects of its business, according to CEO Mark Read. “Clearly it’s a great use in our media business,” Read said of AI in February, “where we can use it to find relevant audiences and measure the impact of our work. We’re using it a lot creatively in our production processes to accelerate how we produce work and reduce the cost of doing that. So it’s pretty fundamental.” Wunderman Thompson Wunderman Thompson, owned by WPP, has used AI in several notable campaigns for clients. Months before ChatGPT launched to the public in November, the agency developed an app for Sherwin-Williams that used AI to generate personalized color palettes based on prompts. The effort’s reception, which garnered Wunderman the inaugural Creative B2B Grand Prix at Cannes Lions in 2022, was a portent for how AI would soon sweep the advertising industry. In the fall, the agency unveiled a campaign for Remembrance Week, a commemoration in Canada meant to honor veterans. The project used generative AI to create images of battlefield scenes from more than a century of wars. It may come as little surprise, then, that when ChatGPT was temporarily banned in Italy in April, Wunderman Thompson’s local office felt immediate disruptions to workflow, including data analysis and brainstorming. The ban has since been lifted. Read more: How Italy's ChatGPT ban disrupted Wunderman

Agencies and AI—how major shops are using artificial intelligence

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