‘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.