Category: Original
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The Creative Majority Is Here, Relocating Agency Value
Nearly one in four people globally now participate in the creative economy. AI has made production near-universal. Platforms have flattened distribution. SXSW continues to pull together the group that reflects that shift—creators, brand operators, AI researchers, neuroscientists, agency leaders—all in the same rooms, working through what creative value looks like when high-quality production is no…
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Is Agentic AI Advertising’s Next Big Disruption?
Large Language Models and generative AI have rapidly become widely-adopted tools in the advertising ecosystem. We’ve experimented with prompt engineering, created synthetic personas, and flirted with automation in content production. But a new frontier is emerging fast—and it’s far more transformative than AI that simply completes tasks when asked. Welcome to the era of agentic…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 27th Edition
THE BIG STORY: AI Growth and Workforce Evolution – A Balancing Act The AI boom continues, with surging investment and adoption reshaping the business landscape. Yet, many enterprises face hurdles in converting early AI implementations into tangible ROI. Add to this the struggle of redefining workforce dynamics in an AI-enhanced world. Enter Slack’s Fall 2024…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 26th Edition
THE BIG STORY: Is AI hitting a wall? Recent headlines have speculated about an “AI slowdown,” with both OpenAI and Google confronting diminishing returns from traditional scaling laws—the notion that more data and compute automatically yield better AI models. OpenAI’s upcoming “Orion” model reportedly brings only moderate gains over GPT-4, and Google’s Gemini has similarly…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 25th Edition
THE BIG STORY: Does the rise of AI agents threaten the mobile app economy?The rise of AI-powered agents is sparking predictions of a major paradigm shift in the mobile app economy, with some industry watchers forecasting the end of mobile apps. As AI agents become more capable, some wonder if users will eventually bypass apps…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 24th Edition
If AI progress seems relentless, it may be because tech giants and startup investors are sparing no expense to make it so. This week’s earnings from Microsoft, Google, and Meta show not just a commitment but a flat-out arms race in AI investments. Tech giants, for their part, reported strong growth, fueled in part by…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 23rd Edition
THE BIG STORY: The Rise of Agentic AI – Revolution or Reframe? Agentic AI is pushing boundaries, with platforms like Microsoft (this week) and Salesforce (in September) announcing robust autonomous agents poised to reshape workflows across industries. Microsoft’s new “co-pilots” aim to shoulder end-to-end processes with little to no human touch, and Salesforce’s AgentForce offers…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 22nd Edition
THE BIG STORY As AI-enhanced search engines become more prominent, tech giants and upstarts alike are racing to define sustainable advertising models that are effective, non intrusive, and rewarding for publishers. Earlier this month, Google began rolling out ads to its AI-generated search overviews, marking a key step in monetizing AI search. This shift suggests…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 21st Edition
Greetings from 35,000 feet on my way back home after another great week in NYC ad Advertising Week 2024. I’m still processing everything, but wanted to share a few highlights from my experience there: Firstly, it’s not AI-related, but I was honored to moderate a fun panel called Play it Forward: How Gaming Immersion Unlocks…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 19th Edition
NOTE: this post first appeared on LinkedIn here. THE BIG STORY: How AI, AR and Wearables Will Transform Brand Experiences Meta Connect 2024 unleashed a whirlwind of announcements, showcasing Meta’s next steps in AI, AR and wearables—highlighting developments that could dramatically impact how consumers interact with brands, unlocking potential new advertising formats, and further blurring…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 18th Edition
Note this post first appeared on LinkedIn. THE BIG STORY: Big tech platforms make text-to-video available to the masses It’s been another week of rapid AI advancements, with several major platforms launching new text-to-video tools. Amazon, YouTube, and Snapchat have all joined the race to make video creation accessible to the masses. What was once…
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How Howard Gossage invented interactive advertising in the 1950s
Everyone has heroes, in both our personal and professional lives. People we quote, follow, draw inspiration from, wish we could meet (even if they’ve long since passed), or count as mentors. I discovered Howard Luck Gossage very early in my career, and he quickly became one of my advertising heroes. Years later – in fact…
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4A’s Noteworthy News – 12th Edition
THE BIG STORY: Walking the GenAI Tightrope – Balancing Transparency and Trust in Advertising Recent articles reveal a critical balancing act underway in the advertising industry: transparency in AI usage is crucial to maintaining trust, but disclosing AI involvement risks alienating consumers. A study by Washington State University found that using the term “artificial intelligence”…
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SXSW 2024: A Communal Experience Designed for Individual Exploration
South by Southwest is a very unique and special event. Its superpower is rooted in bringing together smart, talented people from different disciplines and walks of life: artists, technologists, consultants, filmmakers, musicians, influencers, customer experience specialists, CMOs, CCOs, startup founders, senior agency executives, and more. Something magical happens when you bring together this sort of…
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Thanks to generative AI, advertising’s business models will be reinvented
Advertising and disruptive technologies. In many ways, you can’t have one without the other. In past years, disruptive technology meant programmatic media buying, SEO, and mobile. Today, it means artificial intelligence— more specifically, generative AI. Brands and consumers expect the industry to remain two steps ahead of the digital curve and while AI is not…
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Should we fear AI?
There has been a lot of swirl on this topic over the last few months, fueled by sensationalist media coverage, agency groups joining watchdog organizations, high-profile execs expressing concern and/or leaving their prominent AI roles to sound alarm bells. The power of AI is already impressive, and advancing at breakneck pace. This combination can be…
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Welcome to the Immersive Age: the Third Era of Marketing
Rapidly changing technology often wreaks havoc on business in two primary ways: 1) it changes consumer expectations, often in unexpected ways, forcing companies to adapt to those new expectations quickly; and 2) it gifts companies with a wide array of potential new capabilities. These are two sides of the same coin, of course – and…
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What does 5G mean to business leaders?
5G is ushering in a new era of high-speed wireless connectivity, super low latency and a massive increase in simultaneous device support. But, what do all of these advancements mean to business and technology leaders?
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Big retailers are asking the FTC to recalibrate its definition of antitrust behavior
I’ve got no idea what to say about this yet, but it’s really interesting to watch and you can see both sides of the argument. Amazon continues to say that it represents a TINY (4%, to be specific) portion of overall retail sales. But it dominates in terms of product search and overall influence. When…
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Are influencers the worst?
I happened to be in New York a couple of weeks ago and had an opportunity to check out a really interesting panel discussion that was the brain child of Serial Marketer publisher David Berkowitz. He opened the panel by asking something to the effect of: “It has been said that influencers are the worst.…
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Walmart takes in-home grocery delivery to the next level
Amazon’s in-home delivery is a bold step. Do people trust the brand enough to allow strangers into their homes? A combination of a smart lock and in-home camera provide some small level of assurance that delivery people are only coming inside your house as far as necessary to drop a package off and then leave.…
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CES makes everyone uncomfortable — and that’s exactly why people go
I originally wrote this piece for Venture Beat preparing for CES 2018. Sitting here in Las Vegas on the eve of CES 2019, it felt appropriate to re-share here. ““The crux of the CES challenge is separating real paradigm shifts from parlor tricks. Once you’ve made that distinction, you are left with a view of…
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What’s Next is Everything
I wrote this piece originally as a post on LinkedIn after I left SapientRazorfish. It ultimately became the inspiration for this blog, so I’m reposting here. A 20+ year logo journey Twenty years. Actually, nearly twenty-two. It’s a long time to stay at the same company. But it went by in the blink of an…