• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, April 15, 2024

When David Jones, CEO and founder of The Brandtech Group, a technology holding company, decided to create the word “Brandtech” to the company’s name, he did so because “adtech” had committed all the “worst sins ever possible’ in advertising and marketing.

“Why would anyone want to be followed around the internet by a sneaker they had already bought?” he said. “They are not going to buy the same sneaker again, and it just shows how creepy you can get.”

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) will change all that, personalizing content and making it a lot less expensive to produce personalized everything from television commercials to online content, according to his five-year vision of the industry.

Back in the day, he said, it was expensive to make television commercials. A brand might only afford to produce one TV ad for one target audience. It was very expensive.

The team created the copy, drew a storyboard, which may have cost about $10,000, and after six months of coordination, the team would shoot a TV commercial at a cost ranging from $500,000 to $3 million. The process took six or seven months.

Jones believes that in the near future, Brandtech agencies will have the ability to produce 50 options and give clients the ability to choose the ones they want.

“The future of marketing and advertising will look like stock share trading does today,” he said. “There was a time when folks at the New York Stock Exchange ran around the floor with little bits of paper and a phone. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

Brandtech agency clients are embracing GAI. Hotel Chocolat Marketing Lead Lynne Ormrod acknowledged in a LinkedIn post how the technology has opened up new avenues for the brand in how its creative staff approaches ideas and executions.

Hotel Chocolat used AI to create its Velvitiser work with Gravity Road, a Brandtech agency. The ad has achieved the maximum effectiveness score, as measured by System 1, the company said.

“The TV era was high quality and high cost,” Jones said. “The social and mobile era has been low quality and low cost because everyone can shoot content on their phone and post it. The gen AI is an era of high quality and low cost. This is how I see it playing out.”

When asked about Jones’ view on data, he said brands are not going to let companies train their large language models on their data because it could allow competitors to perform better.

When it comes to individuals, if you do the wrong thing with their data they will become “pissed off,” and if you add value, they won’t, he said.

People don’t hate brands and they don’t hate advertising,” he said. “They just don’t want to receive annoying messages they have no interest in.”

GAI will give brands the ability to get to the perfect market through personalization.

“I love surfing, so when I get messages and advertisements from the surf brands that I like it’s not annoying,” Jones said. “Gen AI will do a much better job.”