Media.Monks on Embracing AI to Fight Your Fear from It
On Tuesday this week, Media.Monks CEO EMEA and co-founder Victor Knaap, along with chief growth officer, EMEA Maria Nordstrom gathered brands, agencies and trade press from across London to break down the ins and outs of AI.
The session covered the newest and most valuable developments in AI, the ways in which Media.Monks is internally changing to match these developments and some advice for how brands can leverage the technology. But this isn’t exactly news for the agency.
In fact, Media.Monks had jumped on the hype train many years ago and have been taking care of establishing company-wide AI expertise since the technology peeked over the distant horizon. They even have many of their own, company-trained AI tools.
Nevertheless, there are some questions we’re all burning to know the answer to. That’s why after the session LBB’s Zoe Antonov sat down with Victor and Maria to find out more about how AI is disrupting businesses ‘in real time’, to what degree Media.Monks is looking to revolutionise its AI usage and why some banking jobs are on the way out.
LBB> What were the main takeaways from your session and what would you like people to remember when leaving?
Victor> There’s a lot of difference in the knowledge of our clients when it comes to AI. So what we try to do in our sessions, is to give a generic overview on what happened in the digital world in the last 20 years, how many iterations we went through, what's the real impact of AI when it comes to consumers, what are all these tools that are out there and what kind of output you should expect. That way, we equalise the level of knowledge. I'm trying to be as transparent and honest as possible with everybody to show what the actual scale of impact is on our own company. Because by just telling brands, ‘you have to do this, you have to do that’ isn’t enough.
We need to change as a business as well. Our business is being disrupted by AI in real time. How do we deal with that? How do we implement that in our company? And then, lastly, what can we do for brands? All across the customer journey - from your data stack, to full production, to media buying, all the way to the last version of the ads on your ecommerce site.
LBB> It becomes clear that one of the biggest benefits of AI usage is optimisation and making processes faster. How can we make sure that optimisation enables creativity rather than stumping it?
Maria> AI allows you to expand your creative thoughts - you can leverage the tool to prompt creative process. It doesn't have the ability to create conceptual stuff. It's not abstract in its thinking - it’s a database. So you still need a creative to truly come up with that conceptual, big idea. But you leverage the tech and the tools to enable you to come up with that and thought starters, storyboards, mood boards, bringing things to life in a different way.
The technology could be on either side – the ideation or the craft - while still working with the people. You can use it to help with the ideation process, in terms of prompting it to come up with different ideas that you're brainstorming with a team, or you can use it for the output of certain creative concepts. If you're trying to create an animated series - [you can] generate photo imagery, backgrounds, any creative element.
Victor> We should be fighting against the concept that AI is just about ‘optimising’. We think it's about maximising. Why should it be just one big idea? Why isn’t it six big ideas? In your review process, you showed three different creative routes – why not [take] all three routes? And why don't the three creative routes have three scripts attached to them? If the production value is going down, or the prices going down enormously, you can now afford to do all nine of them. So, your role as a marketer is to find the point to which you’re comfortable to go to before deviating too much from the brand, while still maximising the creative output.
LBB> Will the element of relatability stay intact for customers and audiences if they know that there are no creatives behind an ad or film?
Victor> I don’t think it will be a threat for the blockbuster creative and films. But there is a lot of middle ground advertising and media and, let’s be honest, there’s also a lot of bad advertising. If you watch daytime TV you know that this is not what we create, but it is around. It literally would come better out of a machine. But when it comes to blockbusters – I don’t see them having to be worried yet.
Maria> You also have to remember though, technology is advancing so incredibly fast that some of the advancements are not even public yet. So what happens is, they're building all these things behind the scenes and all of a sudden, it launches, and then we start interacting with it. We're all of a sudden going to wake up, and we're going to see AI creating blockbuster films too, six years from now. There is a lot of building being done behind the scenes.
LBB> To what extent is AI embedded in the internal processes of the agency as it stands today?
Victor> I think it is in every part of the journey, but maybe not as deep as we want to yet. But these sessions that we do are not just for our clients. They’re also for each and every one of us. The nice thing is that we can look horizontally - we can look at all of our UX development. What does AI mean for us? What does AI mean for our strategists? What does AI mean for our creatives? What does AI mean for our designers? And then you can build that workflow.
We see the output in campaigns, but you need to know how to set up a 500-person design team worldwide working with AI. How are you going to do that work more efficiently? How am I going to do all the writing more efficiently? It’s in these cases that we’re starting to work more and more with it now, but at some point even the legal departments or contracts negotiations – machines are going to do that work. You will only keep the points that need to be discussed by humans, but all the other iterations can be done by machines. I think the ideal goal to go after is being 30% AI driven as a baseline.
Maria> We also have AI ambassadors in each division that are spearheading each of those developments. So there is an AI ambassador for social, copywriting, legal, studio - all overhauling what that change process would look like for their teams and how to operate with the tools. For example, with social we’re looking at emotional artificial intelligence – EAI. And specifically how you emotionally connect with people that you’re creating social experiences for.
LBB> That’s super interesting! So what kind of data do you feed into an AI to create an output that is emotional - essentially creating what you call ‘EAI’?
Maria> It's actually very cool, you can take a product and look at the different types of individuals that interact with it - are they an enthusiastic hiker who uses the product because it's really great for their hair when they're hiking? They may happen to be into nature and into their health routine at the same time. You can take all these data points that cross over around the individual, and understand how to emotionally connect with them, and why that product is the right one to communicate to them – if, say it’s organic and a beauty product. You look at the different triggers around what they like to do, what is in their everyday experiences and moments, what sort of product can match their beliefs and their values.
LBB> The word ‘fear’ persists in AI conversations. When looking at feedback, do you get that sense from the industry as well? Are people scared?
Victor> Yup! We see some competitors denying it. We see some marketers that don't want to have anything to do with it. And we see some people completely embracing it. Now, I haven’t studied psychology, but the only way to fight your fear is, I believe, to embrace it. We don’t really know how it’s going to develop because of government legislation, because of legal, because of procurement, etc., but it’s there. We can see the tangible output – it’s not a concept anymore, we can literally see it do things and see how it will save us hundreds of hours of manual work. That manual work will not come back.
LBB> What is going to happen with the people that used to do that manual work?
Victor> They will become faster, better, more clever, more creative, they will completely embrace what it means in their line of work – as a strategist, as a creative, as a media planner. Although, I have to admit I am worried about the media planning part.
LBB> Should agencies and production companies be coming up with safeguarding pathways that will protect the people whose jobs will be replaced with AI?
Maria> Absolutely. One of the most important things we do here foundationally is education – internally for our own teams and for other companies also. We have to make sure each of us has the knowledge and understands the impact of the changes in order to succeed in leveraging AI in the right way. Companies need to embrace this and start doing those discovery sessions and teaching their own employees that this isn’t about removing people or jobs, but embracing the tech to enhance our jobs.
LBB> In the presentation you touched on the topic of digital avatars – some people are already using them. Do you think there would be a push back from talent across the board on this or do you think they will readily embrace it along with talent agencies?
Maria> I think they're definitely embracing it. Doing a revenue split 50/50 on everything, using their voice, it’s all fair enough at the end of the day. I think the people that embrace it will definitely be more successful. The mishaps should be taken care of by law and contract – the rest of it is consensual and taken care of, so there shouldn’t be a problem if the talent gets to create what they love.
Victor> As I said before, I’m not worried about blockbusters - producers or actors in blockbusters either. But I’m worried about the middle layer. Let’s see how it evens out, but I do think that embracing this kind of thing will probably give you a better chance of success.
LBB> Do you think there's a natural process to come that is going to even things out and transform what you call the middle layer?
Victor> Possibly. I think there’s going to be this very interesting reshuffle and revival of historians and people who studied art because you need to have all these references in the newly created jobs. If you want to have the greatest output, you need to have some good references to how you want to have it look like. Because otherwise, everything will become Wes Anderson, if that's the only reference that you know for prompting the technology available.
The thing about AI is, because it’s trained on such a large data set, it could become very general – so if you want exceptional results you need exceptional data. This is why a lot of brands develop their own bespoke AI that would be brand-aligned entirely.
Either way, we will find a blend somehow between human interaction and AI. Maybe now, people will start talking to each other a little bit more, being nice to each other.
Real life experiences might become more valuable and more important. You can’t replace this – the human conversation. But doing a banking job in Excel… Maybe you can replace it, at the end of the day. And maybe it’s good to go.
LBB> Do you expect even more fundamental changes to take place in other industries then?
Victor> Possibly. I mean, the ad industry is a pretty sizable business – a billion pound one. But we can’t compare it to what is going to happen with banking or legal.
Maria> It's harder for people to wrap their head around the other industries, but it's super easy to digest that AI creates content, so it can help us in obvious ways. Once you start to think about healthcare, or banking, or the financial and legal industries, people haven't yet wrapped their heads around what that impact is and what that means for us. Not to say it’s totally seamless, but it is easier to understand how AI impacts marketing and brands today, immediately, compared to the other ripples it will create.
Victor> Maybe it fixes healthcare? I don't know, if you can repurpose bankers to go into healthcare? But something like that should not be bad for society.
LBB> Banking aside, will AI kill art?
Maria> I was an art history major. I absolutely do not think AI will kill art. I truly believe art will always be there as a way of changing the world, creating amazing experiences in different ways, connecting communicates and people. Art is fundamental to society, I do not believe it will go away. I believe AI will allow artists to expand and grow and explore further. It's like Photoshop, right? When doing black and white photography, the process of development was so tedious. And then all of a sudden Photoshop came along and did it so much faster, and you could create this photorealistic thing in a tool. Did black and white photography go away? No. Did we enable a tool to enhance things and create a different experience in art? Absolutely.
Art democratises things, and it’s so subjective. As humans, it's so important for us to be allowed to have opinions and infuse them with feeling and emotion, with what we see and experience. Art is critical to how we react and experience the world around us.
