Billion Dollar Boy’s Becky Owen is infusing influencer marketing with generative AI

The creator economy hasn’t been immune to the rapid proliferation of generative AI—or the slew of ethical dilemmas surrounding the emerging tech. As Becky Owen has spearheaded the launch of influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy’s in-house innovation unit, Muse, she’s kept those ethical implications of generative AI at the forefront of her work. “I love emerging technology, but I’m so mindful that just because we can [do something] doesn’t mean we should,” said Owen, who took on the role of Billion Dollar Boy’s chief marketing officer last March after leading Disney’s digital partnerships team in Europe and launching Meta’s creator innovation and solutions division. “When it comes to things like virtual influencers and AI, and how we think about them as we enter into an increasingly digital, kind of hybrid life, we don’t have a rulebook for this,” said Owen. “But [through Muse], we get to experiment with AI in a way that feels considerate of community and also represents the future we want.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Versace (@versace) Owen and Billion Dollar Boy spent months piloting Muse with four brands—Loewe, Versace, Clarks and smartphone and tech company Xiaomi—to develop a “pronounced and mature perspective on AI’s influence on the creator economy” before publicly launching Muse last November. The agency connected the four brands with creators who leveraged generative AI to create artwork or animations for their social media accounts, and those tests garnered tens of millions of views for each brand, according to Billion Dollar Boy case studies. Owen’s work thoughtfully integrating generative AI into the influencer marketing world has secured Billion Dollar Boy nearly three dozen new clients since last March, and the launch of Muse helped drive a 35% increase in the agency’s employee roster, per agency data. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Xiaomi Global (@xiaomi.global) See Ad Age’s Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders What is the biggest technological challenge facing your sector of advertising and technology, and why? It’s a really boring technology, but it is a challenge: measurement. We haven’t yet cracked the key to really measuring the impact of creator marketing, specifically, and the biggest challenge is closing the loops between creating content and understanding impact. It’s a billion-dollar industry, but if you ask any CEO or CMO, they will say, “We still don’t feel like we understand this entirely—like, to the minutest detail.” How are you preparing to overcome this challenge? There are some real innovators, like ThisThat, that are using tech to crack measurement, and I think that is really exciting for us. We’re partnering with a lot of these individuals. What’s so exciting is, like, two or three years ago, we didn’t have the solutions we have today, but now they’re coming up because entrepreneurs are able to use technology to fit a measurement solution. It’s really cool now that we’re building this roster of companies—that are startups, technically—all saying, “Hey, here’s how we’ve seen the problem, and here’s how we have a solution.” What technology could you absolutely not live without, besides your phone? I’m dyslexic, and I find it very easy to speak, but writing is this massive brain drain for me. So, I’ve learned through the years how to overcome that with all these different tools and by spending extra time writing—but that’s exhausted me as well. Now, being able to utilize Google Gemini and ChatGPT to ensure that what I’m writing is what I’m saying has unlocked this whole new capacity for me. There’s this part of my brain that was absolutely drained because I’ve tried to make sure that my writing was what I was actually trying to say—but now I can release that part of my brain and I can put it to new things.” Who is your technological hero, alive or from the past, who inspired you the most? Jess Herrington. In [the COVID-19] lockdown, I was working with Sephora to sell a perfume when no one’s going to smell it. And I was trying to work out how we could do that, and I came across Harrington, who is a neuroscientist and AR creator, and she was doing her Ph.D. One of the things that she was talking about is how the synapses in our brain from sight to smell are really connected. And how you can actually, via a visual stimulus, evoke almost the feeling of smelling something. We did this whole campaign together called “Smell with Your Eyes,” and I hired her as a consultant. I think that is when I became specifically interested in technology, because her whole thing was connecting advertising to neuroscience via technology. See Ad Age’s Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders

Billion Dollar Boy’s Becky Owen is infusing influencer marketing with generative AI

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