How is artificial intelligence changing marketing and advertising?
It affects both agility and productivity, such as the speed of developing strategic approaches, the possibilities of validating and changing them in a very short period of time, as well as increasing efficiency in administrative processes.
He joined GroupM in 2022, after taking over as head of Tuenti, to specifically lead this transformation in the communications agency sector through the adoption of technology. How has GroupM evolved since then?
At GroupM we have developed a strategy focused on helping our advertisers grow their business. We work with cross-cutting areas in the application of technologies and processes and in the development of experiences and content that make our teams highly integrated with brands, giving them not only creative approaches, but also successful business models. We are the agency with the highest growth in new business in 2023 in Spain, and as a result the result has doubled in the rest of the sector. In our Barcelona office we have increased the number of employees by 30% in the past year.
With the integration of AI, what do you think we will be able to see in the future?
It will change the entire industrial ecosystem, and therefore the advertising sector as well. It will force us to rethink processes, and to value the time and resources allocated to some, so that we can allocate the talents of our teams to more strategic and creative tasks, and avoid other, less valuable tasks that will be developed through AI processes.
Will technology also make progress in the creative department?
AI currently feeds on available information and probabilistic thinking, and is not capable of replacing human creativity. It will be an essential tool, of course. It will change processes, but it will not be a substitute, but a complement. It can be very effective as a tool for creative search, selection, validation or adaptation, but that does not mean that it replaces the creative department.
Do consumers actually see the results of their requests?
In our daily lives, we already use artificial intelligence, many times without knowing it. This is an interesting topic: in most cases, the user is not aware that an operation has been performed using artificial intelligence, but he does not realize it either when he makes a financial transaction, when he uses a recommender, or when he consumes content produced with this technology. There are different opinions regarding the fact that everything that is created in this way should be identified or not. I think that just as it is now not identified when a text was written using one or another editing program, or when a mathematical calculation is performed using a certain system, I do not think that it will soon be appropriate to specifically identify that it was manufactured by a new technology that will soon become a commodity.
Why did they hold a meeting dedicated to artificial intelligence?
Being part of the WPP Group gives us preferential access to technologies and developments that only the industry’s top figures can lead. As advisors and trendsetters, we share them to apply them to your daily life. In Catalonia, we lead investment in the food sector, we are leaders in the pharmaceutical sector, in the services sector, in retail, and also in the leisure sector. It can be said that this new era is generating widespread interest among all our advertisers.
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