Tag: agency news
-
Google Hired Three Creative Chiefs to Make AI Spots — and Filmed Them Doing It
Jayanta Jenkins ran at least 300 iterations of his spot in Google Flow. Tiffany Rolfe had to fact-check the historical details the model invented for hers. Google put three A-list creatives on its AI tools, pointed them at small businesses, and filmed the trial and error for release alongside the ads.
-
Agency Leaders Predict Growth in Outcomes-Based Pricing, but Face Challenges.
Eighty-five percent of agency leaders expect to do more outcomes-based pricing. The consultancy that studied it says pure versions are “exceedingly rare” — what agencies more frequently agree to is an output fee with a performance measure bolted on. Sixty-nine percent name attribution as a barrier, and the same share name procurement.
-
Butler/Till Pointed Its Buying Agent at iHeart’s, Skipping the SSP
Two AI agents — one built by the agency, one by the publisher — met over an MCP server and placed just under $10,000 of podcast and streaming audio inventory. No SSP in the middle. Butler/Till says CPMs came in 42% below the client’s own benchmark for direct buying.
-
Monks’ Co-Founder: The Billable Hour Punishes the Agency That Uses AI Well
Every vendor at Ai4 was selling the same tenfold speedup, which Wesley ter Haar flags as a pervasive issue with AI tooling – when the speed is off the shelf, it is not a moat. The Monks co-founder argues the real constraint is the legacy model: agencies need to stop selling time, because getting faster…
-
S4 Doubled First-Half Profit. Sorrell Says the Token Spending Has Been “Ill-Disciplined.”
S4 Capital’s margins widened to 12.3% and its first-half operating profit doubled. Its chair says the company has been ill-disciplined on token spending, and Goldman Sachs expects token consumption to rise 24-fold by 2030. Monks passes token costs to clients at no margin.
-
Japan Airlines Scores Well on Gemini, Poorly on ChatGPT. It’s Buying Ads to Close the Gap.
Japan Airlines has a measurable problem: Gemini talks about it well, ChatGPT barely does, and Reddit — where travelers argue about premium seats — hardly mentions it at all. Its agency turned that into a targeting input, and the airline is buying its first ChatGPT ads in August.
-
Mod Op Built Its Own AI Layer Rather Than License Seats for 500 Employees
Building rather than licensing saved Mod Op an estimated $3 million, a number describing a bill the agency never received. Its Orion platform sits over the major LLM APIs, automating agency workflows and, eventually, client ones. Most of the usage is still internal. No client has asked for a login yet.
-
WPP’s $1.8 Billion Enterprise Unit Is Selling Operating Models, Not Campaigns
WPP Enterprise Solutions now has a product line: five AI services, 12,000 people, $1.8 billion in revenue, and Accenture and Deloitte in its sights. The offer is an operating model rather than a campaign — and its CEO says the 2027 scorecard won’t be a dollar figure.
-
ampm Trades Animatronic Snacks for an AI-Built Smorgasbord
“Too Much Good Stuff” has been ampm’s platform for more than 25 years, previously carried by animatronic snack characters and in-store humor. The new campaign from RPA drops both for a generated hyper-real environment built around photographed products — the chain’s first work using AI-assisted creative tools.
-
Omnicom Media’s CEO Says the Holdco Is Now a “Capability Company”
Ralph Pardo runs the North American arm of the world’s largest agency holding company, and he says the traditional holdco is finished. His argument isn’t that AI is coming for agencies — it’s that AI has flattened the scale advantage holdcos were built to sell.
-
Dept Builds a “Multiversal Assistant” and Won’t Bill Clients for the Glue
Dept is rolling out Deptify, an AI system accessed through a persistent assistant called “D.” The pitch is orchestration: D pulls context from whatever workflow tools a client already uses — Adobe Workfront, Asana, or something else — and routes people to the right tool for the job, instead of asking them to learn another…
-
PMG Put $500,000 Behind a Cannes Hackathon and Kept None of the Code
Up to $500,000 in prize money, roughly two dozen entrants, three briefs drawn from real client problems — and PMG keeps none of the code. The agency says the Cannes hackathon demonstrates what AI has done to technical development. It is also a look at who can build.
-
Gap Splits Its AI Marketing Rebuild Across Google Cloud, Zeta and Publicis Sapient
Gap has partnered with Google Cloud, Zeta Global, and Publicis Sapient to transform its marketing approach. The collaboration aims to create a scalable, real-time marketing organization using integrated data and AI. Google Cloud provides the data foundation, Zeta builds the marketing stack, and Publicis designs the operating model. The initiative focuses on enhancing content relevance,…
-
When Product Ships Weekly, Marketing Becomes the Bottleneck
HBR’s premise is blunt: AI sped up engineering first, and marketing is now stuck doing quarterly-era coordination in a continuous-release world. Citing Anthropic research, the piece notes that software engineering accounts for “nearly 50% of all agentic activity.” That helps explain why product teams are shipping continuously, and why marketing — with its cross-functional handoffs,…
-
Agency Account Teams Are Turning AI Into Client-Specific Utilities
Coming back from maternity leave in 2024, Wendy Owen, (Senior Account Manager Publicis Pro) says the biggest surprise wasn’t staffing changes. It was how casually AI had slipped into day-to-day agency operations, especially in client services, where ambiguity and speed are basically the job description. In this telling, AI’s main impact isn’t “automation” so much…
-
The Trade Desk Lets Claude Fill Out the Paperwork—Just Don’t Call It “Buying” Yet
The Trade Desk is talking to agency execs about Koa Agents, a set of agentic features meant to automate large parts of programmatic setup and troubleshooting. The system connects with whatever AI model a partner is using — including Anthropic’s Claude — through an interoperability layer called Open Agentic Kit. According to an agency exec…
-
Publicis Buys a Creative Crystal Ball (AdgeAI Joins the Fold)
Publicis Groupe just added another item to its AI shopping cart, acquiring Israel-based AdgeAI for an undisclosed price—funded from the $970 million deal budget it’s set aside for 2026. AdgeAI is a predictive creative analytics platform that uses machine learning to forecast which parts of an ad (video, images, text, GIFs) are most likely to…
-
Stagwell Unveils Adtech, AI-Focused Incubator
Stagwell just set up an incubator fund aimed squarely at adtech and AI-powered marketing tools. The vehicle is called Quarter Creek Ventures, and the model is straightforward: Stagwell takes a minority stake in selected projects, then backs them with seed funding (amounts not disclosed) plus practical help getting products built and into market. Beyond the…
-
From Billable Hours to AI-Driven Value in Advertising
The ad game is looking a lot less like Don Draper’s boardroom and a lot more like an API call. As AI reshapes the fundamentals of media buying, creative development, and performance optimization, agencies are building platforms instead of just campaigns. Stagwell’s The Machine, Omnicom’s Omni, and WPP’s Open Pro are just a few of…
-
WPP’s “Super Agents” Want to Work for You
Earlier this month, WPP showed its cards at CES with a new internal tool called Agent Hub, a collection of AI-powered “super agents” living inside its WPP Open platform. Think of it as a bespoke app store populated with digital brains trained on the company’s formidable roster of branding, strategy, creative, and behavioral science experts.…
-
Code and Theory’s AI ‘Machine’ Wants to Run Your Entire Marketing Stack
At CES this year, Code and Theory quietly introduced The Machine—an agentic AI operating system designed to live inside the tools marketers already use, not replace them. Built to bridge creative, media, and data workflows, The Machine connects directly with familiar platforms like Adobe, Figma, and Workfront, enabling teams to scale content production, audience analysis,…
-
AbelsonTaylor Hits Fast Forward with AT Studio
AbelsonTaylor Group just rolled out AT Studio, its new production-centric division tailored to crank out high-volume healthcare marketing assets at a much faster clip—without dropping the ball on quality. Think of it as a hybrid assembly line and art studio: a production engine that fuses manual craftsmanship with AI-assisted workflows to churn out everything from…
-
Stagwell Puts AI on the Line With Voice-First Service Platform
Stagwell has launched NewVoices.ai, a new AI-powered workflow tool designed to handle everything from sales tasks to customer service—using virtual agents that speak any language and never sleep. It’s pitched as a full-stack operating system for enterprise teams that want to automate their appointment setting, lead conversion, customer inquiries, and support issues without sacrificing personalization.…
-
WPP Launches Open Pro: Self-Serve AI Marketing
WPP has launched Open Pro, a self-serve spin-off of its existing AI-driven marketing platform, designed to help marketers at smaller brands or in secondary markets build and launch campaigns without going through an agency. The idea isn’t to cut agencies out of the loop but to give clients more tactical tools for lower-touch projects. Access…
-
The Future of Agencies: AI as a Smart Colleague
Agencies like Dentsu’s Carat and indie firm Apollo Partners are integrating generative AI into their operations to enhance collaboration rather than eliminate jobs. Carat is utilizing tools from Vurvey Labs for richer consumer insights and faster decision-making. In a test with a restaurant, they streamlined media recommendations and creative input. Meanwhile, Apollo is developing its…
-
AI or Bye: Why Agencies Can’t Show Up Empty-Handed at Reviews
AI has transitioned from being a novel advantage to a fundamental expectation in media agency evaluations. Brands are demanding deeper insights into AI capabilities, leading agencies to reveal intricate details about their technologies. While agencies need to be proficient in AI, brands often lack understanding, necessitating education and clearer questioning. This evolution is altering agency…
-
IPG Taps Aaru to Help Predict Consumer Behavior
IPG is enhancing precision marketing through a partnership with AI-driven startup Aaru, which creates human simulations to predict audience reactions to campaigns before launch. This innovation, integrated into IPG’s Interact platform and Acxiom toolkit, is designed for improved creative testing and audience targeting across various sectors. The collaboration also includes a new Simulation Studio for…
-
David Jones Says Agencies Are Sleepwalking Through the AI Revolution
Brandtech’s David Jones advocates for generative AI in advertising, asserting it offers significant efficiencies. His company’s AI tool, Pencil, generated 235,000 assets at lower costs and faster speeds for major clients. Jones promotes a hybrid model blending tech with services, emphasizing AI’s potential to enhance, rather than replace, human creativity.
-
IPG’s agentic e-commerce solution boosts sales
Interpublic Group (IPG) has launched Agentic Systems for Commerce (ASC), a data-driven platform aimed at enhancing e-commerce decision-making for brands. Currently piloted by 20 brands, ASC has shown significant sales growth by integrating various data points. Supported by IPG’s AI expertise, it seeks to unify fragmented commerce tools into one effective solution.
-
Stagwell Taps Palantir to Supercharge Ad Targeting
Stagwell is dipping into Palantir’s toolbox to see if military-grade AI can sharpen its data targeting game. During its Q2 earnings call, CEO Mark Penn shared that they’re running a trial with Palantir’s technology to supercharge their ID Graph by combining both structured and unstructured data across platforms like BERA and the National Research Group.…
-
R/GA Makes AI-focused Acquisition
R/GA just closed its first buy since splitting from Interpublic Group, scooping up AI studio Addition—a tight team of about a dozen that’s already punched above its weight with work for Google, The New York Times, and others. Founded in 2021, Addition excels in AI strategy, personalization, and rapid prototyping, thanks mainly to its “AI-native”…
-
AI Agents and Billable Hours: Omnicom’s Pending Revenue Rethink
Omnicom isn’t just weaving AI into its workflows—it’s giving the tech a corner office. During the company’s latest earnings call, CTO Paolo Yuvienco spotlighted a growing internal web of custom-built AI agents fed by Omnicom’s Omni data platform. These aren’t your average productivity bots; they’re tag-teaming strategy teams to simulate focus groups, fine-tune campaigns in…
-
Agencies continue to pace ahead of clients on AI adoption
According to research from Google and BCG, agencies are ahead of advertisers by an average of 35% in key AI use cases like measurement, creative development, and data analysis. Despite this, less than half of advertisers say their agencies have educated them on AI solutions. There appears to be an opportunity for agencies to take…
-
Synthetic Personas, Real Payoff: How Dentsu Is Redrawing Media Plans with AI
While AI headlines often chase shiny creative tools, Dentsu is focusing the spotlight on media planning. Through a partnership with startup Evidenza, the agency network is bringing synthetic audiences—AI-generated personas built from real but anonymized data—into the center of campaign planning and targeting. Unlike traditional panels, these digital twins are created quickly from probabilistic data,…
-
Code, Create, Repeat: How WPP is Turning Prompts into Prototypes
WPP is doubling down on AI via an expanded partnership with Vercel, bringing next-gen development tools like v0 and AI SDK into the fold. These tools allow teams to move from text prompt to working prototype in record time. At the heart of it all is “vibe coding,” a natural language-driven workflow that flattens the…
-
When 30,000 Agents Just Aren’t Enough: WPP Ups the Ante
WPP has rolled out a turbocharged version of its internal AI tool with the launch of AgentBuilder Pro inside the WPP Open platform. Already fuelling over 30,000 AI agents across the organization, this upgrade turns the dial on what these digital coworkers can do. With enhancements like ‘Steps’ for multi-phase reasoning and decision-making, and multi-agent…