Why media agency professionals are attending tech events in greater numbers as AI disrupts their businesses

Ivy Liu

As one of the two holding company agencies at GTC this year, this was Media.Monks’ first time at GTC (and Nvidia’s first in-person conference since the pandemic) and co-founder Wesley ter Haar said this will undoubtedly remain “on the calendar going forward.” In reflecting on Nvidia president Jensen Huang’s keynote on Monday, ter Haar said he believes next-generation computing and AI will arrive sooner than expected as graphics processing units advance.

“It’s fun to think about what it means for us as a company,” ter Haar told Digiday. “I think [Huang’s] point is that everything that can be automated or done by robots will be automated or done by robots.”

At GTC, Media.Monks will deliver two sessions: Tomorrow, the first focuses on AI workflows using Amazon Web Services and Nvidia’s development platform Omniverse Audio2Face. On Thursday, another session will feature Lewis Smithingham, svp of innovation at the media agency, who will discuss its AI utility for broadcast and fan highlights express. It’s part of Media.Monks’ ongoing pattern of Monks.Drift, an AI-driven suite of tools for combining its automation processes and marketing activities.

Media.Monks has also been working on human-to-robot projects ranging from animatronic robots to digital avatars to explore practical AI applications and digital experiences. As Huang mentioned in his keynote address, robotics will advance with more powerful GPUs, a circuit used for accelerating computer graphics and image processing, becoming available — and the industry will continue to see AI strengthen as the systems are trained on interacting with the physical world, images, videos, languages, and simulations.

“We want bigger, bigger GPUs [to get the best computational times and keep costs down],” Huang told the massive audiences at the event on Monday. “We’re going to get AI working with AI together, training each other.”

Ter Haar agreed that this next wave of robotics and AI could even lead what Huang called a glossy industrial revolution — Nvidia is attempting to position itself as the “foundational company behind the foundational infrastructure. … [For] the industry at large, just a few of this could even merely feel a bit esoteric. It’s clear that they’re positioning this as the next enormous Industrial Revolution.”

Increasingly more heritage holding company WPP led a session on Monday wherein CTO Stephan Pretorius focused on AI’s transformation of marketing and marketing using Nvidia’s Omniverse and enterprise AI tools. Pretorius pointed to different examples with Lowe’s and L’Oréal that stood out in how brands are using the Nvidia platform to improve customer service and branded experiences. For example, L’Oréal Groupe is allowing marketers to use AI and augmented reality to enhance creativity and efficiency in their customer experiences and beauty offerings.

While businesses have continuously had a presence at marketing and tech trade shows, Pretorius talked about the excitement with generative AI being an opportunity to collaborate more closely with technology suppliers to create proprietary tools that set each holding company apart from competitors.

“We were maybe as a category or as an industry more focused on distributors or utility distributors that created capabilities specifically for marketing and advertising, [like Adobe or Salesforce],” said Pretorius. “With advances in AI, businesses have realized that they have to partner with foundational capabilities providers, whether that’s infrastructure or software or foundational model providers.”

As the agency world continues to invest in AI, Pretorius said that creativity and evaluation will become paramount as they experiment with the technology. For marketing and advertising, the competition will be around joining the end-to-end marketing value chain — from design and creative to production and measurement, he added.

“That could become the next battleground, as it were — because it relies on us not only being able to integrate capabilities that were historically siloed, but it also requires us to build AI systems that actually can work across these functional domains and leverage data from each of them in order to deliver the different,” Pretorius said.

Pretorius added that focusing on these applications and AI evaluation will help differentiate WPP, which acquired AI evaluation firm Satalia in 2021. Businesses will need to move beyond plugging into open source applications and tools that everyone has access to, he explained.

“It is important to be able to build glossy pipelines, deliver products — have advanced data science on guardrails and hallucinations and things like that,” he said. “It’s very actually skilled and you don’t need large teams — but you will have extremely actually skilled teams.”

https://digiday.com/?p=538405