“Scared and excited”
Generative AI is reshaping many industries, including marketing, advertising, and media. As this cutting-edge technology advances, its profound impact is becoming increasingly evident. Understanding its potential implications and opportunities is crucial.
In the latest episode of our Identity Architects podcast, InfoSum's SVP, Marketing & Communications, Ben Cicchetti, sat down with Sean Betts, Chief Product & Technology Officer at OMG UK, to discuss Generative AI, data privacy, mental health, and more.
“What keeps me awake at night is how disruptive it's going to be to marketing and to advertising and to media, kind of specifically. There's a lot of unknowns with the technology. It's still incredibly new. There's a lot of very big promises that are being made around it that have some incredibly large implications to society. But also, I think marketing is probably going to feel that sooner than most industries. [...] But at the same time, it is the thing that gets me up in the morning. I'm super passionate about it. I'm really excited about it. [...] I say to anyone I talk to about generative AI that you should be 50/50 scared and excited.”
Generative AI is incredibly fascinating and holds great promise for the future. As this technology advances, we must consider how we can best utilize and manage this intelligence.
“I think there's some amazing, impressive capabilities that we were already seeing and have seen for the last 18 months since ChatGPT was launched, but we're still very, very early. The way I think about it is that what we're seeing is the very first early example of how technology can be intelligent. And the challenge and the reason why I think we're still so early is not because the technology isn't as intelligent as it could be or we want it to be because that's obvious and true. The technology will get better and it will get more intelligent. But we have to figure out what we want to do with that intelligence. And that means there's a lot of building and engineering to be done around generative AI, to really apply that intelligence in ways that is going to be helpful and useful and interesting and help people in their day-to-day lives and in their professional lives.”
It's incredible to see the potential for generative AI and its applications evolve. They will inevitably disrupt and transform various aspects of our lives as they continue to develop. For instance, they will significantly impact how we search for and engage with content.
“I think search is going to be hugely impacted by generative AI. [...] OpenAI, I think were able to get that kind of like half step ahead by launching chatGPT, which no one was expecting, and no one really foresaw the impact that that might have. But I think it's very, very obvious now that it is going to have a big impact on search.”
And there are some exciting developments in the space.
“I think where we end up in a couple of years' time is that we have got a primary interface with a generative AI model that is more like a personal assistant. And that's going to be doing the searching, not the human. And that has a profound impact, not just on search, not just on the advertising revenues that are generated through search and Google's whole business model, that's going to have a profound impact on marketing as well. Because we might find that in a few years' time the amount of traffic that is human versus AI agents or assistants is shifting quite a lot. And there's not as many human impressions as there used to be. And that's a really interesting challenge for marketers to think about.”
The evolution of search, driven by advancements in AI, has significant implications for publishers, particularly regarding revenue generation through page views. As AI continues to reshape user behavior and the search landscape, it raises the question of how Generative AI will specifically impact the publisher business.
“There's a big shift happening for publishers, but I think it's actually a positive one. So a lot of companies like OpenAI and Apple have been doing direct deals with publishers to be able to access their content. And that's because it's high-quality content and it's content that is opinionated and you can't find elsewhere. And that content is incredibly good for training models, but it's also content that's incredibly useful for providing the next version of search results in generative AI models. So when people are asking questions about current events, you want to surface answers from those publications. You don't want to make up answers or you don't necessarily want to rely on having to go to a search engine to find those answers.”
It’s a win-win situation for AI companies and publishers, with many benefits for media owners.
“That means that publishers don't have to worry about surfing their content on lots of different platforms. It means they don't have to worry about clickbait headlines. They don't have to worry about how their content ranks organically anymore. And I think that frees publishers up quite a lot to focus on really high-quality journalism and knowing that there is some guaranteed revenue against that content, no matter how many of our eyeballs actually see it. So I think it's going to result in a much healthier ecosystem.”
Generative AI is proving to be highly beneficial not only for publishers but also for marketers. Marketers can leverage generative AI in various ways, one of which is using synthetic data to gain valuable insights. This data can offer marketers a deeper understanding of consumer behavior, preferences, and trends, which in turn can inform more effective marketing strategies and campaigns.
“Probably in the next three to five years is that we can build simulated markets out of these data sets that agents are operating in and simulating how a market operates so that you can start to put marketing campaigns into that simulated market, see how that artificial intelligence population reacts to that marketing campaign going into the market, learn from it, optimize your campaign before you start spending real marketing dollars against it. So this idea of being able to fully pre-test a campaign in a simulated market, optimizing it, and then putting it out into a real-world market, I think is a big part of all of our futures as marketers. [...] The ability to be able to test campaigns incredibly low cost before you spend money against it, I think, is it's going to be fascinating and turns kind of marketing on its head a little bit.”
There’s massive potential and so many opportunities in the future, some of which we are already aware of, while others we will discover as we progress. However, along with the numerous benefits, we also face certain challenges. What does the process of auditing this look like, and how can we ensure brand safety, for example?
“To be brutally honest, if I was a marketer and I wanted to adopt this technology, I wouldn't feel comfortable approving a model unless I'd seen it tested millions of times. [...] I think where we end up in, I'm saying three to five years at the moment, I think that's probably about when it will happen, is that we will have the technology around generative AI to be able to build the models, to put guardrails around them so that they only generate content that a brand would be happy with, and to be able to test it at scale before it goes live so that we can be confident that it's not going to go off the rails in a live environment when it's producing huge amounts of content. And we will have the technology in place to be able to audit the models, to look at the content it's created, and importantly, understand why it's created that content based on the signals that it's using as the input.”
There’s definitely going to be lots of exciting things around AI to look forward to. Thanks, Sean, for the chat!
