Given businesses are facing huge uncertainty currently, what should companies be thinking about when it comes to marketing effectiveness?
Uncertainty may be the biggest enemy there is to making good business decisions. For marketers, it’s not the time to pause decision-making but to determine what to do given different versions of the future. When it comes to investment-related decisions – particularly around advertising – it’s usually better to continue investing even if your competitors do not. The reason is that those dollars will deliver the highest ROI and generate the strongest competitive advantage of any investment you will make. When certainty returns, act accordingly, but don’t miss the opportunity today to steal share and shine while others pause.
You’re one of our biggest advocates of gen AI. How is Gain Theory embracing this exciting technology?
Every day is a new day with gen AI! It will unquestionably reshape our industry, the ways that everyone works with data, and how analytics are performed. At Gain Theory we assume that no part of our business will be the same in three years, so we’re exploring and moving our people towards that reality. Examples include:
- creating new product possibilities like measuring the effectiveness of creative, which has always been a manual process but can now be automated with incredible depth and detail
- working on new ways to acquire, validate, and transform data that will cut time to process dramatically.
- delivering more insights with greater depth and clarity faster than ever before to help our clients generate value from their marketing investments.
We have a tremendous advantage in having access to WPP Open, WPP’s intelligent marketing operating system powered by AI. This provides us with tools and the infrastructure to innovate via standardized, safe access to the latest gen AI engines, a platform to build agents and interfaces securely, and a top shelf training capability to engage our employees in skills they need to deliver for our clients.
How will brands benefit from what we’re doing with gen AI?
Gen AI is one of the most obvious business-altering journeys that I’ve seen in my 30+ year career. Companies that embrace it will be the future market leaders of their industries. We will help marketers radically reduce the time it takes to understand the impact of their past decisions, explore the possibilities of future options, and take high value actions.
In many ways, it’s similar to the evolution of television viewing. You used to watch a small selection of shows at specific times in your front room on your faithful Standard Definition TV but today can watch any type of entertainment at any moment of the day, on any device, at any location in quality just short of 3D.
Gen AI will take marketing effectiveness to a place where marketers get the data and insights to understand their investments and make decisions at the time and place of their choosing with incredible clarity on the potential outcomes. It’s not a perfect analogy, but I hope it helps to illuminate the amount of change we will see over the next 3-5 years.
What person do you follow on LinkedIn that would you recommend to our readers?
I really enjoy the explorations of Ajit Jaokar, who teaches several AI courses at the University of Oxford. Ever since I first heard of ChatGPT, I’ve been following his investigations into the deeper recesses of what GenAI is and will be capable of.
He comes at it from a mathematical and technical direction with deep understanding of the models and the technology to provide perspective on what GenAI will and won’t accomplish over time. While he teaches at the highest levels at Oxford, most of his content is easily accessible via LinkedIn. It’s a journey of learning that I’ve been on versus relying on soundbites that are generated by most podcasts and mainstream news outlets.
Contact Shawn to discuss any of the issues raised in the Q&A.