How Advertisers Can Capture The Total Value Of Automation.
95% of all agency work can be automated AI – Sam Altman
Maybe. Someday. But that would just apply to ALL current types of office and white collar work, not just agency work. And then there will be shifts in jobs to new kinds of work, so I am not sure that 95% will be attained.
But it’s a sound bite for sure that has put automation hype in full overdrive and it is creating pressure on marketing and advertising management teams.
C-Suite Pressure: The real takeaway for execs is “how much can we save right now?” They may know 95% is not feasible, but it sure has them asking for 20, 30, 40% savings right now.
And then managers start looking at …
(an absolutely awful term that this value add work is getting in the advertising space and is ironically suffering from bad branding. For another post.)
Just crude back of the napkin math puts this spend at ($1T global media spend x 20%) $200 billion.
That is the target of AI.
I often hear questions and statements from clients and prospective customers like “Do you do that AI stuff?” or “My VP asked me to look into AI”. It just kinda has the feel that marketing teams are being thrown in to research tech and topics based on headlines and trade show panels.
We are in the messy middle trying to jump “the Chasm.”
What we are really seeing is a giant gap between AI tools being piloted, and then ultimately being implemented into workstreams. There is a lot of work and testing, but few tools making it into client production workflows.
That has many advertisers moving from the hype phase to disillusionment.
AI and automation feels a little messy right now – because it is. Everyone is trying to figure it out in 3-6 month sprints (vendors, consultants, and brands). AI is everywhere, but actual implementation? That’s a different story. Most teams are still experimenting – trying out tools, but struggling to plug them into real workflows.
We have had a few thoughts ourselves while working with brands on creative automation challenges over the years and we have a lot of experience.
This automation playbook can help teams wrap their heads around where and how to start.
Capturing the value of automation will mean three main changes to tools and process:
The Advertiser Automation Playbook
- Update Workflows – This is the foundation. You need to update workflows to match the latest technical capabilities. Otherwise business process constrains technical benefit and you end up with an F1 engine in the body of a Honda Civic.
- Implement Dynamic Creative – Dynamic creative can automate way more than you think is possible (60%-80%) by using feed driven creative and modular design principles. The use case for dynamic goes way beyond traditional DCO and can benefit your entire advertising process.
- Supplement with AI – In certain situations, AI can be hired to complete specific tasks very quickly. Hiring is a good mental model because AI needs to be trained for a job, and it takes time to tune and perfect. Identifying what those tasks are (ideation, iteration, versioning, production processing) will help to narrow down tool research and selection.
Getting Started
Advertising workflows today are built for a pre-AI world where everything was mostly manual or very resource intensive. And getting to the optimal balance of people and machines will take more than just testing tools.
Advertisers will not only need to rethink the processes with automation in the mix, but also what each step in the process should look like in the automated world.
And this is the part where AI can’t do 95% of the work for you (at least not yet 🙂).
