Later this week Cindy Rose, a former Microsoft executive, will doubtless tie herself in knots trying to explain how “agentic” deals with the likes of Google and Meta (would you join them for dinner without the benefit of a Roman-style taster?) will help realise WPP’s ‘Elevate28’ transformation.
WPP has certainly gone all-out for Artificial Intelligence, firstly under former boss Mark Read and now under Rose although it’s far from clear how it can help an agency group apart from cheaper production. Brandtech’s David Jones (left) hit the nail squarely on the head the other week when when he told the FT: “We like to believe that every person who creates is brilliant, but if you watch the basketball [on television] this week, most of the ads are terrible..95 per cent of people don’t produce much that’s creative or original. So why not do that with fast, efficient machines and let the geniuses handle the other 5 per cent?”
So why don’t agencies concentrate on the clients who do care about impactful communications (Adidas being a case in point as it bunged money into the World Cup only to frighten Wall Street’s algo-driven horses) and leave the AI wizards to squander billions on yet more ways to get bots to talk to bots? Even the IAB acknowledges that such ads gain only the most fleeting attention.
Agencies through their history have gone careering away after the latest fashion (AI now obviously but also influencers or creators as they like to be known) with no real evidence that it delivers better results than ads created by people and placed by people in media that people actually consume?
AI has become a vast circular industry where the chip makers fund the companies who buy their products. Sooner or later the musical chairs will stop and there’ll be a financial crash that makes 2008 look like a practice run. That’s if these fiendish AI inventions don’t keep escaping and bring the whole world crashing down anyway.
Agencies and sensible advertisers should steer clear.
