"During the last decade it was ad fraud and
brand safety and a whole host of other issues. And now we're seeing the same emergence out of AI," Association of National Advertisers chief Bob Liodice said during the opening remarks at the ANA's
"Masters of Marketing" conference this morning, confirming news first reported by Ad Age that the Big 3 trade associations held a closed-door meeting on Tuesday to begin developing a
framework for "AI responsibility."
"The 4A's, the ANA and the IAB came together yesterday to begin the process of improved governance to ensure we do not replicate what was a painful journey
on the ability for digital and social media to be able to expand," Liodice announced without going into details about what was discussed or what the roadmap and timing is.
But if they had
asked me to attend and weigh in, I would have told them the same thing I told attendees at an Institute for Advertising Ethics summit in Omnicom's New York City offices last week: You'd better hurry
up, because any leverage you might have on mitigating a painful AI journey may be expiring fast.
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I based that on what happened with digital and social media, which ultimately became too big to
fail with the ad industry by developing the lion's share of revenue not from the world's biggest and most responsible advertisers, but from the long tail of small and medium-sized businesses.
Meta now boasts more than 10 million advertisers, and while it obviously cares about the Fortune 1,000 ones, they are a relatively small share of its total ad revenue.
Last week, OpenAI reported its 60,000th ad client -- up from 20,000 a month a go and dozens at
the beginning of the year -- and at that rate it will reach half a million by next year.
Based on the history of social media, that will be about the same point when AI platforms derive more ad
revenue from SMBs than from major brands. And if history repeats itself, it will also be the point when Madison Avenue's ability to influence their responsibility begins to diminish.
But Kudos
to the ANA, 4As and IAB for coming together to start a process this week. I just hope it's not too little, too late.
I still need to do a thorough recap of the IAE summit, which is actually
the second one to tackle responsible AI marketing that it has held this year, and it's already showing considerable momentum.
At the first summit in April, a cross-industry group identified the
need for a responsible AI marketing framework, and dubbed it the "AI Trust Stack."
At last week's second summit, it unveiled a preliminary structure for the framework -- developed by a
collective of industry volunteers working on its individual components.
To be clear, some of the members of the IAE summit and the AI Trust Stack working group are also members of the ANA, IAB
and the 4A's, so it's not exactly like these initiatives are happening at cross purposes.
But if you ask me, the Big 3 trade's "AI Responsibility" initiative should be broadened out to include
other vital industry stakeholders, including the frontier model developers themselves. I know the IAE is planning to invite them.
For those of you who don't recall, that's what the ad trades
did back in the early 90s to create a framework for digital advertising in the first place.
Remember the ANA and 4A's CASIE (Coalition for Advertising Supported Information and Entertainment)
in 1994? That was two years before the IAB even formed. Remember the FAST (Future of Advertising Stakeholders) summit in 1998?
