How AI is transforming the business of advertising

At the start of the year, every single one of the roughly 100,000 people working for advertising giant Publicis received a video message from the chief executive thanking them personally, by name and in their first language, for their hard work.

To film and edit so many messages would normally involve hundreds of hours of work, but it was much easier to pull off thanks to the industry’s new best friend: artificial intelligence.

The purpose of the stunt, which included AI-versions of senior leaders engaged in each staff member’s favourite hobbies from DJing to waterskiing, was to emphasise the hyper-personalised advertising that rapidly evolving technology is making possible. These ads are fast, cheap to produce at massive scale and with the fine-tuned customer targeting optimised by the vast troves of data now collected on individuals.

Similar advertising campaigns are already being rolled out. In India, for example, thousands of local stores have generated their own versions of ads featuring Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan urging people to shop locally in a campaign for Cadbury by WPP. 

To avoid being left behind, both WPP and Publicis, two of the world’s largest agencies, have set out plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to embed AI in their businesses.

“AI is the equivalent to the invention of the internet, and more profound than mobile,” says Mark Read, WPP’s chief executive. “It’s going to change the nature of creative work . . . [and] empower a lot of creative people to make their ideas become real much more quickly.”

But some advertising executives warn that this strategy could risk talking themselves out of a job, especially given the huge threats the industry is already facing.

One UK marketing chief, who declined to be named, points to the launch of their new vegan brand last year as an example of the dangers facing advertising agencies. Rather than paying tens of thousands of pounds for a team of people to design a new…