Advertising giant WPP is working with chip manufacturer Nvidia to use gen AI in making 3D landscapes and products for advertisers.
Under the deal, WPP will be able to turn simple text prompts like “build a table in an empty room” or “build a giant rainforest with exotic flowers and rays of sunlight” into detailed, immersive 3D environments. Nvidia’s technology uses existing human-created 3D diagrams aimed at creating more realistic visuals.
Stephan Pretorius, WPP’s chief technology officer, said the partnership simplifies intricate creative processes, minimizing the need for extensive coding and backend work compared to how creative processes work without gen AI.
WPP announced the partnership at tech conference Siggraph.
WPP is testing the gen AI tool for Coca-Cola and Ford. WPP’s production company, Hogarth, is also testing the tool.
“Arming Hogarth with better in-house technologies to create high-quality content at scale is a key to our growth strategy,” said Pretorius. “It’s a massive opportunity to grow our business faster by doing more of the final asset production work using 3D generative AI tools than contracting that to third-party production houses or film studios.”
WPP is the first company to pilot Nvidia’s gen AI tools for 3D images.
Nvidia has upgraded its generative AI tools with technologies like retrieval augmentation generation (RAG) to ensure the accuracy of AI outputs and build guardrails on the technology. For marketers, this helps the gen AI output stick to brand guidelines while cranking out assets.
“This is not about making images look better and scalable, but it needs to match the product,” said Rev Lebaredian, vp of Omniverse and stimulation technology at Nvidia. “Otherwise, it’s false advertising.”
The Nvidia tie-up is the latest example of how WPP is betting on AI. WPP plans to invest nearly $318 million annually in AI technologies to help the agency’s sluggish growth. WPP also partnered with Nvidia last year to develop a content engine that helps creative teams produce scalable commercial content efficiently.
WPP also has a partnership with Shutterstock that helps speed up the creation of 3D assets that adhere to brand standards.
Making ads faster and less expensive
WPP built a production studio called Prod X for Coca-Cola that uses Nvidia’s technology in 100 markets. The goal is to “generate video at a speed and scale that was never feasible before,” Samir Bhutada, global vice president of StudioX Digital Transformation at The Coca-Cola Company, told ADWEEK via email.
