This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in.
"ArtBot has been around for some time," said Paolo Yuvienco, Omnicom's chief technology officer. "It's not just a generative AI tool, it's an automation tool that has been operationalized with large accounts at scale."
The company said Artbot had previously been used by Omnicom clients, including Apple, McDonald's, Unilever, Pfizer, and Volkswagen.
ArtBotAI also pulls insights about consumers, their behavior, transactions, and campaign performance from Omni, a marketing operating system the company says stores more than 30 petabytes of data and also has its own Chat-GPT-like virtual assistant, Omni Assist. The data can be used both at the initial ideation and creation process, as well as the downstream optimization stage of a campaign, where the agency can tinker with ads in order to improve their performance.
"I don't think our competitors have cracked the code on that, so to speak," Yuvienco said.
The company is also planning to introduce a "synthetic neural voice" option where the agency could negotiate with a brand ambassador to capture a sample of their voice and then regenerate the audio into different accents, languages, or genders.
ArtBotAI's generative AI functionality is driven by Omnicom's large language models, which it has created through partnerships with companies including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Getty, Adobe, and Amazon. ArtBotAI integrates software like the collaborative design tool Figma, the Unreal 3D gaming engine, and Microsoft Teams to help its agencies and clients craft ads. The system also allows a client to plug in their own preferred martech, adtech, and data providers.
For AT&T, Omnicom's agencies used ArtBotAI to take assets from two TV commercial shoots to create 8,000 ads, reducing the amount of time and people required to create campaigns across digital channels. In an emailed statement, AT&T Senior Vice President of Advertising and Retail Marketing Valerie Vargas said its production and media investments have been "more impactful" since using ArtBotAI.
"While we are increasing data storage and power demand, we're substantially decreasing the physical carbon footprint from shoots, where AT&T would have previously had to go into production multiple times," said Alissa Hansen, Omnicom's chief production officer. "Live-action production is the most wasteful side of the business."
Omnicom said clients using ArtBotAI have, on average, achieved 40% increases in ad engagements like clicks and video views since they began using the platform.
The advertising industry is grappling with the disruptive force of AI in areas ranging from content creation to budget planning. A survey of 500 creative professionals in North America and the UK conducted by United Talent Agency found that 70% of creatives in marketing and entertainment had used AI for work, with 47% doing so weekly.
While most agencies are positioning themselves as AI experts who can help their clients harness technology, the relative ease of AI tools could prompt some marketers to bring more of their advertising work in-house. Omnicom stated in its February financial filings that its use of generative AI presents risks like ethical considerations, a negative impact on the public perception of the company, and the need to comply with various regulations.
As agencies use AI to make their own businesses more efficient, the technology also looks set to upend their fee structures. Ad companies have traditionally charged an "FTE" model, based on the number of hours, equivalent to full-time employees, they spent working on a client's business. Ultimately, fewer agency staffers are required when using technology like ArtBotAI.
Hansen said Omnicom is experimenting with different pricing models for ArtBotAI, from software-as-a-service-style billing weighted to a clients' usage, to billing that's based on the agency delivering pre-agreed outcomes.
Omnicom has previously said that it has historically invested "tens of millions of dollars" in artificial intelligence for close to a decade.
Agency holding companies such as Publicis, WPP, and Havas have variously made pledges to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in AI in the coming years and have also recently showcased new solutions for ad creation that integrate data and generative AI technology.
Ingo Duckerschein, an independent business consultant with previous experience in senior roles at Intuit, Taboola, and LinkedIn, said the winners in the space will be those who can directly attribute a lift in marketing performance to the use of AI tools.
"My understanding is that it is still difficult to train these models against multiple targets, so I suspect some agencies will end up focusing on a specific target network," such as Google, Meta, or TikTok, Duckerschein said. But if one of those tech companies starts to change the focus of their own model -- such as from clicks to conversions -- the performance of an agency could drop until it catches up with the new goals of a specific platform, Duckerschein added.
