Month: April 2023

On the heels of its earnings report Thursday, Amazon Ads has developed more advanced machine-learning models and optimized campaign-control systems to enhance bidding and pacing decisions for the
Amazon DSP.

A new book by BuzzFeed News founder Ben Smith reveals how virality betrayed the news industry—but glosses over who really drove the clicks.

A genteel young man named Elliot, livestreaming on Instagram from a Swedish castle, sing songs, recites poems and answers questions–both silly and existential–while sipping a cocktail. Who needs ChatGPT when there’s Chat G&T? This “wildly inefficient” stunt comes from Hendrick’s Gin as a dig at artificial intelligence, offering up an admittedly flawed but charming human…

In 2008, the global financial system was in shambles. The vertiginous drop in the stock market had brought Wall Street to its knees. Years later, in 2014, the reverberations of The Great Recession were still being felt within the walls of Wells Fargo. Global banking regulator The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) introduced regulation…

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 8.5 million people across the globe are affected by Parkinson’s. For many of them, hypomimia–a loss or reduction of facial expressions–is one of the most difficult aspects of the neurological disease, putting up barriers to a significant form of communication. To provide better tools to navigate hypomimia, Brazilian-based…

Today, Roku is the biggest player in connected TV. This week, the company reported it added 1.6 million active accounts in the first quarter of the year, reaching a total of 71.6 million active accounts. Streaming hours also jumped to 25.1 billion, a 4.2 billion year-over-year increase. Overall, Roku’s data shows that 50% of all…

A relaxed, vulnerable, behind-the-scenes moment with an athlete or celebrity is one of the most coveted commodities of the digital age. It’s also extremely difficult to achieve if your media agency is intimidated by a star’s entourage, or the talent has to uncomfortably discuss the concept with someone who’s never shared their spotlight. Almost a…

Stagwell’s Mark Penn believes every company today is a digital marketing company. His holding company’s aim is to elevate technology with an agency-driven approach into areas like artificial intelligence and augmented reality.

Penn, chairman and CEO of Stagwell, worked across politics, public relations and strategy at Microsoft before founding Stagwell in 2015. He has managed to grow the holding company to $2.7 billion in revenue in seven years, and in 2021 it merged with agency network MDC Partners to expand its roster of shops and assemble an array of digital services and marketing.

Penn contends that digital advertising is still in its infancy, especially with the shift to more online advertising and emerging formats like AR.

“As I always say, the best TV ads have already been done, and the best digital ads are a long way from being done,” Penn told Digiday. “So my question really is, how can we make advertising experiences more relevant, and yet also less cluttering to a consumer experience?”

In exploring more digital opportunities, Stagwell is also searching internally for the latest tech innovations and entrepreneurs. Now in its fifth year, Stagwell Marketing Cloud runs an annual innovation competition — like an internal “Shark Tank” — that awards winners $1 million to build a product to solve a marketing and technology problem. Some of the winners have created AR solutions for live events and sports, and generative and predictive AI tools for content.

“Inside every marketing company today are people who are bursting with ideas, potential innovations, and they are on the front lines of the market,” Penn said. “So the ‘Shark Tank’ [competition] was a way to tap into that.”

In this interview, Penn discusses the future of AR and AI applications, how Stagwell approaches full-service to self-service in the marketplace and which tech developments he doesn’t feel live up to the hype.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Where are emerging platforms like AR and AI going?

For a number of years, automated reality was under-emphasized in terms of potential long-term impact. I was at Microsoft when HoloLens was being developed. I see that there’s still a lot to do in terms of miniaturization, and I think it can be something that is as pervasive as a phone, as pervasive as a watch. That will be a critical part of people’s everyday lives. I think Apple has concluded that augmented reality and being able to put on a pair of glasses and get additional information is likely to be a strong marketplace. We will shift from the phone to glasses, but we want to be there in advance.

What is your long-term vision for tech and marketing innovation?

The overall vision and standards is that in the marketplace we can do everything from global full-service, down to small business self-service. There’s a large bit of B2B and corporate self-service, as well. I realized that there’s a synergy in being able to do all of the above, and when you’re doing full-service, they want to know you have a great tech stack. And when you’re doing self-service, they want to know you have easy, new software. I believe that trying to do those under one house and, in fact, both sides of the house, will support each other to provide better, more innovative technology that can be utilized system-wide.

How will AI transform agencies on the inside?

We think today AI is going to play a big role in shortening analysis time. Right now, people have to go through thousands of numbers, and we think AI can really do at least the first scan, pulling out the most significant aspects and tables at a time. For people who work in marketing, the two things that we target are highly-educated, highly-valuable people doing repetitive tasks. Then the second is: how can complex multi-step processes be automated and simplified so that almost all the things that we do or look at fall into one or both of those buckets.

How has Stagwell’s internal innovation competition evolved?

This went from a program where people kind of started scratching their heads to a real [successful] program that actually has produced incredible products. I was chief strategy officer at Microsoft, so it’s not like they take a raw idea and then they don’t just run with that. They take an idea, and work on it and refine it. In many ways, ‘Shark Tank’ has created an incubator of these tech ideas, each of which has an entrepreneur who gets a significant share and upside. We look at ARound that came up with some exceptional technology that is scaling ahead and augmented reality. And with AI, we started those projects years ago. We’re sitting here because we had the foresight to run this ‘Shark Tank’ process.

What tech innovations are less exciting to you?

I’m always less excited about driverless cars. Also, language translation is something where we’re getting closer and closer, then we aren’t getting closer. There are so many idioms across the languages and so much context — but I will say it’s getting better. It still takes a knowledgeable eye to really put the final touches right on this translation. My general message is that it’s the right mix of people and the right technology that really produces the most effective outcomes.

The use of generative AI across the media landscape seems to get more ubiquitous by the week. 

In yet another example of its broad application, digital video ad firm Pixability is employing ChatGPT to improve brand suitability standards and boost confidence for advertisers looking to invest dollars in content on YouTube and other digital video platforms, while also speeding up the process dramatically. 

Pixability, which has been operating for 15 years and is most closely tied to YouTube but has branched out to work with a variety of streamers and digital video players, including Amazon Fire and Roku, is moving past what’s been a largely manual and therefore labor-intensive and time-consuming process in the past by applying ChatGPT to its brand safety and suitability work. 

David George, Pixability’s CEO, explained that the use of AI enables far more accuracy and scale to predict and identify safe and suitable content environments for brands on YouTube and elsewhere. But it also helps to speed up the process dramatically. He declined to say how much the company has invested in the tech.

“This key investment has always been about dealing with the massive amounts of data and video that we harvest from Youtube every day, and that’s only growing” said George. “A lot of it is just being able to continue with the scale of what we do and do it in as timely a fashion as possible. We’re now supporting clients around the globe.”

Jackie Paulino, Pixability’s chief product officer, added the company has been using ChatGPT for about six months. “We’ve been applying this and using it to improve our training data for machine learning models,” said Paulino. “For YouTube particularly, it’s about speed to getting things into market. There’s lots of new trends that pop up on YouTube. So very quickly, being able to identify that something is new, and then being able to train a model on it, and then deploy that to find that those videos at scale, is really important.”

As an example, Paulino described setting brand safety standards around arms and ammunition — certainly a hot topic across all social and video platforms, but also one many advertisers want to avoid. “ChatGPT understands every gun that has ever been invented or used, so it’s much better than humans at categorizing that type of content,” she said. “Even for very niche things, a human may have mislabeled that in the past. Now, we know we can get that level of accuracy that’s actually better than humans can do.”

John Montgomery, an independent brand safety specialist who for many years worked with GroupM, said it’s the speed that really helps, because so much more content can be assessed in far less time. Generative AI “can go through such a huge volume so quickly, that it’s much more thorough and much, much more accurate,” he said. 

But Montgomery noted that human involvement needs to be maintained at the beginning and the end of any work generative AI does. “It’s only as good as the information you feed it, and the more detailed the brief that you give it, the better,” he said. “I don’t think that this is necessarily going to take human brain safety experts or brand safety reviewers out of the equation.”

Has this reached the agency world yet? Not quite, admits Jason Hartley, head of search, social and shopping at independent media agency PMG. “There is no doubt brands are cautiously excited for the incredible potential of generative AI, but as with any new technology, making the conceptual operational will take work and time,” said Hartley. “As this gets underway, it will be important for brands and agencies to work on the doable while preparing for the possible.”