The really big challenge is what happens when entire industries are reinvented as a result of AI.
says Stephen Pretorius, chief technology officer at global advertising giant WPP, adding:
In our industry, as well as in every other industry, whether it’s coding, legal work, financial work, all business tools will be powered by AI in the future, and organizations’ ability to deploy those tools will greatly improve. Sho. Determine your productivity.
Marketing is one of the most easily mentioned roles/functions when considering the impact of generative AI. Last year, WPP signed a deal with NVIDIA to build its GEN AI-enabled content engine for digital advertising. At the time, this was pitched as building on his WPP leadership in emerging technologies and generative AI.
Pretorious says they’ve evolved in 10 months thinking about use cases.
We all generally understand that AI is a transformative technology, but it’s only when we actually get into specific industry vertical applications that we understand what is possible and how things will look in the future. You’ll be able to really understand what’s going to change…I’m thinking about debates and topics in a broad sense. [around AI] Go in two directions. One, this is my new model. Look how great it is. So it’s a model model contest. And the other one is, “Oh my god, that’s going to cost me my job.” So there’s always this dichotomy between doomsday and very exciting news. And every time there’s a significant drop, it’s really interesting to see how the entire industry focuses on it in the days leading up to the next big drop.
He argues that the notable “big event” for generative AI happened 18 months ago when AI gained UI.
What happened when AI got a UI was that AI was democratized for the first time in history. So Open AI, he was just building a model to release GPT-1 and GPT-2, and no one cared. I think there was one article in the New Yorker where he said, when they opened up ChatGPT for the world to understand and experience, this technology was going to help people create, think, write, and execute content. I understood what it meant in terms of machine capabilities. The reasons are well established.
Sales of genetic AI
From WPP’s perspective, interest in AI dates back to before ChatGPT started accelerating the hype cycle, he said.
Over the past four to five years, and especially in the last 18 months, we’ve seen a lot of progress in not just what the impact of generative AI is going to be, but how to work with it and how to leverage it. We have worked very hard to make sure our employees understand. Incorporating these technologies into daily life. We launched a major evangelization program across our business.110,000 employees worldwide [and] Probably about five times as many clients on an individual basis. We believe that generative AI is an enhancement to human creativity, not a threat to our jobs, but actually a new ability for us to express ourselves and be creative. We aim to help people understand.
So how can AI enhance human creativity? This is a topic that has generated a lot of discussion in recent months. Pretorious is very optimistic about this.
When I started visiting creative agencies in mid-2022 and asking them what they were doing, what tools they were using, and what they were experimenting with, it was really exciting. What do you think about it? As one creative director in Toronto said to me: “Prompt is really a new art direction, so I’m really excited about it.”
That is, in order to successfully utilize AI, especially in the visual field, you must not only know what you want to achieve, but also study design, photography, art, aesthetics, etc. in order to judge whether you should achieve it or not. It meant that it must be done. What is provided or produced is good. This idea of AI rewarding traditional humanities training and softer skills is very exciting to me, and our employees are very optimistic. In fact, the creative community was the most engaged and least threatened community.
He cited examples of WPP’s work with clients, such as Nike’s campaign celebrating its relationship with tennis champion Serena Williams, which pitted her 18-year-old avatar and her current avatar against each other to see who would win. went. Or how Virgin Cruises uses a Jennifer Lopez deepfake to provide passengers with a personalized content experience. This is something like this:
We’ve been able to speculate in the past, but we couldn’t actually do it without AI.
marketing issues
On the other hand, he suggests that marketing as a function is problematic.
Since the 1960s and 70s, brands have basically turned to agencies and the agencies have done everything for them. They created brands and even products and gave them names. Over the past 30-40 years, marketing and advertising has become completely fragmented and siled. We have specialist media, PR, digital and SEO agencies. Most major CMOs today essentially feel like glorified general contractors.
This percentage is even higher when many of our clients are complex global organizations with thousands of products in over 100 markets around the world. How do you standardize your marketing techniques and processes? How do you make sure everyone is working the same way? How do you make sure people are using the same tools and data? And how do you manage all of your third-party relationships?
The answer to all of these questions comes back to “this cool AI thing that everyone in the marketing department wants to use.” But there’s another problem, Pretorius says.
No one has a way to scale it. No one has a way to systematically apply AI to the entire marketing process. This is really the core of what we have been building at his WPP. Over the past few years, we’ve been building an AI-powered marketing operating system to solve this problem. We call it WPP Open. It is an incredibly flexible and agile marketing orchestration system powered by AI that enables us to perform any form and combination of marketing functions in a consistent manner across all of our clients’ markets. We’ve applied AI not only to the vertical functions of creative production, media, and commerce, but also to the horizontal functions of the marketing process.
In part 2 of this article, Asmita Dubey, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at L’Oréal, takes on the topic of how Gen AI can revolutionize marketing.
