"The Machine is Not Going to Take Your Job. The People Who Know How to Use the Machine Absolutely Will" - 4A's Marla Kaplowitz and Razorfish CEO Josh Campo on How AI is Impacting the Agency World

During the course of the two and a half day event brilliantly emceed by ANA Executive Vice President AI MarTech and Marketing Futures Michael Donnelly nearly 350 marketers both inperson and virtually were treated to a wide berth of topics that either are already or will very shortly be impacting every facet of the advertising business From workflow process to legal challenges to frameworks on how to introduce Generative AI into your or your client39s organization industry luminaries from Shelly Palmer Shiv Singh Alan Schulman Jill Cress and companies such as Claritas Adobe Amazon Ads Resonate ETS and many others shared experiences best practices recommendations and personal insights into AI39s use in marketing and the ad industryThe conference wrapped up with an illuminating CEOtoCEO interview with 4A39s Marla Kaplowitz and Razorfish39s Josh Campo on the impact that AI is having on agencies in particular creative agenciesCampo minced no words when directly asked by Kaplowitz about the fear of automation overtaking and displacing talent in the agency world quotWe were pretty blunt with our people in January 2023 telling them the machine is not going to take your job The people who know how to use the machine absolutely will take your jobquot He believes that the speed of the evolution of technology in particular when we hit AGO Artificial General Intelligence when quotInnovation will be born of the machine itselfquot will potentially lead to commoditization of the marketing industry where product differentiation quotwill become less and less because the speed of innovation is so quickquot He sees the importance of solidifying the emotional connection that a brand has with its consumer as a key element that agencies will still be able to do betterCampo admits that some clients are more willing to jump into AI than others Yet even those clients that are not ready are not ignoring the din around AI They still want understanding So we have taken an approach that is really about education We have a conversation with clients educate them on what we know educate them on the perspective on how this will shift the industry and the different ways that GenAI will impact their businessAccording to Campo Razorfish has conducted over 60 different engagements or talking sessions around AI over the past year More recently they are beginning to see those education sessions turn into projections Razorfish has executed between 1516 different AI pilot testsKaplowitz and Campo discussed several use cases The first was a reimagining of the always unused car manual that sits in your glove compartment Training an LLM on all of the car manuals owners can ask the AI questions such as quotWhat car seats will fit in the back of my carquot and the AI will come back with three brands and three models that will fit into the back of the car according to the specs Kaplowitz pointed out that the idea could be extended to manuals for all types of durable goods such as refrigerators and washing machinesOne theme that came up a few times over the course of the conference was that of simulated audiences a method where AI trained on audience data can then be engaged with as a pseudovirtual focus group Campo explained that Razorfish was approached by one of their clients who has a very quotchallenging audience that they39re trying to reachquot In order to gain a much more indepth understanding of that audience Razorfish trained ChatGPT on a particular persona and fed it a pretty large set of data Then through conversing with the persona Razorfish and their client was able to get a much better understanding of the media consumption habits and creative preferences of the audience Says Campo quotIt39s not directly coming up with creative So where we have clients who are perhaps more cautious about using any GenAI created assets this is actually pretty far from that and a safe way to talk about how we can leverage AI in a bit more managed risk on that continuumquotAnother way that Razorfish is helping its clients gain confidence in AI driven creative has been its participation and commitment via its parent holding company Publicis to the C2PA Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity C2PA is an open technical standard which provides publishers creators and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media and creative ensuring that what they are seeing is original and authentic This is critical for a creative agency Says Campo quotIt is important for us to safeguard creative We are in a fundamentally creative industry We need to protect thatquotWhen asked what he would tell an agency who is just beginning to engage AI Campo shared a key nugget of advice start small quotI think there39s so much to learn and there39s an incredible opportunity to fail It39s better to start off with some small initiatives on how you can leverage these AI tools and grow into it It is not a small undertaking to take your CRM data and have an AI platform whichever one you pick understand and train on that data That is not a simple thing without risk I would say you need to start walking before you runquotAttendees at the first ANA AI for Marketers conference took their small steps to become better educated and there will likely be many more ANA AI conferences for them to continue their journeyClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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"The Machine is Not Going to Take Your Job. The People Who Know How to Use the Machine Absolutely Will" - 4A's Marla Kaplowitz and Razorfish CEO Josh Campo on How AI is Impacting the Agency World

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"The Machine is Not Going to Take Your Job. The People Who Know How to Use the Machine Absolutely Will" - 4A's Marla Kaplowitz and Razorfish CEO Josh Campo on How AI is Impacting the Agency World

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