In this video interview with Beet.TV, ad agency Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson defines AI, outlines how his company applies the tech, and casts a note of caution.
“AI’s been in our business for years – it’s just people are talking about it now,” Nelson says. “AI is all over our business, we’re working with all of our partners at Amazon and Google and we use (IBM) Watson,” some of the big sellers of cognitive services.
Nelson says AI is used to optimize media, produce advanced creative, perform image recognition and conduct deep data analysis, leading to more effective creative, better images, better text and better outcomes.
In our specific example, Omnicom’s Annalect division built a chatbot that, in a conversation with media planners, can find and speak back key facts from vast databases of consumer behavior.
“Chatbot helps media buyers, planners, data people… give(s) them insight in to all kinds of data… a chat text-like interface in to all of the data that’s in our networks,” he says.
But Nelson is respectful to growing concerns that increased automation will lead to lost jobs and that consumers may have greater privacy concerns over how their data is processed by AI algorithms.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>When the world was betting on a Hillary win, Havas deployed what, like large tech firms, it is now calling its “cognitive” technologies, on 15 million news articles, candidates’ speeches and a billion social posts by 10 million US voters.
“The platform was predicting a Trump win even two to three weeks before the election,” Havas global head of marketing innovation Jason Jercinovic tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“We were mystified. What came out of that was how Donald was doing that – he was targeting voters that had been switched from voting for Obama (using) very sophisticated targeting and pushing material to them to cause them to think in a certain way.”
Jercinovic’s crystal ball partly relied on topic classification technology from IBM Watson’s suite of cognitive APIs. Havas deployed the findings in an election-night special show by the UK’s ITV News.
Now Havas is building the platform in to an offering its calling Eagle.Ai, for determining the outcomes and key issues of other elections.
But, for Jercinovic, Eagle.Ai’s findings have actually given cause for concern – about the technology now available to both politicians and advertisers alike. The practices of Cambridge Analytica have concerned some observers.
“You can predict the future, outcomes, even influence those outcomes and effect behavior,” he tells Beet.TV. “Thus, we need to act with a mature responsibility and speak from a point of ethics. Now is the time to do that … we need to protect ourselves from ourselves.”
So Havas is involved in bringing together ad agencies to develop guidelines around how to use new AI technologies. Media agency executives are now sharing ideas for how to conduct consumer profiling using artificial intelligence, as one agency urges the industry to adopt its code of conduct to avoid damaging privacy violations.
Jercinovic says the power of AI applied in advertising could be huge – and also destructive.
“Potential violation of trust could be damaging beyond belief,” he says. “Many companies have deployed a set of APIs which you can basically interrogate a data set. That allows you to pull these insights out that can be very personal, can be very intimate…
“(With) 400 or 500 Facebook posts (analyzed), I can effectively map (a person) to Myers Briggs or an OCEAN personality demographic and infer a lot of things. Therein lays the existential challenge – with that power to have those insights, you can know more about a consumer than potentially they know themselves.”
The application of running those APIs on available consumer signals is significant, for anyone trying to target the right consumers.
Jercinovic imagines: “It’s not hard to determine inferences of things like sexual preference, political affiliation, purchase intent etc. and thus the responsibility is critical now for us to look at ways we can protect them, make sure they see the value of these exchanges.”
For one thing, Europe’s forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) make this sort of profiling highly questionable without explicit consumer opt-in permission.
And Jercinovic reveals agency rivals are now discussing with each other how best to exploit the new opportunities whilst also ensuring consumers’ wishes are respected.
“We’ve been putting forward a code of conduct around this, a system of trust which is based around self-regulation, industry-wide,” he says. “We share ideas across many of the holding companies.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>So OMD’s Jean-Paul Edwards commissioned a Europe-wide research study to understand how companies in different countries were treating the emergence of AI tech.
“AI has been in our culture for 200 years, since Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’re now at the point where AI solutions can scale in to mass-market everyday consumer realities.
“Now is the time you move from it being led by technology to being led by consumer thinking, marketing thinking.”
Edwards, who is OMD’s EMEA strategy and development director, says OMD has been going out to talk with customers, stage hackathons and commission research, all to educate and understand customers’ views on AI.
The aim?: “Start to make those big strategic decisions based on empirical data,” he says.
So, what does the data show? Edwards explains: “In the UK, two thirds of people are either using AI or open to using AI, 34% are pushing back. People in Spain and Italy are actually more open to AI, which surprised us.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But the two hemispheres of the industry don’t have to be divorced from each other, says one leading agency exec. MediaCom’s US CEO thinks data can now help to power ever-more creative advertising.
“Data is the new business fuel, data allow you to design new creative,” Sasha Savic says, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “Data will change creative to be more precise and to be more relevant.”
In 2017, we have heard plenty from advertising executives – even many in the data vendor community – who want to talk more about creative enablement. Savic is on board with that – but he doesn’t see enough chat from peers.
“There is reluctance from traditional big agencies to embrace data as the fuel for creativity,” Savic claims.
The industry is now entering a next phase in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are promising to even better target consumers. For MediaCom, Savic says AI “surprises us every day with new opportunities that we didn’t dream about yesterday”.
And, whilst it will be possible for algorithms to mine consumer records to form a better understanding of them than perhaps they even have of themselves, Savic thinks privacy concerns won’t be as big a deal for audiences, if the campaign hits the right note.
He cites an example last year in which Coke wanted to show a bottle bearing viewers’ first name at the end of TV commercials – something which required both viewer data and viewer permission. ‘Eighty percent of people said ‘yeah, do it’,” Savic adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>At Cannes Lions, AI – perhaps surprisingly – emerged as one of the key trends and opportunities facing modern marketers.
Publicis Groupe chief growth officer Rishad Tobaccowala, in this video interview with Beet.TV, says the opportunities are big.
He says AI is marked out by three characteristics – large datasets, a large amount of computing power and a natural, childlike learning ability.
“Put those together and you can predict and make decisions better than ever before,” he says.
“Human plus AI helper can do amazing things.”
In fact, Tobaccowala likens it to Her, the sci-fi movie in which a man who interacts daily with his AI powered operating system assistant and, ultimately, falls in love with it.
“For a marketer, how do you ensure that when someone calls your name or asks for help, your brand can ask for help?,” he says.
And Tobaccowala has more grand thinking.
“We are at the beginning of the third connected age,” he says.
“The first connected age was around mid-90s with the Netscape browser… In 2007 was the second connected age – the rise of social networks and the rise of smartphones… 2017, we’re now in the third connected age – data connecting to data, things connecting to things, and people connecting in new ways including voice.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The marketing chief of one big auto maker believes owners should be able to choose their vehicle’s driving mode depending on their preference.
Earlier this year, Audi partnered with tech maker Nvidia on a range of in-car tech, including AI-powered autonomy, with a view to creating the world’s most advanced driverless car by 2020.
But, for Audi’s America marketing director Loren Angelo, it’s about choice.
“Audi wholeheartedly believes in piloted driving,” he tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We’ve always engineered our vehicles for the driving experience.
“‘Piloted’ means you can engage or disengage depending on the conditions you need as a consumer.
“If you are in commuting traffic, there’s probably other things you could better use your time for. If you want that great drive experience up in to the country on a Sunday afternoon, you want to be behind the wheel of the car, feel the acceleration, be able to steer around those corners and enjoy the experience.”
Angelo says Audi has shrunk its driverless car processing requirements from hardware the size of a mainframe, sitting in the back of a car, to something the size of a chip.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Certainly, tools like 3D brand avatars imbued with lifelike emotions and empathy may seem far-fetched. But they are real, here and now, said one pioneer pitching the tech to advertisers today.
“This technology is available today,” said Mark Sagar, CEO of Soul Machines, a company responsible for the systems. “We could basically replicate any person.”
By that, Sagar means, the 3D technology his company built, originally for movie studios to bring characters to life, how moved beyond animation itself – now, those 3D character models are getting injected with algorithmic profiles that mimic human emotions, ticks and responses, even to viewers they can see through their own digital cameras.
And Sagar thinks brands could use the same tech to bring brand avatars to life.
“It could be a celebrity, it could be a spokesperson or whatever,” he said. “If you think about how you approach representing a brand when you get a celebrity … you’re embodying their traits in that. We can bring them to life and have them interact.”
This is a world away from optimising display ads’ click-through engagement. In this future world, an army of technologies would be deployed to mimic human characters employed to interact in lifelike conversations with customers and prospects. It’s a closing of the gap that Sagar thinks will yield results.
“When you interact, you invest,” he added. “You start personalising things. You can have a spokesperson or representative of a particular brand have a relationship with you – it will remember you, your preferences, adapt its behaviour.
“You start forming a stronger relationship with the brand in that way. By adding life to things, we can’t ignore it.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That means the time is now to pick a horse in the AI race and back it, says Carrie Seifer, chief revenue officer at The Weather Company, whose acquisition by IBM has upgraded its own AI chops.
“If you’re not using AI in your marketing, you’re actually behind the boat,” Seifer tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We have seen several different marketers, just with our tools alone, use it and get higher engagement, better CRM, increase their Net Promoter Score.”
How does AI help marketers and advertisers. The opportunities are many, but Seifer calls out planning, strategy and optimisation as areas that can benefit from machine intelligence.
Furthermore, The Weather Company is working with IBM’s Watson AI division to offer what the pair are calling a “Watson ad unit”, wherein Watson powers chat bot dialog between a consumer and a brand.
“It’s about how machine learning can augment what humans need to do,” Seifer adds. “It’s not cute anymore to not understand what your customer wants. They’ve given you all this data – if you’re not doing anything with it, then shame on you.
“Natural language APIs allow you to have a conversation with your customer with limited human interaction. You feed it data that maybe comes from your call centre.
“Just start exploring the APIs.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Mindshare is one agency that has dipped its toe in the water – but it now thinks artificial intelligence technology may help catapult the brand bots idea thanks to more natural linguistic experiences.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Mindshare US CEO Adam Gerhart explains that his company was a beta partner for IBM’s Watson AI technology. He says the application of AI is diverse.
“It’s about how we engage with consumers more readily, in a more appropriate way, whereby they feel it’s more personalized, relevant and something that they want to engage with,” he says.
“Chatbots is interesting but it’s still one-dimensional – there are still limitations to the number of different responses you can program, whereas (with) things like IBM’s Watson, there’s almost an infinite number of iterations that you can come up with – from a messaging standpoint, an executional standpoint – and that’s what we’re really excited about.”
ButGerhart concedes a risk that the industry may focus too much on using technology and data to solve problems.
He sees the ad world bifurcating along the lines of “EQ” and “IQ” – emotional intelligence and data savvy – with the best campaigns employing a mixture of both.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>It may seem incongruous, but, as executives in industries the world over scramble to assess the benefits promised by AI, advertising decision-makers are amongst those getting excited.
“At the agency level, we have a unique opportunity,” says Havas’ global managing director Dominique Delport. “The way we are going to reach new heights .. is the moment we can bring more and more automation.
And Delport draws a parallel with what happened on the New York Stock Exchange more than a decade ago, when new automated trading software was introduced, meaning many trades are now performed by algorithms, not traders on the floor.
“(It is) exactly what happened in the financial markets and the trading floor, where (the) computer sits next to traders,” Delport adds. “Traders and quant analysts and computer help to make the engine work better.”
At Cannes, discussion of AI’s application in advertising has ranged from interactive 3D faces to personalization. Delport says Havas has already begun to plug AI in to its software stack.
“We start(ed) implementing AI components in our latest version of the meta-DSP, and our new programmatic platform, CTS … to have smarter decision-making by providing the top 30 trading strategies,” he adds.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That is the vision of artificial intelligence pioneer Mark Sagar. He should know – the CEO of Soul Machines says his company has partnered with IBM’s Watson to create digital humans that can understand language and concepts and respond to people with appropriate facial expressions, emotion and mood.”
And now he says the same technology can be deployed by any company, to help imbue their machines with realistic empathy for customer interaction.
“Human cooperation is the biggest force in human history – we’re getting to a point where we can now cooperate with machines,” Auckland-based Sagar says during this panel interview at Cannes Lions.
“You start having situations where you can co-create with machines. If you add these in to the VR and AR worlds, you are populating an entire world of interactive characters, like you can interact with real people.”
Powered by IBM’s Watson cognitive technology, The Weather Company has been doing some early work in helping brands create chatbots that, using lifelike linguistic interaction, can have valuable discussions with audiences.
But Sagar, whose company also uses Watson, thinks that the next step in socialization is visual, humanizing brandbots using emotions in artificial brains that sit behind 3D facial models.
“We don’t just make realistic faces, they can be non-human characters,” he says. “We can take a brand and create an embodiment of the brand personality – you can control all the expressions that brand has so a customer can interact with that brand.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>
For their part, marketers need to be brave and experiment with AI while not thinking short term about it, Fremont says in this interview Beet.TV with The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“For me, artificial intelligence is about the iterative learning process,” says Fremont, who is Global Chief Digital officer of MEC.
From an advertising and media perspective, AI represents a transition from algorithms to “something that is learning on its own.”
He is particularly attracted to the notion that AI could help vehicle marketers configure a car “based not on what you told it but what’s learned about you, your lifestyle, if you have a family, how old your kids are, what you do. You go right to the showroom and your car’s there.”
Fremont dubs AI “beyond transformational” because it touches everything from product design to demonstration and purchase.
“It’s not device oriented, it’s not marketing oriented,” Fremont says. “What I love most about it is that it’s completely disruptive.”
Asked by Bitterman whether AI is just a lot of talk at this point, Fremont posits that marketers need to do a lot more experimentation. Beyond the vehicle design model, he talks about the potential for machine learning from consumer engagement with digital ads.
“It’s really taken the notion of one-to-one personalization to the ultimate.”
Recalling the early days of one-to-one marketing with the direct mail medium, Fremont marvels at the swiftness of the AI realm.
“Now the ability to move at lightening speed is what is so disruptive,” along with “the accuracy that it has.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But we if you could use AI to create lifelike digital brains that, implanted in 3D facial models, could give life and character to virtual avatars?
As far-fetched as it may seem, that is exactly what Mark Sagar has done. The CEO of Soul Machines says his company has used IBM’s Watson cognitive computing service to inject emotion in to computer-generated movie characters – but the tech is not going to stop at Hollywood.
“How do we make characters that have their own digital life?,” asks Auckland-based Sagar, during this panel interview at Cannes Lions. “You almost have to give it a nervous system, a digital brain so it can think for itself.”
Sagar, who first pioneered the technology whilst working on the movie King Kong and who later built upon his work for Avatar, may be used to working with scripted characters – but these AI creations don’t necessarily have to follow the paths laid out for them.
“We have biologically-constrained cognitive architectures – these are brain models,” he says.”You don’t know how it’s going to act, it will have memory and so forth.
“The models can sense the environment, they can react, they can learn in real-time and we can connect those to Watson – you (can) have a conversation with it.”
Why is Sagar in Cannes, where the world’s advertisers and creative agencies are out in force to hear about what’s new and what’s next?
Because AI-driven facial models could help brands and enterprises create avatars that interact with customers in lifelike ways, tapping in to vast databases behind them and describing it in emotional mannerisms.
“If you’re a company and have big data that you want to go through, we can put a living face on it,” Sagar adds.”
This interview panel was chaired by The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman. The Weather Company was acquired by IBM in 2015 and, together, the pair are leveraging IBM’s Watson to work on a range of AI-powered initiatives.
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But all these new-wave developments could be set to revolutionise advertising, as well as the other industries they touch.
Companies like IBM and Microsoft are pitching their cognitive software technologies as helping to power deeper ad experiences or video recognition, amongst other applications. At the Cannes Lions advertising festival, IBM is showcasing its Watson AI tech, which also powers ad experiences with The Weather Company.
And the ad-tech sector’s biggest deal-maker says AI could be a big deal.
“AI is a big deal,” says Terence Kawaja, the CEO of media M&A advisory LUMA Partners. “It’s going to be everywhere – and yet it’s not a sector in and of itself.
“It’s going to be like ‘Intel Inside’ – every facet of workflow, monetisation, data will utilise AI. AI will be revolutionary but it will be on the inside, it should be ubiquitous.
“There’s great potential, especially when you get an industry (like advertising) that deals with billions and billions of payments and impressions. But it will be a ways to come.”
Once just for people in the ad community, Cannes Lions has now joined the ranks of CES and Davos amongst a handful of global super-conferences that now attract executive delegates from outside of their traditional core constituencies.
And Kawaja thinks the next wave of much-needed ad-tech consolidation is going to have been fuelled by this week’s Cannes festival.
“This has truly become a deal festival as much as it is about advertising or creative,” he adds.
“So many companies are here – the big strategic buyers, tech companies, agencies, all the media players – because it’s an aggregation of senior people.
“We’ve been inundated with discussions and dialog. I would expect a significant amount of activity to come out of the discussions that either started or at least were forward here in Cannes.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business and Watson. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this, Soul Machines Co-Founder & CEO Mark Sagar walks The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman through three immersive and utterly absorbing examples of how AI technology is “humanizing” computing. The Weather Company is part of IBM’s Watson group and Watson is being used by Soul Machines.
“You can basically bring anything to life, whether it’s a virtual spokesperson or we can even animate non-human characters,” Sagar says as he begins to summon virtual humans on a computer screen. “So it creates a level of engagement never seen before.”
The first example that Sagar presents is a baby girl who appears to be sitting in a car seat directly facing him. “She can see my face. She’s responding to me. She’s not copying me. She’s got her own emotional models,” Sagar explains.
This becomes evident when Sagar moves away from the computer. The girl’s expression sours as her eyes try to find him. A graph superimposed on the computer screen shows her stress level rising. When Sagar comes back into view and speaks, she smiles. “I’m basically calming her down with my voice and my facial expressions. Just like you do with a child.”
When he shows her a book, she tells him what it is. Her pupils respond as he adjusts her simulated level of dopamine.
The next two examples are virtual female adults who are programmed to be able to interact with humans, for example answering questions from customers on behalf of brands. All the while showing genuine human emotions.
“We’ve actually got absolutely precise control over what their faces can do,” Sagar says, noting that every single virtual eyelash is constructed individually.
To Sagar, such uses of technology represents for brands a “whole vocabulary which has been untapped so far in terms of human computer interaction and it’s totally ready to go now.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business and Watson. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In the past 12 months alone, GroupM launched its global [m]PLATFORM and then bolstered its Xaxis programmatic digital media platform with the machine learning initiative called Co-Pilot and finally the acquisition of Triad Retail Media.
[m]PLATFORM is aimed at “streamlining and simplifying” so that GroupM’s clients can “see their consumers and prospective in the same way across the globe,” Nicolle Pangis, the Global COO of [m]PLATFORM, says in this interview with Beet.TV.
From an organizational standpoint, [m]PLATFORM has brought together teams that used to plan, activate, execute and optimized clients’ investments across channels. This process had historically been done “in different pockets in the agency,” Pangis says. “Now we’re at the point of maturation of our industry that it makes sense to bring those all back together and create a single view.”
The biggest single acquisition by Xaxis was that of Triad, which helps retailers sell ads on their websites, for a sum in the neighborhood of $300 million, as The Wall Street Journal reports. Scaling through Xaxis’s many international offices affords Triad the opportunity to help retailers that don’t already sell ads on their websites.
Co-Pilot represents the entry point to machine learning, which is one aspect of AI. In the simplest terms, Co-Pilot’s contribution to brands engaging effectively with consumers is its ability to predict what may happen when ads are served “or what has the highest probability of happening” based on what it’s seen in the past.
“The great thing about technologies like this is that it can take both data that is specifically advertiser driven or just macro economic driven,” says Pangis.
Like other AI-inspired technology, Co-Pilot “learns as it goes.”
Among its abilities are predicting whether a particular ad impression might be viewable based on history and whether a specific consumer has engaged with ads before.
“As a technology it’s not one that is stagnant,” Pangis says. “It’s not like you put a model in and you leave it forever. You’re constantly putting in models and they’re constantly learning.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“I think the way we think about AI is how to strengthen our journalism,” Jarrod Dicker, Washington Post’s Head of Commercial Product & Technology, says in this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
“How can we create more stories in a broader scope that are more factual, that allow us to be able to take artificial intelligence and API’s to help us bring our journalism farther.”
What he finds particularly interesting right now is how companies like his are using AI to benefit their advertisers. This is important when some people are questioning whether brands are funding fake news and whether “fake advertising” exists, according to Dicker.
“I think it’s up to the publishers to build in certain products and technologies and investments on our site and really bring them from point A to B faster,” he says.
Washington Post’s effort in this regard is Postcards on the Post, which allows it to identify each consumer’s consumption habit based on content type. It’s used for branded content.
As ADWEEK reports, the initiative breaks down an immersive piece of branded content into its multimedia components, which can include infographics, video, text and photo galleries. These can all be turned into standalone units that are then targeted to individuals using available data on their content preferences.
“You look at how different publishers are delivering their stories and it’s always the same thing,” says Dicker. “Headline with the description, similar to what the front page of a paper looked like in 1950 and 1960 a lot of modern home pages look exactly the same.”
This ignores the reality of how people consume content and how data brings these preferences to light.
“So if we know that a consumer prefers video over text, over images, then why don’t we deliver that medium to them directly where that promotion sits?” Dicker says.
Postcards on the Post delivers branded content “in a very seamless and authentic way” that our users are most likely to consume “at that given point wherever they are.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Those were some of the trends on the lips of ad execs as Cannes Lions got underway early this week – but how could they help advertisers?
In the latest development, tech companies are pitching a whole new way of conducting digital transactions as a cure-all for the many transparency issues now being suffered in a world replete with ad-tech platforms.
“The publisher only gets 35 cents on the dollar versus 85 cents on the dollar, the marketer’s money is not working as hard, nobody knows exactly who’s getting what,” says IBM’s Babs Rangaiah, executive partner at IBM iX, the tech giant’s interactive experience division.
“With blockchain for media, you’ll be able to have total transparency – who’s getting what, exactly what each company is doing, why they’re getting paid that. A lot of the issues in programmatic … are the kind of things that, done right, blockchain can help solve. I’m looking to help the programmatic space by building a blockchain for that.”
For the uninitiated, a blockchain is a public, distributed, anonymised ledger of transactions that is supremely trackable and traceable. It is the technology that underpins digital currencies like Bitcoin, but, in theory, those “transactions” don’t have to be monetary.
IBM has already brought its Watson AI tech to bear on advertising, acquiring The Weather Company and, together, offering a system through which brands could make interactive brand assistants, for example. Now IBM’s Rangaiah wants to go further, using blockchain’s transparency, which comes as a default, to pitch to an advertising community plagued by concerns over opaque practices.
“Because it’s a clear supply chain, it’ll also be ad-tech players in that mix that will no longer be necessary,” he says. “If everybody has the same information, you won’t need every single one of them.
“I’m exploring a pilot as we speak right now with a big client, a big agency and various partners and players. We’re going to start that probably in the next month or so. We’d like to open it up to the industry at large.
]]>The bank hopes that Erica will help to humanize relationships in what has historically been a very transactional service category. As The Wall Street Journal reports, a client could say things like, “I want to send money to a friend,” or “I want to pay a bill,” and Erica could easily facilitate the transaction.
“I think this is really going to be a paradigm shift as we become much more relationship-centric,” Verdone says.
Another transition that has been under way at BOA is that of being more “audience-first” instead of looking for solutions and delivering them to audiences, according to Verdone.
“And what we’re finding, not surprisingly, is people do need more information about their finances. What we’re trying to do is deliver it in a digestible, easy way that they want to engage with it.”
One particular target is the Millennial cohort, which Verdone describes as wanting to “follow their passion” but not fully knowing whether they can afford to do so. This is one reason why BOA maintains an ongoing relationship with online learning center Kahn Academy.
On her list of exciting developments in advertising are addressable TV, “something that we’re starting to tip our toe into” given BOA’s range of service offerings and audience needs.
“The other thing we’re seeing a lot of success with is sequential video,” Verdone explains. For example, instead of running three separate 30-second spots on Hulu considering it an opportunity to have “90 seconds in front of this audience. What is the story that we want to tell them in 90 seconds and to really think about it as a short film.”
Amid all of the talk of technology at Cannes, what Verdone doesn’t want to lose sight of “is the amazing creativity that is here.” At the end of the day, “how we connect on a very human level and break through and touch our customers is really what’s going to make the difference.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this interview with Beet.TV at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Donohue talks not only about the prospects for AI but the talent needs of the modern media agency and how Starcom has doubled down on its human experience positioning.
The continual increase in data and technology fosters the ability for brands to be more personal and “recognize people for what they are, human beings,” which is a change for the better, according to Donohue.
Regarding AI, she sees on one end of the spectrum machine learning leading to better insights “from a significant amount of data as well as then building strategies off those insights.”
On the other end of the band is the promise of more personal relationships, for example the growing use of chat bots. “Bots is a very technology term, but the reality is bots are allowing a more human interaction with a brand,” says Donohue.
Unlike technology that facilitates website transactions, bots can provide users with a direct dialogue with a brand “that can enable me to figure out how the brand can better serve my needs.” Overall, the range of the AI spectrum “is pretty powerful in how it can change marketing overall.”
Donohue segues to the organizational change at Starcom within the past year or so during which management “took a step back” and decided to determine whether the human experience positioning it had staked out was a viable one.
“The resounding answer among our people and among our clients is that human experience is absolutely the right positioning,” she says. “And in fact, you could argue that it’s more right than when we first created it.”
So Starcom “laser focused” on the notion of the power of a human experience with brands. “Human experience is right, but what’s the modern iteration of it? That’s what we spent the last year on.”
With about 30 years of agency experience behind her, Donohue has a keen perspective for the changing role of what used to be referred to as personnel or human resources. The modern media agency needs everyone from data engineers and scientists to storytellers to managers who can horizontally manage those resources.
“It’s a diverse range of talent needs that we have, which on one hand does make it challenging,” Donohue says. “It also opens up a much broader competitive set that we have to deal with.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“The experiences that we’re are bringing our clients through here that are all Watson-based is really where the future is for us,” The Weather Company CMO Jordan Bitterman says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.
All things weather-related won’t disappear altogether when The Weather Company undergoes its name change. The future “does not exclude weather, because weather is obviously a big part of how we can utilize AI going forward,” Bitterman says. “We’re going to be rolling it out in the coming months.”
IBM envisions Watson as akin to the Android or iOS app stores “where it’s a platform that people can develop on.” Bitterman cites companies like Soul Machines that are building their technologies on top of the Watson stack via application programming interfaces.
For Soul Machines, building “virtual humans” involves using such Watson skillsets as natural language recognition to sentiment analysis. Auckland-based Soul Machines recently unveiled its first virtual assistant, Nadia, voiced by actress Cate Blanchett, as idealog reports.
“Right now there’s 38 different API’s that Watson has and there’s more in testing right now,” Bitterman says. “Probably by the end of the year there should be close to 50 or even 60 different API’s that Watson can enable companies with.”
Cannes attendees can demo various kinds of AI interfaces at The Weather Company’s encampment at the Carlton hotel. One of the experiences is operating the self-driving car called Olli that is powered by IBM’s technology.
“We also have a mirror here that will let you know if you have early signs of melanoma,” Bitterman explains. “Which seems highly appropriate for the south of France.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s AI Series from Cannes Lions 2017, presented by The Weather Company, an IBM Business. For more from the series, please visit this page.
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