Last summer, The Brandtech Group CEO David Jones and creative director James Dow went to Cannes Lions to convince the industry of the power in their company’s GenAI tools. To show off what the tools could do, Jones and Dow declared they could create a brand in 59 minutes.
The Brandtech Group made a spree of AI acquisitions over the past few years. The company’s crown jewel is Pencil, which it acquired in 2023. Pencil uses AI to create static and video ad creative, and as of December, it had generated more than 2.35 million ads for more than 5,000 brands, and processed $2.65 billion in media spend since 2018. Soon after the acquisition, the company launched a premium platform, called Pencil Pro, with Unilever and Bayer as launch partners. Midway through last year, Brandtech claimed it had already produced an average 48% drop in an ad’s cost-per-action and a 78% boost in return on ad spend compared to a brand’s baseline.
In episode two of Brand New World, I decided to interrogate the claims of Jones and Dow with my own idea for a toothpaste brand as a way to get a peek under the hood of how these tools are significantly changing the advertising we see. What should the toothpaste brand look like? What should it be called? What’s the market analysis and growth strategy? Their answers were… impressive.
I also spoke to Omnicom Advertising Group’s chief operating officer Deepthi Prakash about TBWA’s CollectiveAI platform. The Omnicom-owned agency launched the platform last summer. It’s a collection of tools trained on the company’s past work to do everything from create social content and brand materials for clients, run ideas by synthetic audiences of any and every desired demographic, and use the company’s DE&I values to create more diverse casting, programs, and partnerships.
This episode is about how ad agencies and other brand partners are retooling their services and business using AI, and how that is already impacting brand culture. And, of course, toothpaste.
David Jones on the fears of GenAI’s impact on creativity:
“One of the big fears people have is like, everything’s going to look the same. And my first answer to that is just go look at a reel of banking ads and car ads. And they all look the same. This isn’t an AI problem. This is a human problem. But actually you’re going to be able to do so much more to ensure that you can push your brands into different spaces.”
Omnicom’s Deepthi Prakash on the value of ideas in the AI era:
As creative becomes more automated, the volume of it is going to grow to an extent where it will be really hard to stand out And brands are going to have to work a lot harder. And that means you can’t get away with just making campaigns anymore. You actually have to figure out what you stand for, and have a strong and differentiated position if you’re going to survive and not be diminished in your margins, your costs, and even the quality of your product. The content is not going to break through as easily when everybody else can also make it really fast and really cheaply. Feeding the model what the model has created will no longer be useful.
Listen to the full episode for more. And if you missed Episode One last week, check it out here.
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