Why Publicis Groupe Is Calling Out BS AI Claims at Cannes Lions... Using AI
Publicis Groupe is calling BS on unsupported AI claims at Cannes Lions this year. From tech titans promising the creation of new worlds, and destruction of old industries, to legacy companies using AI as a catch-all solution, everyone has a prophecy to push. And as can be seen in a provocative video from the holding company, each claim is bigger and bolder than the last.
Knowing that the hype will only intensify during the Cannes Lions Festival, Publicis is cutting through exaggerated AI promises. With the BSBot, clients will be able to record audio or upload images and text from keynote speeches, meetings, presentations, articles and press releases about AI. Once inputted, they will receive an immediate analysis that translates AI hype and jargon to real talk, and highlights critical questions that should be asked.
The bot will be launched on Monday June 17th and made available exclusively to the Groupe’s clients. Throughout the festival Publicis will also host more than 30 closed-door sessions, delivering the real deal on AI for its clients: what’s real, what’s ready and what’s relevant for their industry-specific business challenges and marketing imperatives.
The idea to unleash this broadside at the AI-obsessed industry during the week when it generates the most headlines began in another headline-producing week – this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Carla Serrano, Publicis Groupe’s global chief strategy officer, felt ‘bombarded’ by AI there. “Every company was either touting it as the panacea or touting it as the greatest evil. As we're walking into Cannes, we're pretty much certain that a very similar experience is going to happen,” she says.
So to preempt the frenzy of AI overclaims that Cannes Lions 2024 will likely play host to, Publicis Groupe has built BSBot, equipping its clients with a tool to sift BS from real promises of AI-driven marketing success.
“More specifically in our industry, the BS that we're talking about is this strange tech-partners arms race,” says Carla. “I wake up every morning and our trades are like, 'Oh my God, this company is partnering with this company'. And it seems like the formula for success is the more partners you have (which, by the way, we all have), which is sort of crazy.”
The second fascination of the ad industry that often gets mired in the bog of bullshit is generative AI image creation. “It's all about prompts and gen AI,” says Carla. “We've been so bombarded with AI images, we now know what they are and what they look like. And I'm kind of tired of them. I don't know whether you are. Prompt-a-palooza seems to be a thing.”
Last but not least, it is the sheer inevitability of AI entering into every discussion. It’s “everything, everywhere, all at once,” she adds – “the catch-all solution for every business problem, every industry issue, every innovation in the future that's going to change the trajectory of life as we know it and work as we know it.”
Of course, Publicis Groupe is doing this with the healthy lens of self-criticism that we’re so used to seeing from the company. Carla is ready to turn the BSBot on its creators. “By the way, I'm not saying that this is a disease that others have that we don't have – because we have it.” In the launch video, the Groupe’s CEO Arthur Sadoun appears alongside all the ‘utopic tech bros’.
For Carla, it’s about setting the agenda for Cannes Lions to make sure everyone gets value from the discussion. “I want us to really focus on that last statement [in the video] of 'Imagine if we all took the BS out of AI'. In terms of the way that we're going to be coming into Cannes, maybe it'll temper all of us, I don't know. Probably not. I'll probably get hanged on the Croisette,” she laughs.
The launch of BSBot sets Publicis Groupe’s agenda for next week, which hopes to focus on a BS-free programme of AI for its clients. It will be hosting over 20 closed-door sessions in Cannes for its clients, providing them with a BSBot.
Scott Hagedorn, global chief solutions architect has been enjoying the tone of the AI. “He's like 'That is the bitchiest bot I have ever seen in my life,'” says Carla. “And she is. You don't take the BS out of anything unless you cut through the shit, so we definitely needed to train the bot to be like that.” But its function is to promote incisive discussion. It will help prompt people to ask the right questions in order to scrutinise AI claims. “Just ask the question, because it might help us get out of the BS that's in the hype,” says Carla.
Following the launch of the bot next Monday, Publicis Groupe clients will also be showcasing new AI-driven tools to its clients. “If I would have rewound the tape to six months ago, when Arthur asked me and the team to lead the development of new AI applications and large language models by vertical, had I known that Carla was going to create a BS detector app in the style of Elton John's voice critiquing you, I would have probably said no. But that's where we are.”
His side provides the answers without the BS, he hopes. First they assembled teams for various verticals across the Groupe that included strategy, analytics, data science and paired them up with development teams at Sapient and data teams across the organisation. They gave everybody a brief, which Scott outlines as: “In the era of being able to process massive amounts of data with models that exist in the industry (and our expertise in working across Azure and GCP and AWS) what applications could we build in our verticals that haven't existed before?”
Working in the five key verticals of consumer packaged goods, automotive, financial services, pharma and luxury, these teams built new marketing applications and new data models to power those marketing applications by vertical. In the sessions in Cannes, Publicis Groupe will be showcasing what they built to clients. After Cannes, Scott and his team will also be running sprints for its other critical verticals.
In theory, the clients will be able to use their BSBots to call out any nonsense claims as these apps are being presented to them. “Oh, yeah, and it's not nice,” laughs Carla.
“It pulls no punches,” says Scott. “I'll tell you right now. It's a savage. But why we are confident that what we have is that we've done the work to build the applications and to structure the data. So all the models we built are trained on the best data – because we have the best data, and we're also unafraid to do deals to get access to the best data by vertical. We're ready with our applications today, the ones that we’ll show – some of them are already in use by the client. And we're relevant. We've designed them for outcomes. All the apps that we're building are looking at driving more business outcomes faster. They're not as focused on creative outputs, as Carla mentioned, that sort of SaaS that's existed and it's starting to look the same.”
Of course this all rests on the foundation of data and AI that Publicis Groupe has been laying since way before the gen AI hype boom. “We're sitting in a really unique position,” says Scott. With Epsilon giving access to 2.3 billion profiles globally and an AI model trained on all of the past 35-year knowledge base of Publicis Sapient, bundled in with Marcel, which has been loading into AI, which is as Scott puts it “all the institutional knowledge from our employees.” Add to that the retail capabilities and data from CitrusAd and Profitero. Then there’s the Groupe’s media data – 650 impression bids daily, and trillions of data points on performance for media and creative. “We've been doing syndicated data deals by vertical to bolster and enrich our current capability,” adds Scott. These apps have vast resources to draw upon.
As a tease of the kind of problems these applications will be solving, the CPG example Scott gives revolves around the disconnect companies sometimes struggle with between mental availability of and physical availability of their product on the shelf. “Our big business growth-driving application is tying those two things together for the first time,” says Scott. “We have our identity graph where we can see where people shop, and are they loyal to a specific brand, or do they shop the category, and when was the last time they shopped, and when was the last time they bought your product? We also have Profitero and CitrusAd, which gives us visibility into 70 million shelves. And increasingly, because you can do in-store pickup, what you see online is what's available in the local store. But that's a massive amount of data to try to put together. What we ended up doing was building a model to connect the consumer identity with the inventory.”
He suggests a marketing application of the insight this gives. If a competitor brand has gone out of stock, it can help the Publicis Groupe client to understand who shops the category and the last time they bought this kind of product. “That gives them the ability to move at the speed of a retailer,” says Scott. Why is that important? Increasingly, for the CPG companies, they're competing with Amazon. Amazon's introducing private label stuff, and they're bidding them down the page, giving them that level of visibility and intelligence is going to logarithmically drive their business outcomes forward.”
“We've been designing apps like that, vertical by vertical. And they are not creative output apps. They are new business driving applications, marketing applications.”
It’s a bit more than a fun new AI bot, then. “As you can tell, it's a very different conversation,” says Carla. “And I think it had to take a hype video for us to go, ‘Can we stop focusing on where AI incrementally at some point can kind of help us? But focus on the foundational benefits and necessity of using AI, which has to start with data.'” The creative outputs of gen AI don’t hold the power they did a year ago. It’s the wrangling of data for business applications that counts. And the leaps in that part of AI have been huge too, she says. “For the first time, we can actually connect large siloed bits of data that gives us new intelligence and new insight. Without that, all of that is just bullshit.”
The BSBot knows the jargon of AI, though. Which can accumulate around even the most legitimate of tech claims. “It's hard to be honest,” says Carla. “The challenge is going to be to present this in straight talk. I don't know whether Scott and his team is totally capable of that,” she laughs.
“It hasn't disputed any of my facts! It's gone straight after my delivery and cadence,” he retorts.
“Because it's been trained on all the stuff that's already been said about AI, it knows the tropes, the conventions, the things that are repeated again and again. So that's the basis of the entertaining part, translating it into straight talk. But then the real thing happens when it provides you with a question that you can ask that will hopefully prompt a more meaningful conversation.”
