Inside an agency’s AI pitch to CMOs—how its technology creates ad concepts and analyzes brands

The big conversation in advertising regarding artificial intelligence right now is just how much of the work machines can take over in an industry that prides itself on being able to summon emotion. The Brandtech Group is one ad conglomerate that is testing those limits—human versus AI—after raising $115 million. In its latest investment announcement, Brandtech Group CEO David Jones cited AI evangelist Sam Altman, who claimed that 95% of marketing work today could be done by machine. Brandtech is trying to demonstrate how AI is the most important tech in advertising by pitching brands on new modes of billing and measuring success. “We’ve done a few pitches recently with just like two people, you know just to show how you can do it,” said Nick Emery, CEO of Jellyfish and Brandtech Group partner. Emery talked about going into rooms to win brands with a tiny team, whereas major agencies might go in with 20 people on a pitch. Brandtech Group deploys AI models to create ad concepts, analyze brands and provide insights about the audiences. “Now you can filter in a client’s diagnostics, data, and it will come up with some idea of what you should be spending in different markets to get what return,” Emery said. Also read: 5 AI trends for brand marketers to know about Brandtech Group was valued at $4 billion after its fundraising round last month, according to The Financial Times. The group is comprised of a bevy of marketing tech firms, including Jellyfish, and its AI startup Pencil, which is a platform for generative AI ad creation. The idea that AI can take over much of the ad load is provocative, but Brandtech Group’s leaders welcome the charge. Google, Meta, OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, Amazon and others, are training large language models that are changing the face of advertising. When asked about the now-famous quote from OpenAI CEO Altman, about AI taking over 95% of ad duties: “I think that’s 95% of advertising today,” Emery said. “That certainly doesn’t mean it’s going to be 95% of advertising tomorrow.” Source: The Brandtech Group (Click image to enlarge) A million generative AI ads “While everyone is talking about what they will build and will invest in in the future, Pencil is the only [generative] AI marketing platform proven in-market,” Jones said by email this week, adding the platform has worked with 5,000 brands, $1 billion of media spend, with 1 million generative AI ads made since 2018. The Brandtech Group has startups that specialize in AI influencers, chatbots, data, media planning, and digital twins, which is a concept that applies artificial intelligence to create computer-generated personas. Also read: How AI-generated customers can help brands The Brandtech Group’s revenue has topped $1 billion annually and it has an average annual year-over-year revenue growth rate of 23.5%, according to a person familiar with its finances. A slide from a Brandtech Group presentation shows how it considers its firm leaner than most, comparing its 7,000 staffers, what it called “digitally savvy disruptors” in the organization, to 100,000-person teams at competitors. The Brandtech Group said half of its top ad clients are working with generative AI, and it “launched with [a] mission to do marketing better faster cheaper using tech and machine-generated content/Al as [the] founding vertical and predicted what is happening now,” according to its pitch. The Brandtech Group also encourages an “in-house” mindset for brands to incorporate generative AI, according to its leadership team. Read more: AI prompting lessons for marketers “In terms of in-housing, [generative AI] is going to be a huge growth driver for in-housing,” Jones said, “many clients believe [generative AI] is way too important to outsource to external agencies and want an in-housing model instead.” Ad Age Breakout Brand Leaders New award honors the people behind emerging brands Enter here ‘What we do’ That is the crux of the issue: On one end, advertising creatives worry about an AI future that reduces advertising to “ones and zeroes,” and on the other there is a group of AI enthusiasts who think the technology can take over the mundane portions of the work, such as the manually typing in of product details, or guessing which shade of blue elicits the best ad response from consumers. “Sam [Altman] is selling a very myopic future without really understanding the nuances of what we do,” said Craig Elimeliah, chief creative officer, formerly of Lippe Taylor Group. “AI has unparalleled efficiency in data analysis and content generation. It amplifies the depth of human insight, emotional intelligence and strategic innovation. He is missing out on the symbiosis the AI promises to transform in marketing … Sam is wrong if he thinks AI is replacing the creative spirit.” The Brandtech Group is just one of the firms adapting to this new reality. Just this week, WPP announced a deal with Google to integrate its AI model Gemini with WPP Open, what the agency holding company calls an “AI-powered marketing operating system” used by Coca-Cola, L’Oréal and Nestlé. Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu and others are building AI marketing platforms, too. Generative AI has been a driver of mass content creation as automation makes it possible to create hundreds of ads and to test them across digital surfaces, whereas the same process would either be impossible with only humans or at least limited. There are major drawbacks to AI, however, as brands are seeing instances of out-of-control chatbots that make mistakes about their brands or AI-generated images that fall short of brands’ guidelines. Ad Age’s guide to AI at the biggest agencies As for The Brandtech Group, it made its bones on claims that it identified the AI revolution before most. Jones founded the company as You & Mr Jones in 2015, before renaming to The Brandtech Group in 2022. It counts Google, Microsoft, Unilever, LVMH, Morgan Stanley, Bayer, TikTok, Diageo, Reckitt and Renault-Nissan among its clients. One of the group’s core technologies comes from Pencil, an ad platform that can make a variety of generative AI ads for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon and others. Modeling updates AI in advertising is completely changing the way brands think about success and how agencies think about ho-hum tasks, such as billing, Emery said. One consideration: It’s no longer common sense to charge clients based on hours worked by full-time employees when AI is reducing that workload, Emery said. “Every aspect of the business has to change. I don’t think we’ve got any clients on commission; I think it’s all based upon outputs and transparent fees and outcomes.” It’s no wonder that The Brandtech Group meets some skeptics in advertising, as some agencies are not on board with wholesale changes that alter historic practices. Brandtech’s pitch to brands focuses on the new dimension that AI brings to advertising, which the agency calls “share of model.” That is a concept that has to do with how AI perceives a brand, according to Jack Smyth, chief solutions officer, AI, planning and insights, at Jellyfish. Instead of “share of voice,” which is how much a brand dominates the conversation in its category, Brandtech analyzes how AI models such as Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama and OpenAI’s ChatGPT understand a brand. Deciphering the mood of AI, and what it thinks of a brand, is challenging, but it could make or break a marketing plan. The AI models increasingly determine when and how a brand shows up, similar to how search engine optimization affects how a brand appears in a search engine, Smyth said in a recent interview. “It’s a new way of measuring,” Smyth said, “so ‘share of model’ is based around the idea that the majority of customer queries about a product, even the content that gets curated in your feed, those are decisions that are going to be made by large language models.” Gemini will control search order and Llama social ranking, Smyth said. “Even retailers like Instacart are using [ChatGPT] to help them curate product recommendations or shopping lists,” Smyth said. “So we think brands have to understand how those models perceive their brand, their category and their product.” The Brandtech Group wouldn’t share its full presentation of how it measures “share of model,” but in outtakes from a Jellyfish tech pitch, it showed how a car brand could see how Gemini, Llama and ChatGPT interpret “brand visibility,” “positive brand attributes,” and “negative brand attributes.” The tech platform also compares brands against their top competitors analyzing their digital footprint and position on Amazon. Source: The Brandtech Group (Click to view pdf) Brands need to adjust to this reorientation of marketing in the age of AI by creating new types of content that will influence the large language models. For instance, brands could produce feature-length documentaries about products. That video content could be simply about the types of materials a brand uses to make its apparel, and that information could influence when a brand appears online, in feeds and in search results. Generative AI is being used to make videos, but AI also is using computer vision to ingest video. “Even without video generation,” Smyth said, “video analysis is going to be a massive unlock for a lot of marketing organizations.” “Think about optimizing the content to be found by the model,” Smyth said.

Inside an agency’s AI pitch to CMOs—how its technology creates ad concepts and analyzes brands

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