Ahead of next week's Cannes Lions festival, Publicis dropped what
presumably is intended to be a tongue-in-cheek video poking fun of "how far" advertising holding companies are willing to go in their "AI-fueled" account pitches.
The video is clearly tied to
the Cannes festival. At one point, it shows the depiction of a pitch meeting promising a client that they won't have to pay until they win a Gold Lion ("We Win! You Win!).
But coming on the
heels of a devastating report released last week by ad management consultancy 3C Ventures, the video might come across as a bit tone deaf to some industry observers.
The send-up also follows
Monday's release of a World Federation of Advertisers and Lions organization
survey of brand marketing leaders, which concluded that while AI creativity will be the talk of this year's festival, the reality is that it's still more talk than action as far as many marketers
are concerned.
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The 3C Ventures analysis, entitled "What Are You Buying? The Platform Illusion: Cutting
Through Agency Tech Narratives," likely will also stir conversation and debate at next week's festival, because it is positioned as an expose that implies that for all their investments in AI
tools, Big Data acquisitions and proprietary engineering, the big agencies' AI tech fundamentally are just new black boxes full of pitch promises and a new non-disclosed way of creating better margins
and new profits for holding companies.
In effect, the 3C Ventures analysis implies that after years of walled-garden-envy, the holdcos have simply managed to build their own and are in a
heated race to win new business and market share based on the ROI promises they can deliver for clients.
"At some point over the last five years, every major agency unveiled a proprietary
technology platform," the report begins, citing nine agency-branded, AI-powered platforms:
- Horizon Media's
bluConverged
- Stagwell's STAGE/The
Machine
"These platforms, at varying stages of build and deployment, are positioned to advertisers as transformative
operating systems designed to meet the velocity and accuracy demands of modern marketing. What they share, regardless of maturity, is a vocabulary: AI-powered, end-to-end, transparent, open ecosystem,
and agentic." 3C Ventures notes that is how they started out, but asserts that more recently they "Moved from the background into the pitch deck and brought an entirely new commercial language with
it. That language is now so uniformly adopted that, stripped of branding, most platform descriptions are functionally indistinguishable from one another. The underlying capabilities, however, vary
dramatically."
The issue of the new holdco AI-powered "operating systems" emerged as a new cautionary tale during a special Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) webinar on the tenth
anniversary of its infamous agency media-buying "transparency" studies as a potential new form of non-transparency.
"The problem is that the big groups, in particular, are building black box
agentic systems and I'm quite happy to say they are doing it for reasons of arbitrage -- effectively -- principal media [buying]," Encyclomedia International Founder Nick Manning, an expert presenting
on the ANA webinar, asserted, adding: "I don't belive agentic is going to be the solution to the problem, at all. I think it's going to make it a lot worse."
Manning emphasized that "agentic"
could be advertisers' "worse nightmare, because, if you've got agents talking to agents in ether the buying or selling of media, then we lose sight completely of where the advertising is going and
what it's doing. Even though the agencies would have you believe the reverse."
Dogsled Enterprises' Jon Mandel, the former WPP media executive who turned ANA whistleblower on the holdcos'
kickbacks and non-transparent media-buying practices ten years ago, piled on Manning's caution, noting: "Don't use the agency's agentic to prove out that it works."
In lieu of the agency's
agentic systems, Mandel advocated that advertisers should utilize neutral third-party systems, or even build their own -- "That doesn't deal with data from the agency, but deals with it strictly from
within the advertiser and can work and can work out the numbers on whether the advertising is working or not.
"And at the end of the day, that matters more than whether you paid $100 or $116
for a given unit."
While the ANA webinar focused on the burgeoning role of the holdcos' Big Data/agentic systems, and not creative ROI explicitly, it's part of a trend toward distrust, hype
and new forms of non-disclosure highlighted by 3C Ventures' report, the WFA/Lions study, and teased in Publicis' own video, which dropped this morning, just in time to get the buzz churning leading
into next week's festival conversations.
