Sir Martin Sorrell explains the five ways AI will change advertising

Sir Martin Sorrell has been preparing for AI for decades, which is why AdWeek named Media.Monks as its AI Agency of the Year in November 2023. He shared the five key ways in which AI is set to transform advertising:

1. Visualisation and copywriting.
Sir Martin Sorrell says that something that took three weeks can now be done in three hours. Clients are going to want to share that benefit, because we are selling time – albeit we should be selling outputs.

2. Hyper-personalisation
When we produce a campaign for Rebel Moon for Narcos on Netflix, for example, we produce around one and a half million pieces of content. And the process is automated with the help of AI. The Netflix model is still the best: you use the first-party data to create the content: “You started this movie, why didn’t you finish it?”

3. Media planning and buying
Out of the total $950 billion advertising expenditure, around $650 billion can be bought with algorithms. The great thing about that is we’ll have better information to make better decisions. Sir Martin Sorrell said that the future is in question for the 200,000-250,000 people doing semi-automated manual media planning and buying worldwide.

4. General efficiency
In every department AI can be harnessed to improve efficiency and deliver solutions faster and at lower cost. An example is Media.Monks’ collaboration with AWS, Adobe, and Nvidia to deliver software-defined outside broadcasting in place of capital- and carbon-intensive physical infrastructure.

5. Democratisation of knowledge
Knowing what we know, within the organisation, being able to instantly tap the knowledge of every individual is a kind of Holy Grail that is becoming a reality thanks to AI. As an example, we now have over 800 people globally working on Google. If we can get everybody in that team to know what everyone else is doing, then you flatten the organisation, and you increase efficiency.

Conclusion
Sir Martin Sorrell said Google started 2024 by announcing that it will deprecate third-party cookies, initially on 1% of searches and with the objective of eliminating them altogether in the second half of the year. This is a step that was originally planned before the pandemic and was delayed because of COVID-19. What it means is that, for clients, the imperative to harvest first-party data in order to understand your customers and to achieve personalisation becomes all the more pressing and is likely to be a key focus this year.