She was appointed to the head the agency one year ago, coming from GroupM’s Essence where she was Head of Media Activation for North America.
In 2013, Gila joined the growing Google account at Essence and built a team to run Google’s SEM and biddable media efforts. Gila also helped Google codify its global Adwords and DoubleClick best practices.
She grew Essence’s social practice by 50x between 2013 and 2016.
In this interview, she talks about her path to leadership and the efforts to bring diversity, equality and inclusion to Xaxis. She speaks about the focus of outcomes at Xaxis as a core value of the programmatic unit of GroupM. She covers AI and the future of of a more efficient programmatic ecosystem.
This year marks the agency’s 10th year anniversary.
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]]>But humans, too, have to learn how to make the right calls when it comes to training those algorithms.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, GiLa Wilensky, president of US at Xaxis, says “ethical AI” is essential.
Xaxis is the WPP agency focused on driving business outcomes using programmatic ad-trading. It has operated its own AI offering under the name Copilot for five years now
Introducing Copilot, Xaxis' proprietary AI-powered technology that optimizes campaigns using machine learning models.#OutcomeMedia #artificialintelligence #machinelearning pic.twitter.com/lAVva9uBmy
— Xaxis (@XaxisTweets) September 28, 2018
Wilensky says AI use cases in programmatic advertising include streamlining bidding and investment decisioning towards client goals, through customizable and machine learning models.”
“The true promise of programmatic and AI is to automate as much as possible and streamline so we can free up human resource and human time to do other things,” she says. “And so I think AI is great for automating decisions that a human can make quickly.”
But she is also cautious that, without the right guidance, the algorithms could lead to poor outcomes.
“If you put garbage (data) in, you get garbage out,” Wilensky, who joined Xaxis earlier in 2020 from Essence, adds.
“If you’re feeding the algorithms unethical or unsafe data or poor inventory to run against with programmatic, you’re going to see that output.
“The humans are ultimately responsible for the AI and the decisioning. We need to be very aware of the human biases that we’re coding in, our methodologies for sourcing data, the inventory quality, so that we can be as brand safe and ethical as possible in the outputs of what the algorithms are working towards.”
Some time ago, in association with IAB Europe, @XaxisTweets conducted a pan-European survey to understand the current and future impact of Artificial Intelligence (#AI).
Survey results are here: https://t.co/QN25wAZf6N pic.twitter.com/KlTxgFbvrO
— IAB Europe (@IABEurope) December 16, 2020
So Xaxis’ Wilensky has a solution – humans to watch over the machines.
“If you create the right boundaries and guardrails for AI, when you’re writing that code, then you’re able to have the outputs live within those boundaries,” she says.
“Some of the fear of lack of ethics in AI is really when it sort of goes wild and you don’t have the right guardrails in place.”
“Ethical AI” is a big trend in the sphere, concerning how to fairly program machine learning algorithms without human biases.
There is even an institute dedicated to the practice, while Google’s internal AI ethics unit this month hit the press amid in-house diversity concerns.
A side issue is the idea of transparency. If ad-tech were not already mired enough in concerns about lack of visibility in to supply chain patterns, then some fear decisions made by AI will be even more opaque. That is why a movement is growing to encourage AI to show their workings.
Ultimately, though, Xaxis’ Wilensky imagines AI helping play a part in keeping brands afloat after a difficult year.
“There’s no better medium than programmatic media to do so because it’s extremely flexible and we can help our clients roll with the punches as we continue into 2021 and the pandemic,” she says.
You are watching “Media In Transition: How AI is Powering Change,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by IBM Watson Advertising. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>And that tipping point coincided with a large-scale new bearishness that plagued its rival tech platforms, as concerns over ad practices, mental health and democracy coalesced to dog Facebook and Google.
So, who will be winning the race in 2019? In this video interview with Beet.TV, an executive from one of GroupM’s ad agencies says Amazon has taken share from the big two digital ad players, and now stands ready to capitalize on a world of walled gardens.
“The theme of 2018 was that it was a really hard year, from a digital measurement and tracking perspective,” says Essence SVP, media activation, North America, Gila Wilensky.
“And I think 2019 is going to be difficult, as well, as we sort through some of the challenges as it relates to the way we track audiences, and are able to market to our customers.”
Wilensky is talking about the ongoing challenge in which ad buyers want to use the likes of Facebook but find it difficult to put their activities there in the wider context of campaign performance – in other words, the “walled garden” issue.
That has been a grumble of many advertisers for a couple of years now. But, with Facebook facing an onslaught of criticism for insufficient oversight over how its user data is exported out of its platform, it could arguably be an issue that won’t get solved any time soon.
“We have a challenge that we could only get a read on what’s working within one channel, or within one place,” Wilensky says. “We’re not able to say that platform A or media A had this X impact on somebody. It just becomes more of a crap shoot in the way that we’re able to do attribution.”
What does that mean for the GAFA tussle, the race between Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon for ad supremacy?
Elsewhere in the GroupM stable, Finecast’s CEO has already told Beet.TV that Amazon’s connected TV ad ambitions, after announcing it will take a 30% cut of ad revenue spent over that platform, are clear.
“They’re building a big infrastructure, sales force of going directly after TV money,” Jakob Nielsen said. “So they’re definitely going to be a gigantic player in there.”
But Wilensky sees Amazon’s coming scale as being the sum of its many different parts.
“Amazon’s really interesting, because of the acquisition brands that it has,” she says. “They have amazing data from their customers. Whether or not we can use that in interesting ways will remain to be seen, but I think the acquisitions at Amazon makes is where it’s going to see differentiation.
“Whole Foods is one of them. IMDB was one of their first acquisition brands. And they just have a wealth of data across the different platforms that they own, and so their success, I think, will be in integrating their customer insights across all of those products, and then up-leveling the ad platform, which is pretty nascent right now, as it relates to its competitors.”
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