Gen AI Is Helping to Drive Innovation for Advertisers: Annalect’s Clarissa Season

LAS VEGAS – Generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular apps such as ChatGPT, is quickly being adopted by a variety of organizations that seek to improve efficiency, foster creativity and improving customization. Media buyers are among these adopters of gen AI as they collectively help to determine how billions of dollars are spent on behalf of advertisers. “Every job has some things that are a little mundane and can be automated,” Clarissa Season, chief experience officer at Omnicom Group’s Annalect, said in this interview with Beet.TV contributor Mike Shields at CES 2024. “That’s going to free up people’s time to be more creative, more strategic thinkers, more innovative in what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “We do not see this as taking anything away from our employees, but rather freeing them up to do the work they want to be doing.” Omnicom Media Group was one of the first companies to be given access to secure generative pretrained transformer (GPT) models at Microsoft, a major investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Omnicom integrated the gen AI technology with its Omni data platform, which its agencies use for media planning and buying. “We’ve introduced Omni Assist, which is a virtual assistant that lives throughout the Omni experience,” Season said. “One of the use cases might be how do we use generative AI to actually teach our people how to use Omni better and our clients how to use Omni better.” Omnicom applied ChatGPT models to its training library for Omni, giving people a way to find answers to their questions in a conversational manner. “We have a rigorous kind of set of guidelines that we put all of our use cases or models through…to make sure we’re getting the right answers back,” Season said. “We have over 20 different checkpoints that we go through to make sure we’re using the right data set.” As with many new technologies, gen AI has ignited speculation about how it may perform tasks traditionally handled by humans. “The reality is that as part of our approach to responsible generative AI usage, we have to be really careful about how we’re applying these outputs to client work,” Season said. “We are expecting large improvements, but we do want to be cautious and we want to make sure clients are really comfortable with this application of generative AI and that nobody’s following it blindly.” You’re watching “AI: Powering an Optimized Advertising Ecosystem,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series at CES 2024, presented by DoubleVerify. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.