• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 22, 2023

Generative AI will "supercharge" the creative process, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees at the Cannes Lions Festival this past week.

“For the very first time, the creative process can be amplified in content generation, and the content generation could be in any modality — it could be text, images, 3D, videos,” he said in a conversation with Mark Read, CEO of WPP Holdings.

Huang outlined the impact of AI on the $700 billion digital advertising industry, and touched on the ways AI can enhance creators’ abilities. He also spoke about the importance of being responsible when developing AI services.

There was no shortage of AI news during this past week, but advertisers had lots to discuss. Some of the topics, according to Jason Fairchild, CEO of tvScientific, were television (TV), sales teams focusing on TV, measurement and performance.

In fact, he said, performance has been the topic of multiple panels. People talk about performance very differently and broadly.

“Really, there are two ways to think about performance,” he said. “One is, did it perform against the reach and frequency goals? Did you get the media on target? There are lots of competing ways to measure that. The more emerging measurement question is outcome-based, where this could be a sale or purchase.”

He said the valuable learning at Cannes centered more on “inside baseball stuff, the valuable learning for us is more around decluttering the value chain and understanding exactly what happens with an ad impression all the way through to make sure we know what we're getting and not overpaying.”

It sounds simple, he said, but it is complicated. Publishers use ad servers, ad servers have different configurations, ad servers send inventory to ad exchanges, ad exchanges also have different configurations, and they treat inventory in different ways. Signals are passed to buyers in different ways and times for auctions to open and close are different. 

He said understanding the value chain is important for buyers and performance marketers, so “if we can identify 15% inefficiency, it will make a direct improvement on return on ad spend. This was similar to the early days of programmatic where there was a wild west phase -- it's a little chaotic and will get more mature. There are a lot of inefficiencies to squeeze out. I think we’re at that phase.”