ABOUT GALE

GALE is a Business Agency. Founded in 2014, the agency currently has offices in New York, Singapore, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles, London, Austin, Kansas City, and Bengaluru. GALE has received top industry awards including Ad Age’s A-List, Ad Age’s Data & Analytics Agency of the Year, Adweek’s Fastest Growing Agency, the Grand Effie and Adweek’s Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year. 

Frontiers in Focus

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Bomb Pop is the most popular ice pop that nobody can remember. GALE’s mission was simple: get tweens to remember the brand’s name. The team brought the favorite summertime snack into the virtual world of Restaurant Tycoon 2 in Roblox, where Roblox restaurant owners could serve eight virtual Bomb Pop flavors to their customers. Gamers served 48.5 million Bomb Pops — making it the #1 selling food item in Roblox history. 

Our Approach to Transformation

Introducing the Bomb Pop Update in Restaurant Tycoon 2. For two weeks, Roblox restaurant owners could serve virtual bomb pops to their hungry customers and earn limited edition gear to upgrade their restaurants – turning Restaurant Tycoon into a red, white, and blue bonanza, and making restaurant owners within the platform our very own virtual brand ambassadors, interior designers, and architects. In the process, using our limited-edition items, players completely transformed the restaurants into gaming lounges, family style buffets, and even high-end beach clubs with an average of 28 minutes engaged across the experience.  

Our Impact

Time spent was 133% beyond Roblox branded experience benchmarks. We also had over 500,000 unique users enlist as virtual bomb pop distributors who sold over 48.5 million bomb pops, making it the most sold food item in Roblox ever. Even more significantly, sales in the real world were also up with an immediate 28.6% increase. We proved that the virtual world can spur epic real world business results.

Wondering where to begin with immersive experience implementation in your organization?

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ABOUT COLLE MCVOY

Colle McVoy (CM) is a full-service creative agency that builds enduring relationships between forward-thinking brands and people. We believe this time of rapid change is filled with opportunities, so we constantly strive to push the boundaries of creativity, pressure-test best practices and create new brand futures. As a Certified B Corporation, we believe a better future means we have a responsibility to use our expertise as a force for good to benefit all people, communities and the planet.

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We’re sure you’ve heard about JOMO (the joy of missing out). Here’s the reality: It’s one thing to miss out, it’s an entirely different thing to find the joy in it. 

To reinforce La-Z-Boy’s new platform, Long Live the Lazy, Colle McVoy’s creative technology team designed and fabricated “The Decliner,” a first-of-its-kind recliner allowing owners to AI-generate a cancellation excuse via SMS simply by pulling the handle. 36,000+ people signed up for a chance to win their own Decliner just in time for National Lazy Day as part of the earned creative brand act. 

Our Approach to Transformation

For a chance to put their feet up with AI assistance and La-Z-Boy style, people were asked to submit the most creative excuses they’ve ever used to protect their JOMO. And, influencers created content to amplify attention to the contest. The innovation was a technological hack—with 225 lines of code directing the AI server and 344 lines for each fabricated chair. An indicator of sorts had to be fashioned to let people know requests were processing, which took the form of an LED-lined puck at the handle base. The tech choices needed to be as reliable as the chairs themselves and couldn’t disrupt La-Z-Boy’s comfort and durability standards.

Our Impact

Colle McVoy drove 1.1B media impressions across 317 placements in the likes of USA Today, Better Homes & Gardens, Architectural Digest and more. People definitely put their feet up, juicing La-Z-Boy’s website traffic by 200% and increasing brand sales by 50% during the first weekend of the campaign.

The La-Z-Boy Decliner has gone on to win several awards, including Best in Technology at the 2023 PRWeek Awards and Best in Research & Consumer Insights in MediaPost’s Planning & Buying Awards. Nearly 13,000 cancellations have been sent by Decliner owners, giddy with AI-assisted JOMO. 

Wondering where to begin with AI implementation in your organization?

Email Beth Sidhu, Chief Brand and Communications Officer at Stagwell, to discuss how we can support your organization’s digital goals. 

ABOUT LEFT FIELD LABS

Left Field Labs is a digital agency dedicated to solving our common challenges through uncommon creativity. Our team of over 100 designers, developers, and strategists has launched hundreds of digital products and experiences – from VR and websites to apps and experiential installations – for clients, such as Google, Discovery, Android, Estée Lauder, Uber, and Disney.  

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Google set out to create a 360° event-scale augmented reality (AR) experience at CES that would help attendees experience its presence in a whole new dimension. Google partnered with Left Field Labs to blend its physical booth location with a digital overlay, focused on bringing helpful and contextual information to attendees, as well as delightful moments.  

Our Approach to Transformation

LFL leveraged Google’s latest AR technologies in partnership with Adobe to inspire developers, creators, and brands at Google’s CES booth. The team aimed to demonstrate how AR has the potential to solve everyday challenges, whether orienting yourself around a busy environment, getting the scoop on more demos to see, finding transportation, or helping with decision making. 

First, LFL used Google’s Geospatial Creator, powered by ARCore and Google Maps Platform, in Adobe Aero to create an effective storyboard that integrated physical and digital elements seamlessly for the AR experience. LFL then built Google’s beloved Android Bot into the AR experience as a guiding figure with simple yet richly expressive interactions. Taking an agile approach, LFL iterated and tested on a wide range of Android and iOS mobile devices to ensure smooth performance for attendees.  

Our Impact

The AR guide to Google on Android at CES 2024 was a successful “show rather than tell” experience that helped attendees enjoy the space with immersive surprises along the way. The experience was activated nearly 9,000 times over the four-day event.  

Wondering where to begin with immersive experience implementation in your organization?

Email Beth Sidhu, Chief Brand and Communications Officer at Stagwell, to discuss how we can support your organization’s digital goals. 

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Insights for the C-Suite

Enjoyed these insights? View more commentary from our global marketing, technology, and creative experts in Stagwell’s “C[x]O” series for the C-Suite. Click here to explore more.

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The Sky’s the Limit But Use Cases are the Target

At Google Next – and at several marketing and technology conference this year, including CES and SXSW – the clear challenge to attendees was the two-step from theoretical implementations of AI to hard use-cases that provide value to consumers (and reasons for investment). It’s no wonder companies in attendance debuted over 101 real-world use cases for generative AI, spanning applications to consumer experiences, back-end-operations, insights, and more.  

Some common themes emerged as to where AI is providing the most immediate value:  

• AI to accelerate the curation of essential business insights: AI21 Labs showcased how they use a BigQuery integration called Contextual Answers to allow users to query data across their businesses conversationally.  
• AI to put the power of storytelling in everyone’s fingertips. Google unveiled Google Vids, a new AI-powered video creation app in its Workspace suite that can do everything from generate a storyboard, piece together first drafts of videos from stock multimedia, and do voiceovers.  
• AI to bring real-time tracking to the customer experience: UPS is constructing a digital twin of its entire distribution network that will enable customers to see where their packages are at any time.

AI Will Mean a Rewriting of Every Customer Interface – Here’s Where to Begin

Artificial intelligence represents a quantum leap for creativity and productivity.  As a network on the beat of marketing, we know that AI’s rise will mean a rewriting of almost all customer interfaces as companies race to deliver consumers the personalized experiences they’ve desired since the dawn of the internet. At Google Next, Stagwell CTO Merrill Raman and Stagwell Marketing Cloud CTO Mansoor Basha emphasized that the first step brands should take to reap the benefits of AI should be assessing their organization’s data infrastructure to ensure it is primed for AI.  

Tactically, that may mean deep clean-up of existing first party data sources using data science best practices to get the information organized in a manner that AI can extract useful insights from. Or it may mean partnering with a third-party data provider who can supplement your view of existing and prospective consumers. 

AI Can Be the Bedrock for Trust, When Implemented Appropriately

As Left Field Labs CEO Sarah Mehler shared at Google Next: with growth in AI utilization, a critical question to consider is how do we build trust with audiences when considering AI implementation? Striking the right tone in AI-enabled communications is a primary step. And remember that communication that reflects cultural and demographic nuances is what ultimately resonates with audiences and builds trust in new systems. Well-practiced organizations will apply sentiment analysis to better understand the emotions of a user and provide appropriate responses (thus driving traction and building more successful outcomes).  

Attention to detail is also crucial for building trust in AI implementations. A “Chain of Verification” is one of several methods that can be employed to enhance the accuracy of information provided by AI systems. This process involves multiple steps to validate information before it is conveyed to the user. For instance, after our language model generates a response, we can employ a separate validation model to scrutinize the facts within that response. This secondary check helps to identify and correct any inaccuracies or ‘hallucinations’—instances where the model generates false or misleading information. By systematically verifying data through multiple layers, we can provide more reliable and trustworthy outputs. 

Wondering where to begin with AI implementation in your organization?

Email Beth Sidhu, Chief Brand and Communications Officer at Stagwell, to discuss how we can support your organization’s digital goals. 

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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. WHAT MATTERS TO JURIES NOW Hot topic on day one: How would purpose be rewarded? This year, award juries could weigh the emotional impact of ads with their financial impact, thanks to new submission rules. Some creatives told Adweek they were hoping for “more scrutiny” on whether “purpose-based work actually drove real results for brands.” Creativity + results could be the new formula for success. DIVE DEEPER: Political Season Is in Full Swing. Brands Beware. 
2. BARBIE HAS A STORY TO TELL Like Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling in spandex, creative branded entertainment is hot. Richard Dickson, president and COO of Mattel, spoke at the Palais about reinvigorating the Barbie brand ahead of the buzzy movie release in July. In an interview with WWD, he stressed “we are storytellers” who “create narratives out of our brands” and want to be “where our consumer is.” DON’T BE BORING: What an ‘MBA in Entertainment’ Can Teach Us About Brand Content
3. EVERYONE IS OBSESSED WITH AI. SERIOUSLY. If ChatGPT was a real person, they’d be shmoozing at the Hotel Du-Cap, Sport Beach, and every other Cannes hot spot. What we’re obsessed with? The ocean-inspired work artists created with the help of generative AI at Microsoft Beach, done in partnership with Instrument. THE POWER OF AI: How A.I. Could Help You Craft the Perfect Media Pitch

On the Main 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. 

Carmelo Anthony spoke at SPORT BEACH about how he approaches business opportunities, his love of wine, and the current state of the NBA.

By

National Research Group

Full Report Here

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A new battlefront in the Tech Wars heated up last week with Microsoft’s announcement and hands-on demo of new AI capabilities in its Bing search engine and Edge browser. Google quickly followed suit by announcing its own conversational AI in a blog post on Monday and at an event in Paris later in the week. This all comes on the heels of ChatGPT’s launch late last year, which eclipsed 1M users in 5 days and 100M in less than two months.

With all the buzz, we wanted to take a pulse on public opinion and understanding of this emergent technology, so we surveyed 1,000 US Consumers on Tuesday this week. Here’s what we found…

NEWS STILL BREAKING THROUGH

While last week felt like a whirlwind of announcements and media coverage, it’s important to keep in mind that news about AI-powered search is only just beginning to break through to the masses. 17% of those we surveyed said they had heard a “great deal” about AI-powered search recently, and 53% had heard at least “some.” That’s not bad one week in, but there’s a long way to go before companies build mainstream familiarity and understanding of the technology.

DON’T COUNT GOOGLE OUT

Last week did not go as well as Google likely hoped with many headlines focusing on Bard’s inaccurate assertion that the Webb Space Telescope was the first to capture images of an exoplanet and a tepid media response to the event in Paris. But one week’s headlines will not determine the long-term trajectory of who wins the race.

SO WHO HAS THE EDGE?

Disruptor or incumbent? Microsoft certainly has taken the initiative, having released a functional product that is already available to beta testers (and a lengthy waitlist to gain access). They also plan on investing $10 billion into OpenAI. Google is the overwhelming incumbent in the search space, commands vast resources, and has assembled a formidable team that has been working on this technology for many years. The public appears to be favoring Google’s incumbency at this stage.

59% of those who have heard about AI-powered search say Google is best positioned to successfully deliver the technology to market …compared to 13% for Microsoft

Time will tell how much that shifts in the coming weeks and months as familiarity with the companies’ offerings deepens, and more users get their hands on the technology.

Looking forward, consumer excitement is palpable

A lot remains to be seen, but consumer excitement for the technology is building.

71% of those who have heard about AI-powered search say they’re excited about using the technology and 92% say they believe it will change the way people use the Internet. Why? Improved ease and speed of finding information and improved accuracy and relevance of search results are the key benefits driving their excitement.

IMPLICATIONS

As we look ahead, a few thoughts on how this will play out from here…

Finding the Early Adopters

Which companies will effectively find the segments of the population that drive early adoption and help their products cross the chasm? Our data points to the usual suspects as early adopters: Younger consumers (ages 18-34) who skew male, those working full time (who perhaps see workrelated applications/benefits), and more affluent and educated consumers.

Managing Expectations

The potential for conversational AI is clear, but as we’ve already seen, it’s still a work in progress. The process of “deep reinforcement learning” that drives applications like ChatGPT will take time to mature and there will be missteps and inaccurate results in the interim. Continual improvements in accuracy while managing consumer expectations will be important to mass adoption.

Achieving Product-Market Fit

In addition to generating excitement and driving trial, products will need to identify the Jobs to Be Done that will have staying power. With seemingly limitless applications for AI-powered search, what jobs can the technology do for users that deliver the most real, sustained utility? Keying in on these use cases and building products that are optimized for these needs will be critical to gaining a competitive advantage.

Monetization

Even new technologies that find the early adopters and achieve productmarket fit aren’t guaranteed a sustainable path forward—think of AI-powered voice assistants, which have achieved widespread adoption, yet struggled mightily to monetize. How will companies effectively monetize conversational AI? Will they follow the ad-supported playbook that Google has mastered? What subscription- based models will emerge?

Bringing AI into the Light

Now that AI is maturing across a new threshold, and as ChatGPT, Bing and Bard bring multidimensional algorithms forward in a radically new way, there may be an opportunity to incorporate a new level of transparency, education, and understanding of all AI, including existing algorithms that are already deeply interwoven into daily life. This may happen organically, as new AI are introduced; perhaps there is also an opportunity to create distinct and meaningful AI personas for existing tools, with inherent consumer choice built into the experience.

Proceeding Responsibly

There’s been much written about the unintended consequences and potential abuses of AI. Ambiguous and misleading answers, the expression of embedded bias, and the propagation of ideological filter bubbles are all concerns. Conversational AI will almost certainly be a proving ground for the extensive work that Microsoft, Google, and others have put in to anticipate consequences and safeguard against abuses. Close partnership between companies, their users, third parties, and regulatory bodies to ensure a responsible approach will be essential to maximizing the potential benefits of this new technology.

Want to learn more?
Contact Nick.Crofoot@nrgmr.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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By: Aaron Kwittken, Co-Founder and CEO, PRophet

Originally Published in The Drum

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When I launched PRophet in late 2020 I left behind both the ’comforts’ of agency life and the agency I founded. Fast-forward to 2023 and the road less traveled is now a digital super-highway destined to transform the PR industry as we know it, primarily using AI-driven technologies and techniques designed to make modern communicators more productive.