By Helen Myers, Advertising Week Correspondent
David Billings, the VP of digital at Empathy Lab teamed up with the Sameer Amin, the VP of Data Driven Marketing & Media at Reckitt to present the transformation of AI in paid media.
Billings began the talk by giving a basis for what his company does. He described Empathy Lab as an AI focused agency born from the company EPAM, which develop technical solutions for enterprise clients. Empathy Lab takes the technical foundation and incorporates creative marketing expertise to solve CMO oriented challenges.
Billings then dove into Agentive AI. “Agentive solutions are a great fit for some of the big challenges and opportunities that I think anyone working in the paid media domain is wrestling with today,” Billings explained. He also expressed the urgency in implementing these solutions as the pace of the market is increasing exponentially. “If you’re not already at that point then you’re probably already behind. The danger is that being even a few months behind in such a fast-moving market can open up a vast gap in capability that becomes challenging to close,” he said.
He then handed the floor to Amin who stated that Reckitt’s is going through a transformation. They want to improve their overall simplicity, agility, and effectiveness and this transformation will pivot around the powerful technology.
“We’re refocusing our business processes and a lot of these tools require a new set of training requirements,” he said. To adjust to these changes, Reckitt has created an internal team called Genesis which is their Generative AI transformation team.
With fragmentation, he explains that advertisers are faced with far more platforms and media owners than ever before. Generative AI can help with this volume and sustain long-term growth.
Billings performed a live demonstration of this Agentive AI. After inputting a media planning brief, budget, and campaign run time, the platform produced an optimized media plan. He further explained that the AI is transparent and shows the user exactly where it is pulling data from.
Amin says that they want Generative AI to replace tasks and not people. He said that in their research they found that marketeers were focusing their time on non-marketing related tasks. That inspired the steps towards working AI to automate the grunt work to make the tasks that humans perform more enjoyable.
“We wanted to make sure that we could use GenAI not to create new content, but actually adapt existing content so it’s fit for platform, and then make sure that localization of it could be scaled to much more markets” Amin noted. He followed this by doing a demonstration of a post campaign report done by Generative AI.
Billings closed out the session with stressing again how fast the future is moving. “This isn’t just about bolting a new tool onto an existing process, this can actually provide a catalyst to totally rewire the way that your teams work. This is happening now so if you’re still thinking about this, again that unfortunately means you’re already behind the market,” he said. He also highlighted that Agentive Ai can strengthen ROI’s and overall efficiency. Amin returned to the fear of AI replacing human employees and added, “For us, it’s about getting more out of our teams. It’s refocusing their attention on the things that really make a difference and matter to our business.”
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