As part of a major overhaul of the agency’s go-to-market strategy in the age of artificial intelligence, Interpublic’s Huge is officially unveiling today a new AI product that will help redefine client opportunities as well as its own future.  

It’s an analytic engine that the agency has dubbed Huge LIVE (Living Intelligence Value Engine) that analyzes billions of data points and is designed to help clients identify opportunities in real-time, accelerate growth, “out maneuver competitors and remain hyper-relevant in culture.” 

The engine is comprised of proprietary AI technology developed in-house combined with third-party AI platforms as well as input from sibling company Axiom. It is just one product in Huge’s two-year effort to transform itself from a digital agency to creative consultancy.  

Huge quietly put the LIVE engine into action last year. The firm is mum on most of the work it’s done to date although it confirms working with Pantone to help the client define last year’s “Color of the Year” (“Viva Magenta”). 

It has also worked with companies in the automotive, toys, and technology categories.  

IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky has acknowledged on recent earnings calls that Huge, and sibling digital shop R/GA have struggled to remain as innovative in the digital marketing space as they once were and that both shops were busy developing new go-to market strategies. Earlier this year he said Huge was further along in its effort to transform to a more “consultative” role. 

And he also told investors that the negative impact the agencies were having on IPG’s growth was expected to “cycle out” by the third quarter of 2023. 

Huge’s two-year odyssey to transform itself into a leading AI-generation consultancy is the subject of an upcoming book by Michael Farmer called Madison Avenue Makeover: The Transformation of Huge and The Redefinition of the Ad Business (LID Publishing). It is due out later this month.  

Part of Huge’s objective is to move away from a project-focused business model to a solutions model with products and fixed pricing that can drive client growth as well as its own, said Mat Baxter, who has been working on the agency’s transformation since being named CEO in 2021. 

“It’s a big pivot for us as an organization,” said Baxter, and one where most of its staff has been undergoing intensive retraining to be able to fulfil the new mission. “And one of the things we wanted was an engine that was able to assist us in delivering those products and outcomes that was as rigorous and forward thinking as possible.” 

Also the engine is the foundation for a blueprint to ingrain AI across the organization. Differentiators, the agency believes, are its work to build out parts of the engine that leverage cultural semiotics (interpreting signs and symbols in culture) and other anthropological applications to analyze and predict consumer behaviors, define brand perceptions and generate new problem-solving capabilities. 

Over time, Baxter adds, LIVE will help the agency spin out other standalone products and capabilities that can be sold to clients on a subscription basis, one-time or other price models that become part of a menu of offerings.  

One such product has been dubbed the Creative Capital Index, a tool designed to help businesses quantify and measure organizational creativity. The firm likens it to the S&P 500 Index but for creativity and innovation. The index values all of an organization's assets that enable creative problem solving and innovation. It then tracks how the relative value of those assets rise and fall over time as compared to industry benchmarks. 

The main objective: help clients exploit their creative potential to achieve greater growth.  

In the past Huge has been known as a tech innovator helping clients like JetBlue develop its online booking engine and others create and navigate generations of mobile marketing technology. And according to Baxter, “we want to do that in the AI generation as well. So this is our first step to being that trailblazer with clients helping them to make the best use possible of AI and all the potential it has.”