Sundogs and Newfangled Studios Launch New Partnership To Help Brands Supercharge Human Creativity with AI

How can brands unleash human creativity and supercharge it with AI? That’s exactly the question Sundogs founder Ben Jones, who also founded Unskippable Labs at Google, and Macaela VanderMost, owner/executive creative director at Newfangled Studios, are offering to solve for the world’s most celebrated brands with their new partnership.

With the average digital media buy representing 54% of total ad spend2 across 50+ ad units, the days of brands taking a one-size-fits all approach to advertising are long gone. In its place is a complex media landscape requiring assets to be tailored to specific ad units and optimized using generative AI. 

As a creative production agency that specialises in social-first, digitally native campaigns, Newfangled Studios produces creative campaigns for a number of industry-leading brands including YouTube, Google Pixel, Google Chrome and The Google App.

“AI’s impact on media planning is allowing us to think in a more modular way by creating smart videos, images, and headlines that can be mixed and matched by AI to get the best outcome,” said Macaela. “Creative effectiveness moving forward will hinge on how brands feed the AI machine to help their campaigns scale assets across screens, devices and contexts.”

However, creative is still the dominant driver of ROI. Understanding how to build creative effectiveness into the rapidly evolving AI models will be critical to the next generation of advertising success.

“As media automation increases and privacy signals are muted, the power of creative will only increase. And while I love the magical transformations of AI models, if we don’t know what’s more effective in them, we’re wasting our time,” said Ben. “That comes from creative hypotheses explored through experimentation with advanced partners like Newfangled. Together, we’ll be able to build better models faster by uncovering and scaling new levers of creative value.”

Led by Ben Jones, former global creative director of Google, and co-founder, entrepreneur Jonathan Savitch, Sundogs has compiled a team of Cannes-winning creatives, cutting edge data scientists, and strategic experimenters focused on using the power of data and AI in service of creative.