Brand Marketers Need to Own Their AI Advantage

Our Founder and CEO, Hannah Mirza, recently published an article on MediaPost, where she discussed the competitive advantage of AI usage.

Beyond the awards and networking, the ongoing impact of AI was the strong undercurrent at last week’s Cannes Lions. 

That makes sense because the tools behind a Grand Prix winner like Google's Project Genie -- which enables people to build an AI-generated world from a text prompt or photo -- will quickly become the standard creative production kit for everyone.

But while there were lots of examples of AI playing creative director, there was also a deeper (and long-overdue) debate along the beach: who owns and who controls the competitive advantage that this new technology brings.

AI is now a fact of life for our industry. We have more messages powered by data, creative personalization, and media-buying agents that operate within human-set guardrails.

This is a dramatic change that also means the learnings are being gained not just by the agency teams that brands work with, but also by the systems they use. For many clients, this can mean that the competitive advantage sits with the tools and systems their agencies own.

This is because the more an agency builds and trains AI systems using a brand’s data -- its creative assets, audience signals, campaign history -- the harder it becomes for that brand to leave.

The institutional knowledge that once lived in people now lives in the models and tools that belong to the agency. The switching cost is rising quietly, month by month. 

What once looked like future risks -- outsourced IP and diminished negotiating power -- have already become a reality for many advertisers. Post-Cannes, every CMO should be asking themselves, “Who owns those learnings and if I want to leave does that mean I have to start all over again?”

We have been here before with data and programmatic, however, and smart advertisers know they need greater control -- whether that would be by having their own first-party data or in-house control of strategy. 

The smartest CMOs are now working to identify where they need to grab hold of the strategic levers that drive their business because what they buy and what they own will be very different in an AI-powered future.