Reimagining Advertising as a Suite of Intelligent Products

By Tim Williams

Visit almost any agency website at random and its almost certain you’ll find a “services” section with a predictable list that includes “brand development, strategic planning, campaign development, media planning, analytics” and you can guess the rest.

Occasionally this catalog of capabilities will include something out of the ordinary, like “environmental design” or “retail media integrations” but most of this list is both ordinary and unsurprising. No wonder clients have a difficult time distinguishing one agency from another.

But the bigger point is that today’s clients don’t want to buy your competencies; they want solutions to business problems. Today’s smartest agencies are evolving their traditional bullet-point list of capabilities into bundled solution sets — “products” in place of services.

Reframing competencies

Professionals are easily repelled by the idea of selling products. But a “product” is simply a solution to a problem. In fact, dictionaries sometimes list the word “result” as a synonym. And thanks now to the power of artificial intelligence, agencies are able to reframe and reimagine their service offerings as a series of intelligent products designed to produce specific results for their clients.

“Intelligent products” have at their core the formidable power of Large Language Models that augment and transcend what humans alone can do. A chatbot is an example of an intelligent product, and hundreds if not thousands of agencies have already developed custom chatbots designed to carry out marketing tasks normally accomplished by human labor.

In context of business applications in advertising and marketing, intelligent products can:

Analyze Customer Data: Detect patterns in consumer behavior to tailor marketing strategies.

Optimize Ad Campaigns: Adjust targeting and messaging in real time based on user responses.

Personalize Content: Deliver individualized content recommendations across multiple channels.

Automate Customer Interactions: Manage interactions through AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants.

Agencies move to the forefront

While AI labs or software developers are currently on the forefront of intelligent product development, creative and media agencies will increasingly be compelled to adopt this business model as well.

In other words, while agencies will continue to license tools like Jasper and Celtra, they are also moving to create their own AI platforms. Skeptic from the agency Known is a good example. Skeptic is a holistic marketing development platform capable of creating strategies, developing targeted campaigns, testing, and much more — in effect, a suite of intelligent products.

For the agency Huge, LIVE (Living Intelligence Value Engine) is the central focus of the their business model. LIVE uses AI to analyze literally billions of data points to deliver culture-driven insights for marketing programs and campaigns.

Visit the websites of Known or Huge and you’ll see not a list of services, but rather their custom AI platform as a product-centric solution to their clients’ marketing and business problems. This is the future of the agency business.

The future of agency revenue streams

There are plenty of other examples of AI-powered products from notable agencies around the world:

The Insights Machine from Pereira O’Dell leverages AI to create dynamic, data-informed audience personas, enabling marketers to engage in real-time conversations with virtual representations of prospective customers.

The Bubl Creator from VCCP is an AI-powered platform developed for one of its major clients, 02, that enables their client to instantly create brand assets featuring 02's mascot “Bubl.”

PRophet, from the agency holding company Stagwell, is an AI-driven platform developed for the PR community to help predict media interest, sentiment and spread before a story is pitched.

These products, and many more like them, represent increasingly important revenue streams for these firms, and in the near future are destined to be the centerpiece of their business models.

Product centricity

The AI-driven productization of professional services is trending not because AI is trendy, but because it represents a vastly more effective method for problem solving than the labor-intensive services-centric approaches of the past.

Martin Sorrell, former founder of WPP and current CEO of holding company S4 Capital, recently announced his company’s intention of abandoning labor-based billing in favor of payment for outputs and results. He acknowledges that AI-powered products are essential for creating and producing the massive amount of quality content required by today’s brands, and Sorrell is directing S4 companies to move aggressively in that direction.

It’s increasingly clear to agency leaders that a business model optimized around AI-powered productization is not only the best choice for agencies, but perhaps the only choice.