News15 Mar 2024 10:18
Martin Sorrell, executive chairman at S4 Capital, took the stage at Spikes Asia 2024 on Thursday to a packed house with a cagey audience that didn’t respond well to a show of hands as to whether they belonged to agency, brands or platforms. “Who are you then?” mused Sorrell, before launching into an interview with Haymarket Media managing director Atifa Silk where he expounded on his vision for the future of the marcomms industry, as touched on in his recent opinion piece for The Times. Today’s industry is full of blurred lines between folks in creative, media, PR, publishers and platforms, all of whom are excited and terrified at where new AI technologies will take them. Rapt audience in hand, Sorrell served his non-sugar-coated vision, portions of which have already been chronicled, on where the opportunities and pitfalls lie for agency groups as new technologies and relationships supplant existing ones. “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” he quipped, noting that there will be significant attrition in areas like media planning and buying where the existing 200,000+ employees in the media planning environment will be culled in favour of algorithms. “The days when we rely on a 25-year-old media planner and buyer will be over,” he added. Also, whether agencies like it or not, the advantage of their closer relationships with clients will be ceded to platforms as new technologies like Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ become more proficient at directly explaining results to clients, with fewer agency people needed in the process. Ultimately, Sorrell said, we will get to a model where ideation teams will use technology like Sora or Lightricks where text or voice is instantly converted into video. That video will then be fashioned into a plan and a buy which an algorithm will be able to deploy. “Agencies will increasingly become validators,” Sorrell said, “because you’ll need an independent third party to validate what the platforms and algorithms are implementing in the right way. That's the way it’s going to go.” The techniques needed, he said, are still creative and marketing-based, but it will be critically important for agencies to employ people with deep technological capabilities for these roles. Five areas where Sorrell sees AI impacting advertising and media Visualisation and copy writing. What took three weeks can take two hours. More use of text to visuals. This is a double-edged sword for agencies selling their services on time. Hyper personalisation. Netflix has already taught us how to use data to create content at scale. AI can help build content factories at huge scale. The price of the assets will go down but the number of assets deployed will be greater so it will be a positive for agencies. Media planning and buying. This will be revolutionised as media planners and buyers are replaced with algorithms. Agency and client efficiency. Linear marketing plans that u
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