Generative AI is best managed in-house. So say Oliver’s chief strategy officer Nick Myers, and Peter van Jaarsveld, head of global content production at Oliver+ and AI lead at Oliver.
In a conversation at Campaign’s In Housing Summit, Myers told the audience that GenAI will allow brands to be more creative, to accomplish more, and to save money, but, he added, it needs to be “carefully managed”.
Asked about the ways in which in-house agencies are adapting to technological advances, van Jaarsveld pointed out that GenAI has been around for “longer than we may acknowledge”.
“Now, suddenly, it’s moved from the periphery to the centre,” he said, “and the biggest change we’re seeing is not in the technology, which is obviously hugely powerful in driving all this change, and not in the people, because talented people always find ways of using technology to do amazing things. But…actually in the ways we work.” Agencies and brands alike need to focus on the process of connecting technology and people to do “good and interesting things”.
Van Jaarsveld noted that because generative AI touches many facets of a business, including data, compliance, performance, and creative, it is best managed from inside an organisation.
“The most successful implementations we’ve done at an enterprise level are the ones where, from the start we had legal, compliance, and marketing in the room working on what we were trying to achieve.”
When it comes to talent, he believes generative AI will allow agencies to look at the task at hand more holistically than before.
“We tend to look at processes as very role driven,” he said. “This role hands over to that role, hands over to that role. And what’s happened now is suddenly you can skip through those handovers, and one role can do all those things…it changes the speed and agility with which we can do things at a very fundamental level.”
As for working with clients, van Jaarsveld said regulated industries such as pharma and financial services were, perhaps surprisingly, the furthest along on their GenAI journeys.
“Part of the reason for this is that the regulated industries are used to dealing with more complex asks at the start and are better set up to come on this journey,” he explained, adding that they have good frameworks in place for managing and guiding innovation.
His colleague, chief strategy officer Myers, highlighted the difficulties of getting some brands on board with a new concept when there is no evidence that it works because it hasn’t been done before.
It can indeed be “hard to de-risk the decision before going on the journey”, agreed van Jaarsveld, because there are no use cases to fall back on. But brands can’t and shouldn’t sit and wait for everything to align perfectly before they get started on their GenAI journey.
“You can’t learn to swim from the shore. You need to get things turning and be in a state of readiness.”
“The most important thing is to have a view of what your ultimate end goal is,” he urged. “And then ask yourself what kinds of pilots you could run that most effectively prove the primary factors, because you don’t have to test the entire workflow.”
He encouraged brands and agencies to be flexible when it comes to how they reach that end goal, given that technology is developing fast.
The discussion also touched on how agencies can ensure their employees have the right mindset and skills to use generative AI tools.
Businesses need to foster a mindset and culture where people are open to ambiguity, learning and experimentation, van Jaarsveld believes. “You also have to cultivate the space where people can learn and explore and go down some dead ends and come back. It’s important to have that framework so that they can do this safely.”
It’s down to the leadership team to “create a vision of the future that makes it compelling enough for people to want to learn and explore,” he said, adding that generative AI development was coming “from the coalface to the boardroom” and that the leadership team was often playing catch-up – hence why creating the right environment for innovation is important.
Myers sees an opportunity for in-house agencies, because of the very way they’re set up, to be “the epicentre for innovation” and for trying out tools to develop products that will help their clients. “We’re thinking about GenAI, not just as a tool to do artwork or production,” he said, “but thinking about it from end to end.”
Van Jaarsveld agreed that “being close to the brand, the work, the challenges and opportunities” means in-house agencies are best placed to know what their clients need.
Oliver uses generative AI to measure media performance, ROI, and how creative is performing, both pre-flight and post-flight through the use of Pencil, The Brandtech Group’s generative AI marketing platform.
“One of the key things about performance management and AI is that AI “wants to tell us what has worked before,” van Jaarsveld said. “So the really important thing here is to not fall into the trap of saying ‘this has always worked, so let’s do it again’.”
Myers added that the agency uses Pencil as a pre-flight tool to test digital ads before they go out. This has been trained to use Oliver’s internal creative indexing system which measures the impact of a piece of work.
“Previously we’ve been fairly subjective and depended on people’s judgement,” he said, as he wrapped the conversation up. But now the model is helping the agency assess “whether work is brand-damaging, whether it’s baseline wallpaper, or unexpected, provocative or ground-breaking.”
It’s clear that as generative AI continues to reshape the marketing landscape, according to Oliver, in-house agencies are the best way for brands to achieve greater control, greater transparency and greater ownership of their marketing during this evolution.
Want to hear more from Oliver’s session? See what else Nick and Peter shared in the video here.
