Despite the ubiquity of artificial intelligence in marketing materials over the past three years, its application within advertising is arguably much more established than many industry observers realize.
However, what has changed is not the existence of AI itself, but the prominence of the language surrounding it (you may have noticed).
Since the early 2020s, terms such as “AI-powered,” “end-to-end,” “transparent,” “open ecosystem,” and, more recently, “agentic” have become near-universal fixtures in agency marketing — almost to the point where the use of the term “AI” in a pitch or conference stage has become meaningless.
Currently, almost every major agency holding company, or scaled independent, has a platform story to tell, whether it is Omnicom’s Omni, WPP Open, Publicis Groupe’s Marcel, PMG Alli, Stagwell’s STAGE/The Machine, Dentsu.Connect with a growing number of similar offerings across the market.
Ahead of this month’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, a team of technology and product experts at 3C Ventures examined many of those platforms and published a paper concluding that while the language has become increasingly standardized, the underlying capabilities remain far harder to assess.
