Experts from Quantcast, Havas Media and This if Flow said that while GenAI has efficiency benefits – such as removing the ‘grunt work’ from planning and reporting, as well as ‘death by powerpoint’ scenarios – an over-reliance on machines could stifle creativity and the development of important soft skills. They also questioned current spend levels in walled gardens and Google’s real reasons for delaying the deprecation of third party cookies.
The marketing and advertising industry needs to strike the right balance between unleashing the benefits of Generative AI technology with human smarts or risk creating a world in which media plans and creative are indistinguishable, vanilla and ineffective.
Marketers have also be warned not to wait for Google, which is acting in ‘self interest’, to deprecate third-party cookies on its Chrome browser, and over-index ad spend in social media walled gardens, in particular Google and Meta, which continue to dominate online spend despite their shares of internet usage decreasing.
These were the key messages from a punchy Cannes in Cairns panel debate, sponsored by Quantcast, that featured Quantcast ANZ commercial director Daniel O’Connor, This is Flow chief strategy officer Catherine Rushton and Havas Media’s client experience officer Michael Kay.
The discussion aimed to address the ‘elephant in the room’ about several hot industry topics, including the use of GenAI, third party cookie deprecation, social media walled gardens, measurement and important skills for the future.
Quantcast has been using AI technology for the past 18 years and O’Connor pointed out that there are several “mundane” tasks in digital media that are done better by a machine than and human, such as optimisation, pulling levels and using audience signals and AI models to provide insights for planning and activation.
“A lot of these things will be done better by machines 24/7 than having humans on the tools,” he said. “We use these insights in our decision-making.”
Rushton said the technology can help speed up the “medial tasks” to allow humans to “slow down on the tasks that matter”.
“When it comes to AI, we have been taking an experimental approach. So a big part of our nine-day fortnight initiative was essentially to test ourselves on whether we could improve efficiency and productivity through these freely available tools to give everyone a day off a fortnight. And so far, we’ve found that it can be done,” she said.
This if Flow also has an AI committee who researches new AI tools and presents them to the agency in a Dragon’s Den style format to see which ones can further improve processes and workflow.
Havas Media also uses AI tech to take “the grunt work” and admin out of media planning processes, such as reporting.
Kay warned that it’s still important media planners are taught the basic skills of reporting and “the hard yards of data”.
“I have this worry that about generating automated insights that we still need a human level of strategic insight and we are not defaulting everything to a machine. So I think there’s a balance, but definitely reducing that workload on tasks that have been the same for as long as we’ve all been in the industry is a massive benefit,” he said.
Another concern is whether over-relying on GenAI and other forms of AI tech could create indistinguishable work across the industry.
For example, would pitches from This if Flow and Havas Media that are powered by GenAI insights create similar insights and solutions?
Kay said that where the industry needs to get is a “Havas branded AI that thinks and knows how our processes work and how we operate” rather than what would amount to white labelled solutions.
Another benefit the panel pointed out is that removing the mundane tasks and allowing media agency executives to focus on important strategic work could help retain junior talent that either burn out or get bored of the industry after a couple of years.
The panel also warned marketers that they should wait for Google to deprecate third party cookies because nearly 50 per cent of browser usage already happens outside of Google Chrome in Australia, and nearly a third of those that use Chrome do so in its incognito mode that doesn’t allow tracking.
O’Connor said that Google – which has delayed third party cookie deprecation for the third time to 2025 – keeps “kicking the can down the road” not because of privacy concerns, but because “they are finding a reason that is totally benefiting them”.
Kay and Rushton said that marketers who haven’t begun planning for a third-party cookieless world will be left behind and that a positive outcome is that the discussion has enabled makerters and agency partners to have an important discussion about targeting and tracking consumers across the internet – an issue that is concerning consumers much more than markets who are drawn by the ‘shiny and new’, such as GenAI.
The panel also questioned why marketers invest far more in the walled gardens of Meta Google apps when most users spend 75-80 per cent of their time outside of these walled gardens, while they continue to dominate the lion’s share of spend.
Part of the reasons for this is that Google and Meta’s platforms are easy to use, have powerful data and targeting and there’s a mindset of “you’ll never be fired for recommending Fcebook or Google as a stock” that applies to the digital duopoly.
The panel recommends marketers move away from vanity metrics towards outcomes-based metrics, and bemoan the vast range of metrics and measurement systems that often complicate the media planning and buying ecosystem.
Machines and automation may make some jobs redundant, but the panel believes it will create far more new and interesting roles.
Getting the balance right between machines and human insights is also critical when it comes to training the next generation of media planners and marketers, especially when it comes to soft skills that are important in client and agency relations.
