AI Predictions & Bold moves: Pfizer, Sorrell and NVIDIA
The latest most transformational stories you need to know.
Dear reader,
Welcome back to BN Edition: concise analysis on the stories that offer us hints at our unfolding future. Fresh from the desks of the Brilliant Noise team.
Each edition takes a handful of stories from recent weeks and asks three things:
What? The story in a few sentences.
So what? Why do I need to know?
What next? What do I need to do or watch out for?
This week, find out more about:
Martin Sorrell predicts how AI will change advertising
Pfizer roll out custom gen AI platform to their marketing teams
NVIDIA launch a platform that will democratise generative AI
Let’s get into it.
Martin Sorrell predicts how AI will change advertising
What?
Martin Sorrell made some comments at a conference in Asia about AI and advertising.
One of them being:
“Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” while talking about the impact of AI on the industry and hinted at large scale job losses in areas including media-buying.
“The days when we rely on a 25-year-old media planner and buyer will be over,” he added.
Five areas where Sorrell sees AI impacting advertising and media :
Visualisation and copy writing. What took three weeks can take two hours. More use of text to visuals. This is a double-edged sword for agencies selling their services on time.
Hyper personalisation. Netflix has already taught us how to use data to create content at scale. AI can help build content factories at a huge scale. The price of the assets will go down but the number of assets deployed will be greater so it will be a positive for agencies.
Media planning and buying. This will be revolutionised as media planners and buyers are replaced with algorithms.
Agency and client efficiency. Linear marketing plans that used to cost millions will be reduced to hundreds of thousands and client-agency bottlenecks are streamlined.
Knowledge transfer. The ability for people to share information inside companies is going to be revolutionised by AI, creating flatter organisational models with the ability for all teams to upskill and act quicker.
Source: ‘Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas’: Martin Sorrell on the fate of agencies in an AI age, Campaign Live
So what?
Any analysis by Martin Sorrell should be framed by two facts:
His digital-first, S4 Capital, has lost about 90% of its value over the last three years, compromising a business model based on acquiring agencies with shares.
Sorrell fully exited WPP plc this week (one of the world's largest advertising and PR groups, a company he founded but was ousted from), and is antagonistic to his former colleagues.
Sorrell’s position is that of a traditionalist. He’s attacking the incumbent holding groups and imagining changes which suit his agenda with S4 Capital to be, er, the next big holding group.
He advocates for a fairly traditional vision of consolidated, global agency groups, but the forces of digital disruption are likely to create new, more agile operating models, like networks, platforms and ecosystems.
Dinosaurs didn’t notice the meteor coming: While Sir Martin recognises major disruption is coming, he seems to underestimate just how drastically the agency model will need to evolve. Incremental changes around technology skills, transparency and global scale are likely insufficient.
Big may not be better: Organisations that are too large and rigid are often too slow to respond to frequent disruptions of a complex digital environment. Smaller, more agile organisations could be better suited to thrive in this new reality.
Bonus angle: The “Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas” line is pure snark, but also an opportunity for us to remind astute readers that there are no known instances of voting by turkeys affecting the timing of Christmas, nor the outcome for most turkeys during the festive period. Turkeys don’t vote ever. But agency turkeys get to shape the future if they want to.
What next?
The smart moves now are to invest in artificial intelligence capability and innovation:
Resist certainty: Agreeing or disagreeing with an analysis like this is a red herring. The impact of ongoing digital transformation, fuelled by artificial intelligence and other innovations will change business models and offers.
Invent the future: Betting on one vision of how marketing services will evolve is high risk.
Think like a scientist: An open mind, developing capability (skills and tools) to support a business or operating models while experimenting.
Look for the innovators: There are big shifts coming in marketing – weak brand investment in advertising (US data show declines in confidence in the sector) – and a Cambrian explosion of new approaches fuelled by AI will create new models.
Pfizer roll out custom gen AI platform to their marketing teams
What?
Pfizer has developed a new generative AI platform to enhance Pfizer's content supply chain and overhaul its marketing strategies.
‘Charlie’ is being deployed across Pfizer's central marketing team and its various brands, to be used by hundreds of employees and key agency partners like Publicis Groupe and IPG.
The platform focuses on content creation, editing, fact-checking, and legal reviews, crucial in regulated industries like pharmaceutical marketing. It employs a ‘red, yellow, green’ risk system for content review, aims to quintuple content creation, and integrates seamlessly with Adobe platforms and Slack for enhanced collaboration and insights.
Source: Pfizer is building a new generative AI platform for pharma marketing, Digiday
So what?
By focusing on critical aspects like content creation, legal compliance, and collaboration tools, Pfizer is setting a new standard for AI's role in industry-specific marketing.
Without the full details of the tool they have built, it’s impossible to know how advanced it is. But what is clear is Pfizer is making their position on the potential of AI to revolutionise healthcare KNOWN. It’s an invitation to join the race.
What next?
A few weeks ago, we reported how another big pharma leader–Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson–is approaching AI. His opinion is one of surprise at the number of senior leaders whose first response to an AI conversation is "governance, controls, rules, principles."
Fear is a natural response, but if this really is the fourth industrial revolution then getting people to AI literacy is the most important thing. Fear can take over, and deprive us of so much opportunity.
The worst response is silence.
Once people had the vertiginous experience of seeing what they can do with Gen AI – they’ve saved hours and got rid of their ‘drag’ (time-draining and soul-destroying) tasks, only once people in an organisation have that felt-sense of what's possible there’s no stopping them. If you’re wondering why your people aren’t using it, you’re not alone, but you are behind. You need to create demand in order to use the opportunity.
But tech solutionism isn’t the answer.
Software isn’t the answer. You can turn up with the best tech in the world but people won't use it unless you've created an emotional need for it. Be suspicious of anyone showing up with complete solutions. Counter-intuitively, the more complete your organisation’s AI solution is at this point, the more limited it is. Because what will you do when everything changes next week? Then again the week after?
Nobody knows anything.
If you bet on solutions, for example, if you pay a large provider now you’re betting they’ll be the best provider for the next (circa) three years. But it’s impossible to project that far into the future with AI. As we said in response to Martin Sorrell’s ‘Go big or go home’ comment: big may not be the answer to this new challenge. Nobody knows what will happen, we can’t yet imagine how this will change our lives our work or our lives. Even in the last week, Claude 3 came out and trumped previous golden child ChatGPT in IQ tests. GPT5 is coming out soon. And OpenAI’s Sora came out of nowhere. What’s next? Nobody knows.
Develop capability and an innovation mindset instead.
Getting your organisation to a place where you share the same view of the fundamentals, the framing and the context can you build from there. But until people have it in their hands - they won’t know what the possibilities are.
NVIDIA launch a platform that will democratise generative AI
What?
NVIDIA has introduced the Blackwell platform, marking a significant advancement in computing technology.
The Blackwell platform, featuring the new Blackwell GPU, is designed to power a new era of computing, enabling organizations to build and run AI models with up to trillion parameters.
This innovation is expected to unlock breakthroughs in various fields, including data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided drug design, quantum computing, and generative AI.
Source: NVIDIA Blackwell arrives to power a new era of computing, NVIDIA
So what?
Less carbon: Significantly reducing energy consumption and operational costs for AI processing tasks, the platform will help decrease carbon emissions related to AI.
More technology overhang: If Gen AI stopped evolving right now, we’d still have 5-10 years of world shaking business innovation just finding applications with the current AI models. Blackwell will power more performance and more breakthroughs, adding fuel to the flame of AI exponentiality.
This is a race that is gathering pace: We have barely even started to scratch the surface of what we can do with this technology. Rapid progress at every level, from the chips to the models to the business applications shows every sign of keep up its breakneck pace for years to come.
What next?
There are new products coming out every day and the pace of innovation is insane.
When running AI capability workshops with clients a recurring theme is that we don’t yet have the language yet to describe all the new things we can do. When we say ‘bot’ we’re used to that being a chat bot that took months and a big budget to build. With Gen AI our non-technical team have turned the following things into bots this week:
a plan
a book
a repor
a conversation
a workshop
Generative AI means you can instantly turn anything into a database and interact with it. Have a conversation, even.
Everything that can be a bot will be a bot. But not in the way we know them. And from there, who knows?
Thank you for reading.
The Brilliant Noise team