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We’re going strong after Cannes LIONS 2023 – even after hosting more than 5,000 people at SPORT BEACH. The emerging themes still on our minds: 

1. The consensus at Cannes was that generative AI is no passing fad. But brands and marketers need to understand how to use (and not use) AI to truly realize its potential.

    

2. Brands need to understand the risks of embracing polarizing issues. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t stand for something.

    

3. Fandom is even more valuable than you think. How else could a dish soap company like Dawn have more fans than tech and entertainment giants?  

Get ready, because we’re diving deep into all three … 

How AI and AR Will Transform Sports 

The Intersection of Sport and Sustainability  

What Turns Customers Into Fans

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Beyond the Stage

Stagwell talked to C-suite marketers, sports luminaries, and other innovators at SPORT BEACH and the Palais. You’ll find fresh, insightful videos on our YouTube page from every day of Cannes LIONS. 

On the sand at SPORT BEACH, Anton Vincent, President, Mars Wrigley, North America, talked to the NFL’s Mack Hollins and Damaune Journey, Global Chief Growth Officer, 72andSunny, about treating business like sports, sustainable growth, and the importance of the Black Executive CMO Alliance (BECA).

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1. THE AI REVOLUTION IS REAL OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL·E would lead to an “explosion of creativity” in the marketing industry. His key points: Creatives will use it to generate and enhance ideas more quickly, e.g. easy-to-create storyboards that let agencies explore lots of possibilities. Meanwhile, on the rooftop of the Carlton, Code and Theory’s co-founder and executive chairman Dan Gardner stressed that companies need to embed AI across their entire ecosystems – not just in one-off use cases. DIVE DEEPER: Mark Penn sees AR and AI as the industry’s biggest disruptors
2. YOU HAVE THE POW(AR) What’s holding back brands on AR? The perception that it’s difficult to create and activate at meaningful scale, said CPB president, North America, Maggie Malek at Hôtel Martinez. But Snap’s AR tools and companies like Stagwell’s ARound are making it easier to target passionate new customers in unique ways.
   Speaking of Snap, it teamed up with Disney to build an immersive AR exhibit at Cannes LIONS. And AR developer Niantic announced Rewarded AR, an ad platform that will allow for branded content in mixed-reality games like Pokémon GO. THE APPLE EFFECT: What Apple’s new $3,499 Vision Pro headset means for brands
3. DON’T SLEEP ON THE METAVERSE With all the attention on AI, brands may have neglected opportunities in the metaverse. At the Palais, Roblox’s Christina Wootton said that’s a huge mistake: brands (especially fashion labels) have a great opportunity to connect with Gen Z in the metaverse. Plus, she doesn’t see AI and the metaverse as in conflict, noting that brands could use generative AI to populate the metaverse with a ton of enticing content. NEW RESEARCH: NRG’s Fandex says innovation creates fans, and fans are 3.5x more likely to advocate for brands.

Beyond the Stage

Stagwell talked to C-suite marketers, sports luminaries, and other innovators at SPORT BEACH and the Palais. You’ll find fresh, insightful videos on our YouTube page from every day of Cannes LIONS. 

At SPORT BEACH, Olympian Allyson Felix talked to Evin Shutt, Global Chief Executive Officer and Partner, 72andSunny, about founding her footwear company Saysh and women’s sports.

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Talent in the Metaverse 

What’s next in connection, community, and commerce for avatars, athletes and artists? Hear from Tracy Benson, CEO and Founder of Obsesh, Nova Han of Nova Han Productions, and Helix Wolfson, President of Metaverse Operations at Infinite Reality. Stream the episode.

Creator Economy and the Metaverse

How are creators and platforms envisioning the future of fandom and engagement in the metaverse and other immersive realities? Maggie Malek, CEO, MMI and John Rough, SVP, Enterprise for Untied Masters, discuss. Stream the episode.

Fandom, Music, and Metaverse 

VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi, Jonathan Vlassopulos, CEO of Napster, and Animal Concerts Executive Producer, Music, Anthony Mazzo discuss how brands can connect with artists, music, platforms and communities in the metaverse. Stream the episode.

Inclusivity in the Metaverse 

AFROPUNK founder Jocelyn Cooper and Shelby Larkin, Director, Global Partnership development at SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park discuss diverse communities can benefit from the Metaverse. Stream the episode. 

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72andSunny

• Call of Duty Modern Warfare “Squad Up” – Nominee – Video > General Video > Trailer – VOTE HERE 
• NFL “We See You” – Honoree – Advertising, Marketing & PR > Advertising Campaign > Corporate Social Responsibility Campaign – VIEW THE WORK 
• HubSpot “Success Stories” – Honoree – Advertising, Marketing & PR > Craft > Best Copywriting – VIEW THE WORK 
• Bumble “Fall in Love with Dating” –  Honoree – Advertising, Marketing & PR > Individual > Video Ad Shortform > VIEW THE WORK  
• Google “Helping You Help Them” – Honoree – Advertising, Media & PR – Advertising Campaigns – Best Partnership or Collaboration – VIEW THE WORK  

Anomaly

• Make Time for the Life Artois – Nominee – Advertising, Media & PR > Craft > Best Video Editing – VOTE HERE

ARound

• ARound Stadium – Honoree – Apps, dApps and Software > App Features > Best Use of Augmented Reality – VIEW THE WORK

Code and Theory

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill – Nominee – Websites and Mobile Sites > General Websites and Mobile Sites > Architecture, Art & Design – VOTE HERE
• Code and Theory Inclusive Design & Marketing – Honoree  – Video > Branded Entertainment > Diversity, Equity & Inclusion – VIEW THE WORK
• Windows (Consumer) – Honoree –  Websites and Mobile Sites > General Websites and Mobile Sites > Web Services & Applications – VIEW THE WORK
• Fatherly – Honoree – Websites and Mobiles Sites > General Websites and Mobile Sites > Travel & Lifestyle – VIEW THE WORK
• Amazon Ads – Honoree – Advertising, Media & PR > Branded Content > Products & Services – VIEW THE WORK

GALE

• 26.2 You’re Gonna Need Milk For That with MilkPEP – Nominee – Advertising, Media & PR > PR Campaigns > Best Event Activation > VOTE HERE  

HUNTER

• Johnnie Walker and Lilly Singh Join Forces for Gender Parity in Leadership – Nominee –  Video > Branded Entertainment > Corporate Social Responsibility – VOTE HERE

Instrument

• Eames Institute – Nominee – Website and Mobile Sites > General Websites and Mobile Sites > Architecture, Art & Design > VOTE HERE
• Blackspace – Nominee – Websites and Mobile Sites > General Websites and Mobile Sites > Activism – VOTE HERE

Observatory

• “Live From The Upside Down” Netflix Stranger’s Things and Doritos from Observatory & Slap Global – Nominee – Advertising,  Media & PR > Branded Content > Media & Entertainment – VOTE HERE 
• “Live From The Upside Down” Netflix Stranger’s Things and Doritos from Observatory & Slap Global – Nominee – Video > Branded Entertainment > Media & Entertaniment – VOTE HERE
• “Live From The Upside Down” Netflix Stranger’s Things and Doritos from Observatory & Slap Global – Nominee – Metaverse, Immersive & Virtual > General Virtual Experiences > Entertainment, Sports & Music – VOTE HERE 

YML

• YETI Year in Preview: Plan your wildest year yet – Nominee – Websites and Mobile Sites > General Websites and Mobile Sites > Events – VOTE HERE 
• Albertsons: Simplifying Grovery Shopping for Millions – Nominee – Apps, dApps and Software > General Apps > Shopping & Retail – VOTE HERE 
• Chopt: Building an End-to-End Experience for a Challenger Brand – Nominee – Apps, dApps and Software > General Apps > Food & Drink –  VOTE HERE 
• FIREWATCH: Using NFTs to Fight California Wildfires – Honoree -Websites and Mobile Sites – Responsible Innovation – VIEW THE WORK  
• Albertsons: Simplifying Grocery Shopping for Millions in the Websites and Mobile Sites – Honoree – Best Mobile Visual Design – Function – VIEW THE WORK 
• Champion: Evolving an Iconic Brand For a New Generation – Honoree – Websites and Mobile Sites > Shopping & Retail –  VIEW THE WORK 
• Chopt: Building an End-to-End Experience for a Challenger Brand – Honoree – Apps, dApps and Software > Technical Achievement – VIEW THE WORK 
• FIREWATCH: Using NFTs to Fight California Wildfires – Honoree – Websites and Mobile Sites > Sustainable Technology: VIEW THE WORK 

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LEGO: Branded Entertainment and Brand Fandom Go Hand in Hand  

LEGO Creative Director James Gregson shared his team’s playbook for using brand entertainment content like “The LEGO Movie” to drive long-term brand fandom with Rescout’s Ivan Kayser. Watch the clip.

Lenovo and Infinite Reality: What Is the Most Important Driver of Fandom?  

National Research Group’s Jay Kaufman interviews Infinite Reality CMO Hope Frank, Lenovo CMO Gerald Youngblood, NRG CMO Grady Miller and Brand Performance Network’s Shannon Pruitt after their SXSW Session “The Anatomy of a Fan.” Watch the clip

Minnesota Twins: Fan Insights Fuel Better Experiences

Technology is giving sports teams and sports marketers insights into fan behavior that they’ve never had before. Chris Iles, Sr. Director, Innovation and Growth at the Minnesota Twins, caught up with Stagwell at SXSW to chat about how teams like Twins are integrating tech innovation to reach a new generation of fans. Watch the Clip.

By

Mark Penn, Chairman and CEO, Stagwell

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At CES 2023 in January, Stagwell was the only global marketing services network to exhibit on the main convention floor as we focused on showing how we transform marketing through impactful technology. There, we unveiled an exciting new division in the Stagwell Marketing Cloud to build Specialty Media formats that offer brands novel ways to reach, engage, and monetize key consumer segments across sports, travel, retail, news, and dining. The unit currently includes ARound, our shared AR product in use by the Los Angeles Rams; a new QR code powered marketplace for restaurants and bars; and a new travel marketplace from Ink.    

Through this tech-focused approach, we are bringing new experiences to consumers, whether at the stadium, in a restaurant, or on an airplane. Along with these experiences comes a wealth of creative marketing opportunities, adding, as Digiday reports, yet another “bow in the quiver” of the Cloud that keeps us at the forefront of new forms of richly targeted media

Originally Released On

PR Newswire

CONTACT:

Brandon Dixon
pr@stagwellglobal.com

NEW YORK, Feb. 22, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW) today expanded its digital transformation and engineering network Code and Theory with the addition of Silicon Valley-born digital product and design agency YML (Y Media Labs). The Code and Theory Network now includes six agencies: flagship shop Code and Theory, Kettle, Mediacurrent, Rhythm, Truelogic, and YML. The move creates a truly differentiated integrated network boasting nearly 2,000 people with 50% engineers and 50% creative talent, equipping client partners with teams purpose-built to solve digital-first end-to-end business challenges.

“Stagwell believes a digital-first approach drives holistic business transformation and marketing innovation,” said Mark Penn, chairman and CEO, Stagwell.  “Stagwell is accelerating our investment in scaled digital transformation and engineering capabilities by aligning a truly impressive set of agencies to support our global client partners.”

Stagwell’s Code and Theory Network now boasts approximately 800 engineers who can execute 24/7 development cycles utilizing onshore, nearshore, and offshore engineering. YML’s arrival adds key offshore scale in India and award-winning native app development capabilities.

“We are excited to expand the Code and Theory Network with the addition of YML and the opportunities this will unlock for our clients and our talent,” said Dan Gardner, co-founder and executive chairman, Code and Theory Network. “Modern business is digital business. We now have both the scale of technology services and the balance of excellent creativity to deliver end-to-end services across the customer journey, which our competitors in traditional agencies or consultancies simply don’t have.”

Dan Gardner, along with Mike Treff, CEO of Code and Theory, will lead the Code and Theory Network. YML will continue to be led by CEO and Co-Founder Ashish Toshniwal. And, as part of this network expansion, Lauren Kushner has been promoted to CEO of Kettle.

“I could not be more excited for YML’s next chapter as we join the Code and Theory network. Building on our momentum, this move will bring our clients a new roster of resources, technology partnerships and near-shore global reach with engineering scale in Latin America,” said Toshniwal.

All agencies within the network will continue to operate under their individual brands, consistent with Stagwell’s focus on collaboration between complementary groups versus agency consolidation. Brands within the network will retain their cultures and unique capability sets, while scaling through more integrated work.

About Code and Theory Network

The Code and Theory Network is the digital-first creative and technology group within Stagwell, built to partner with businesses to navigate the complexity of changing consumer behaviors and emerging technologies. With a global footprint and the capabilities to work cross the entire consumer journey, we crave the hardest problems to solve. The network includes the flagship agency Code and Theory as well as Kettle, MediaCurrent, Rhythm, TrueLogic, and YML.

About YML

YML (Y Media Labs) is a design and technology agency bringing Silicon Valley to the world by creating award-winning digital products and experiences. YML has launched mobile apps, websites and other digital experiences for a range of clients including PayPal, Google, Universal Music Group, The Home Depot, Yeti and Polestar. Its work has been recognized by Steve Jobs (ya, that Steve Jobs) and featured by TED Talks, in The Wall Street Journal (“YML is one of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley”), Forbes, Ad Age, ABC, CNBC and more. Founded in 2009, YML is now home to 500+ innovative designers, strategists, and engineers around the globe. To learn more please visit yml.co.

About Stagwell

Stagwell is the challenger network built to transform marketing. We deliver scaled creative performance for the world’s most ambitious brands, connecting culture-moving creativity with leading-edge technology to harmonize the art and science of marketing. Led by entrepreneurs, our 13,000+ specialists in 34+ countries are unified under a single purpose: to drive effectiveness and improve business results for their clients. Join us at www.stagwellglobal.com

By: Tim Hawes on February 3, 2023

Associate Strategy Director for Europe, Tim Hawes breaks down generative AI and gathers insights from teams at Assembly on ChatGPT and its applications.

Over the last two years, advancements in generative AI have been taking the world by storm, just check out some of the headlines:

Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony completed by artificial intelligence.

Why It’s So Hard to Resist Turning Your Selfies Into Lensa AI Art.

How a deepfake Tom Cruise on TikTok turned into a very real AI company.

ChatGPT passes exams from law and business schools.

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Generative AI utilises machine learning to create new and unbelievably real digital content with minimal human intervention, leaving many questioning the ethical role this tech plays in our everyday lives. In practice, brands and marketers are assessing how these tools will impact their work and the future of their industries.  

We spoke with some of the brilliant minds at Assembly to get their points of view and what they’re excited about when it comes to generative AI.

What can generative AI be used for, other than creating AI art of cats?

Tim Hawes, Associate Strategy Director for Europe: It has a tone of utility already and its rate of development is astounding. It seems like a new AI for “X” is released or posted every day. It can pretty much answer any question you throw at it (ChatGPT, that is). It’s like a chat-based Wikipedia in that regard. I’ve asked it to explain history, maths and random facts or even write some marketing headlines or code snippets. It can write recipes – which is what really kickstarted my renewed interest in it. I watched a video where a chef explains her preferences; type of meal and the bot outputs a full menu and instructions for a full Indian-inspired thanksgiving dinner.

Other than cats, it (DALL-E) can create some genuinely interesting art, some can come out looking a little uncanny valley-esque though, depending on what you ask it to generate. There are AIs for everything,  theresanaiforthat.com is a database of many of them; I wouldn’t be surprised if an AI curated it. Because of the way that the ChatGPT  is trained, it can recount any set of information it has ingested, merging sources together and creating ‘new’ text, depending on how you prompt it. You can even ask it to ‘speak’ in a particular mode or instruct it to take on a particular role.

So as far as “what else CAN a generative AI do?” with enough quality input I’d be asking “what can’t it do?”

Are there limitations with ChatGPT and similar tech?

Pedro Mona, Global Director Martech & Data: Two of the major factors limiting scale right now are server capacity issues and computing power – ChatGPT was down recently because half of LinkedIn were trying to access it at the same time. There are also organisations using ChatGPT to churn out essays and sell them to university students, granted the work was brilliant, however, the machine didn’t seem to understand the concept of referencing. So, plagiarism and duplicate content could certainly be an issue – which brings us back to my point on training models specific to clients and brands. On the topic of coding, it’s certainly got applications in shortening writing time but it’s essentially not much different from stealing code from the slew of libraries out there anyway – that’s what everyone already does.

David Hidasi, Senior Data Scientist: In the role of data science, it can help us to generate and fill holes in data as well as create basic functions and give us shortcuts for coding – which humans can then elaborate on and develop. We’re not there yet as far as relying on it end-to-end, there will always be some requirement for testing and human curation – given the pre-trained nature of the networks.

What does AI mean for marketers and brands?

Kristie Naha-Biswas, Head of Strategy & Planning for Europe: AI is pretty amazing, but frightening at the same time.  The ability to produce content faster and more efficiently than humans may be appealing to brands or procurement as a new cost-efficient evolution in their marketing deployment, but there is one vital human component that this technology still lacks, which is empathy and emotion. Emotion is what makes art, in any form be that a painter or a musician, unique.  Art is a human expression of emotion that cannot be replicated by AI, it is the artists’ personal experience and original thought that elicits an emotional response from their audience – do we love it or hate it. Advertising creative is no different. Emotionally led and real, insight driven ideas are what makes creative distinct so brands can stand out to build that critical mental availability vital to any successful brand formula. I think there is a future role for how we can use AI to drive greater personalisation of a piece of content, or messages from an overarching creative idea, or concept.

Pedro Mona, Global Head of Data and Martech: The way agencies and brands are going to win with generative AI is integrating it into human-assisted workflows – where maybe an analyst could work on one or two things at a time, now maybe its three or five at once! Training and integrating generative AI models into a brand, where it understands the tone – the voice of the brand – will take it much further to “on brand” content than its current public training models. I see big applications for content in this regard.

The most interesting part is testing human versus AI versus human + AI. In my previous experience producing predictive models for media performance, the human-assisted AI campaign won by a landslide – the input quality and the human context for the brand and therefore analysis bore the best results. While I don’t see it replacing search engines entirely (the ability to index up-to-date data isn’t there yet) it has wonderful applications for accessibility – text to speech rendering and explanation of advanced topics can have brilliant utility for the visually impaired, for example. Ultimately, I think it’s going to become the new standard, improve parallel workflows and companies that can utilise it in the context of their own brands. There will always be an element of human intervention in quality control and analysis that I don’t see going away any time soon.

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