Advertising companies have also invested heavily in AI. Last year, WPP, Publicis and Havas each announced investments in the technology of more than $300 million, while other holding companies expanded budgets of their own. To be sure, Ludvigsen does not see these deals as any less valuable in light of DeepSeek. Much of the money invested is targeted towards integrating AI across workflows as opposed to training models directly.
But the cost-efficiency proved by DeepSeek could encourage ad holding companies to more seriously consider training their own models, Ludvigsen said. Not only would these models be cheaper to use compared to Big Tech’s AI systems, they could also be developed from the start to handle a parent company’s specific network of agencies and clients, Ludvigsen said.
Nicole Penn, chief executive of agency EGC Group, expects the DeepSeek moment to birth a new crop of enterprise marketing platforms. Custom-built AI agents could be developed with fewer resources, lending to innovations in customer service, e-commerce and other marketing-related services, Penn said.
“This is going to make AI integration more accessible and 50 to 60% more cost-efficient,” Penn said.
Marketers split on DeepSeek
While many marketers seemed to agree that DeepSeek heralds a new moment in the AI space, they are less in harmony about the viability of DeepSeek itself.
Penn, who has experimented with DeepSeek, is already introducing the platform to curious clients, although EGC hasn’t yet built any applications on top of it. The R1 model, the latest generation of the LLM, is especially valuable for its transparent reasoning, which allows users to better understand the system by learning how it arrives at a response, Penn said. This quality is not as prevalent in OpenAI’s models.
The cost to use DeepSeek is also an advantage for marketers, said Aaron Andalman, chief science officer for programmatic ad platform Cognitiv. For every million output tokens, or units of text that the AI model produces, DeepSeek’s R1 model costs roughly $2.16, according to Andalman. In contrast, OpenAI’s o1 model costs $60 per million output tokens, and its cost-efficient version, o1-mini, is priced at roughly $12 per million.
This week, another important endorsement came from Perplexity, the AI search startup, which began serving results powered by DeepSeek’s application programming interface (API). Perplexity has a handful of brands testing ads on its platform, which may now surface alongside DeepSeek’s content by virtue of appearing in its search results. Perplexity did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, some marketers advised against using DeepSeek because of its opacity. For instance, the Asman Group, a marketing consultancy, will not use DeepSeek because of concerns about how the platform collects data, founder and managing principal Greg Asman wrote on LinkedIn. Jon Hackett, VP of technology at agency Huge, also recommended that brands not yet migrate to the platform and away from Big Tech providers because of uncertainties surrounding DeepSeek’s training data, Hackett told Ad Age.