Asset Identification and Tracking; AI for Branding, Marketing and Agency Operations
Today, there is no technology moving into the mainstream faster than artificial intelligence (AI). The ease of implementation and access to both the technology and the underlying large language models (LLMs) are seemingly everywhere.
An untrained workforce should be worried.
A trained workforce will be happy that there are now tools available to help them get back to the part of the jobs they like — talking to clients, building campaigns and working on creatives.
Automate and Use AI Appropriately
There are AI-based video editing applications that can create storyboards and animatics and do so at a fraction of the cost of existing methods. These are the tools your team wants to use to stay competitive. Remember, your competitors and a cadre of smaller, independent agencies will certainly use these technologies.
Your agency has proprietary knowledge and intellectual property (IP) that you have developed. This can be utilized in such a way that AI enhances it and accelerates your steps in the pitching process. And it is crucial to develop a strategy where using AI in the content preparation stage will showcase your IP, including the thousands if not millions of preexisting assets, as well as protecting the data you have amassed throughout the years. This trains the large learning model (LLM) and, once done, it will unlock the true power of the AI platform. This will allow you to use AI to process your IP but to not lose custody of what makes that IP special.
The next crucial step is to incorporate AI and the efficiencies it may bring directly into your workflows and to introduce automation to streamline the round-trip requirements of any of these workflows.
Automation
Many industries rely on robotic process automation (RPA) software to perform tasks that previously were done by humans. A common example of RPA usage in the banking industry is screening loan qualification through a series of automated and sequenced questions. RPA systems can combine required information from documents using optical character recognition (OCR) and other systems such as credit reference providers. As a result, what used to take weeks to successfully onboard a customer — checking all the required credit references, customer history and background — can be significantly reduced and utilize far less human capital.
Imagine moving a quote to an IO (insertion order), getting it to the client for legal review and, once signed, putting it into your production workflow with fewer human touches. How much would that save your agency directly? (Not to mention your account executive will be on the street with new clients, not routing email to legal, creative and graphics.)
The AI + Automation Combination for Legal and Compliance
Every campaign and every product requires rigorous legal and compliance review to verify brand safety guidelines. And these checks must occur for every advertisement. Almost always, however, the compliance checking process occurs after the fact — after the ad is finished. A new approach may well be to create an AI model where all the relevant rules, brand safety guidelines, and legal and compliance requirements are incorporated during the actual time of the creative process. In other words, an AI model plus automation can be utilized to check at each stage of the creative.
The facts are compelling in that, on average, the approval process — taking into account all of the stages of approval including brand safety, legal and compliance — averages two to four weeks. Technology holds the promise of radically reducing this process.
In my next entry, I'll cover some topics on offering self-service SaaS.
Originally published by 14 May, 2024
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.