An AI assistant on display at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona.
Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is shaking up the promoting business and “unnerving” investors, one industry leader told CNBC.
“I feel this AI disruption … unnerving investors in every industry, and it’s very disrupting our business,” Mark Read, the outgoing CEO of British promoting group WPP, told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday.
The promoting market is under threat from emerging generative AI tools that could be used to materialize pieces of content at rapid pace. The past couple of years has seen the rise of a lot of AI image generators, including OpenAI’s DALL-E, Google’s Veo and Midjourney.
In his first interview since announcing he would step down as WPP boss, Read said that AI is “going to totally revolutionize our business.”
“AI goes to make all of the world’s expertise available to everybody at extremely low price,” he said at London Tech Week. “The perfect lawyer, the perfect psychologist, the perfect radiologist, the perfect accountant, and indeed, the perfect promoting creatives and marketing people often will likely be an AI, you understand, will likely be driven by AI.”
Read said that fifty,000 WPP employees now use WPP Open, the corporate’s own AI-powered marketing platform.
“That, I feel, is my legacy in some ways,” he added.
Structural pressure on creative parts of the ad business are driving industry consolidation, Read also noted, adding that corporations would want to “embrace” the best way through which AI would impact the whole lot from creating briefs and media plans to optimizing campaigns.
A report from Forrester released in June last 12 months showed that greater than 60% of U.S. ad agencies are already making use of generative AI, with an additional 31% saying they’re exploring use cases for the technology.
‘Huge transformation’
Read shouldn’t be alone on this view. Promoting is undergoing a “huge transformation” because of the disruptive effects of AI, French promoting giant Publicis Groupe’s CEO Maurice Levy told CNBC on the Viva Tech conference in Paris.
He noted that AI image and video generation tools are speeding up content production drastically, while automated messaging systems can now achieve “personalization at scale like never before.”
Nonetheless, the Publicis chief stressed that AI should only be considered a tool that folks can use to enhance their lives.
“We must always not consider that AI is greater than a tool,” he added.
And while AI is prone to impact some jobs, Levy ultimately thinks it’ll create more roles than it destroys.
“Will AI replace me, and can AI kill some jobs? I feel that AI, yes, will destroy some jobs,” Levy conceded. Nonetheless, he added that, “more importantly, AI will transform jobs and can create more jobs. So the online balance will likely be probably positive.”
This, he says, could be in line with the labor impacts of previous technological inventions just like the web and smartphones.
“There will likely be more autonomous work,” Levy added.
Still, Nicole Denman Greene, analyst at Gartner, warns brands ought to be wary of causing a negative response from consumers who’re skeptical of AI’s impact on human creativity.
In accordance with a Gartner survey from September, 82% of consumers said firms using generative AI should prioritize preserving human jobs, even when it means lower profits.
“Pivot from what AI can do to what it should do in promoting,” Greene told CNBC.
“What it should do is help create groundbreaking insights, unique execution to achieve diverse and area of interest audiences, push boundaries on what ‘marketing’ is and deliver more brand differentiated, helpful and relevant personalized experiences, including deliver on the promise of hyper-personalization.”
