If everyone has access to a supposed competitive advantage, there is no advantage, as Leagas Delaney’s Gareth Davies explains.
For the past couple of years, much of the advertising industry has been dancing on the pinhead of AI. This noisy collective has been clamoring to make their respective cases for how they’ve adopted AI, with some agencies noticeably further down that road than others.
But whether you’re a die-hard AI-evangelist or frustrated by the way the topic has dominated the industry narrative, one thing is sure: everyone has an opinion.
And so they should.
Speak to anyone in adland with their finger on the pulse, and they’ll tell you that change is everywhere, all at once. Necessity is the mother of invention after all. And necessary it certainly is.
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However, if you look at any of our industry’s publishing platforms, you’ll still find disbelievers banging their anti-AI drums.
Let’s deal with that directly. The AI ship has long since set sail. AI is everywhere in agencies. It’s part of the strategic development process, guides targeting and personalization strategies, supports creative ideation, is front and centre in production, and underpins our daily processes. AI has moved from an experimental tool to an established, functional mainstay. And if you’re not using AI across a wide range of your agency functions, you are now behind the curve.
There should be no debate around that.
The scale of adoption has become so significant that another change has occurred. AI has become ‘table stakes. ’
Is that plausible?
Well, a quick search of the term on Google’s AI (naturally) Overview feature defines it as follows. Table stakes are the ‘essential, basic requirements or minimum level of effort needed to participate in a particular activity or market, often in business or gaming. It’s the minimum you need to have just to be in the game, not necessarily to win or excel.
That sounds about right.
So, what happens when everyone has AI, when it has become so deeply interwoven into our agencies that it has become a basic cost of entry?
In the conversations I’m having with clients, there’s an increasing, often unspoken expectation that AI will be deployed to their advantage – to deliver a faster, better and more cost-effective process. That’s a change of focus. A year or two ago, AI was considered a differentiator. If you had it, you had an edge. Today, it’s quickly becoming the expected norm. Writing for WARC, Brian Carruthers sums it up well, explaining how AI ‘resets everyone on a new playing field’, becoming ‘table stakes in the new advertising world order.’
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And if AI is more or less everywhere, perhaps it’s time to jump off that metaphorical pinhead and remind each other of what we’re good at rather than how we do it? In those same conversations with clients, more and more emphasis is being placed back on the strategic challenges of brands and how we can use creativity to help address them. It’s where most of us want to be. Tech-enabled, for sure, but human-powered for certain.
That might sound like a future we can all get behind. But a reminder, it’s a future that’ll only be available to the agencies that have embraced the foundational tools of AI in the first place. The age of AI experimentation is over. The age of AI adoption is here.
To not embrace AI is to gamble on your future. No AI, no dice. But if you have embraced AI and are committed to continuing to do so, then you’ve earned the right to be at the table (stakes). Now, let’s remember what we’re all good at and write about a new, ambitious future for ourselves.
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Gareth Davies is the UK Group CEO of Leagas Delaney, a role he has held since January 2020. He brings a wealth of experience from over a decade at Havas. Prior to Havas, Gareth was the NFL’s marketing director.