WPP Makes Major Commitment to AI with $313 Million Annually

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The juggernaut in AI marketing innovation and investment continues, with a major financial commitment by one of the world’s biggest agency holding companies, a new Silicon Valley incubator, and a newly launched tool for decoding cultural trends.

TODAY’S AI-POWERED MARKETING UPDATE:

• Top News: WPP Announces Major Commitment to AI with $313M Annually

• New AI Solutions: Huge Launches Tool for “Decoding” Cultural Trends in Market

• AI Innovation Trends: Pereira O’Dell Creates Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley

• White Paper Summary: Deploying AI to Optimize Content Format in Real Time

• Today’s Master Marketing Tip: Michael Aagaard, Senior CRO consultant

TOP NEWS

WPP Makes Major Commitment to AI with $313 Million Annually

WPP, one of the world’s “Big Four” advertising and public relations holding companies, announced it plans an ongoing annual expenditure of $313 million to support data and technology initiatives across its various subsidiaries, which include Ogilvy, CMI Media Group and Hill+Knowlton Strategies.

The company said it’s a move to expand its WPP Open offering, which has more than 28,000 current users that include L’Oréal and Nestlé, as well as build on WPP’s acquisition of Satalia in 2021, organic investment in AI, client technology and data, and “deep partnerships” with Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI.

“AI is transforming our industry and we see it as an opportunity not a threat,” said Mark Read, CEO of WPP, in an announcement.

“We firmly believe that AI will enhance, not replace, human creativity,” Read added. “We are already empowering our people with AI-based tools to augment their skills, produce work more efficiently and improve media performance, all of which will increase the effectiveness of our work,” Read added.

“We also see opportunities to sell new AI-driven products and services to our clients and to capture more growth in areas like production,” he said.

The announcement from WPP comes just days after Publicis, another of the Big Four agency holding companies, announced plans to invest around $325 million over the next three years in a major initiative to unify the company’s entire operations around a new AI infrastructure.

One of the four largest advertising and PR firms in the world, Publicis said the effort to create a completely AI-integrated organizational network—to be called CoreAI—will be led by its Sapient subsidiary, which provides technology and data services to major corporations and government agencies around the world.

NEW AI SOLUTIONS

Huge Launches AI Tool for “Decoding” Cultural Trends in Market

Huge, a creative consultancy that’s a subsidiary of the Interpublic Group conglomerate, on Monday announced the release of an AI-powered “culture decoder” to help brands understand the cultural trends that are most important to their existing and potential customers.

The new technology solution analyzes billions of data points to calculate the size, sentiment, and momentum of each trend, and provides “actionable and data-driven recommendations to help brands drive engagement,” according to Huge.

“When creating relevant and personalized experiences, companies often claim they already know their customers well enough to accomplish this goal,“ wrote Brendan Witcher, a Forrester VP and analyst, in the company’s report titled, “Conditional Love: What It Really Takes To Keep Customers Faithful.”

“But too often they use the same list of banal customer data categories to get equally banal business results,” Witcher added. “The outcome: They don’t understand the required ‘conditions’ to win and retain a customer’s love of the brand — and that customer’s initial and ongoing business.”

Huge’s new “Culture Decoder” tool “provides users with the context and reasons trends matter within an industry, as well as the relationship seen between them,” according to the company’s announcement.

Interpublic Group, the parent company of Huge, is an S&P 500 company with total revenue of $11 billion in 2022.

AI INNOVATION TRENDS

Pereira O’Dell Creates AI Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley

The creative ad agency Pereira O’Dell, a subsidiary of Serviceplan Group, Europe’s largest independent agency network, announced it has launched an innovation lab and business incubator in Silicon Valley called Silverside AI, “for brands willing to experiment during this critical early stage of the rapidly expanding AI boom.”

The new center’s mission is to pioneer cutting-edge innovations in AI-powered media, data, optimization, creative, customer experience design, and operations, the company said, adding, “The goal is to reshape the fast-growing AI innovation economy within the global advertising and marketing sector.”

Silverside AI's innovation projects include The Insights Machine, an AI-powered language processing tool that aids strategists in creating interactive marketing personas, utilizing brands’ first-party data for more precise audience targeting.

Led by Pereira O'Dell co-founders, PJ Pereira and Andrew O'Dell, Silverside AI has hired Rob Wrubel, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and innovation executive, as its managing director, as well as naming Johnny Rohrbach, as director of AI partnerships at Silverside AI.

Serviceplan Group is simultaneously launching an AI Lab headquartered in Munich, which will serve as a European-based innovation center aimed at fortifying the group's global AI capacities.

WHITE PAPER

White Paper Summary: Deploying AI to Optimize Content Format in Real Time

In a new white paper on the topic of maximizing the effectiveness of marketing content by using AI to determine optimal formatting in real time, Yieldmo, the provider of a programmatic advertising platform, spells out five key steps for achieving success.

Here’s a quick summary of the five basic elements described in the paper:

1. A broad selection of formats that can independently improve outcomes in real time as ads are delivered

2. Abundant and granular training data that enables the ability to process, transform, and store large volumes of interactions

3. Modeling, which entails a clear use case and a well understood and defined problem

4. Machine Learning with a robust infrastructure that automate pipelines to collect, prepare, and score training data an ensure models are up to date

5. Activation that deploys predictions into a real-time decisioning system that balances between scale vs. performance as needed by each advertiser to hit KPI targets.

“The right creative format amplifies–without altering–the core underlying creative, to create a unique interactive experience,” according to the white paper’s authors. “An intelligent creative format drives engagement with customers and improves a variety of key advertiser KPIs, including brand awareness & recall, attention, consideration, shoppability, site visits, and more.”

TODAY’S MARKETING MASTER TIP:

Michael Aagaard is known as one of the most passionate and enthusiastic people in the conversion rate optimization (CRO) industry. He has helped companies around the world create better experiences for their customers.

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THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY, FOLKS!