Ask any creative agency about their business strategy these days and chances are artificial intelligence will feature at one point or another. For many agencies, generative AI tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT are fast becoming a vital part of the creative development process, automation assistants are being used to minimise the time creatives have to spend on more menial tasks, and the technology has even found its way into fully fledged (albeit PR driven) campaigns such as Rethink’s Draw Ketchup stunt for Heinz.
As AI has increasingly pervaded the creative industries, there’s also been a surge of new agencies that are putting the technology at the heart of their offerings. One example of this is Fred & Farid spinoff Aimagination, which officially launched in January and describes itself as “global AI production studio tailor-made for the advertising industry”.
Headed up by Fred & Farid co-founder Frédéric Raillard, the idea for the studio was born after he went to see an AI art exhibition of the same name organised by one of his partners in Shanghai. “I could see really interesting visuals but those visuals were showing a complete lack of understanding of what brands needed. And on the other side, we had advertising talents who understood brand platform but had a complete fear about prompting and this world of AI. So I thought, we need to create a culture where we have these two things together,” he tells CR.
It’s always going to be harder to change a tanker, because you’ve got certain processes, you’ve got structures, you’ve got a muscle memory, you’ve got a lot of people
While Aimagination is tapping into a growing global community of AI artists, the majority of its output is created by its in-house team of prompters, who were drawn from Fred & Farid’s offices in Paris, Shanghai, New York and Los Angeles. Raillard is keen to keep it that way too. “Gen AI is so complicated and goes so fast that it’s hard to keep pace of the technology, so we are convinced that we cannot be efficient if we are isolated. We need to be together,” he explains. So far, this approach has led to collaborations with brands including LVMH, Pernod Ricard and Greta Thunberg’s non-profit Fridays for Future, as well as a two-year partnership with McCann.
As self-described “girl geeks of the industry”, new agency Uncharted’s co-founders Laura Jordan Bambach (previously Grey London), Hannah Matthews (ScienceMagic) and Fern Miller (R/GA London) have a history of leaning into new technologies, and AI is no exception. “One of the first things that we did when we came together was ask the question, what would you do if you were starting an agency from scratch? What skill sets do you need? Where do you need people? How can you augment talent with the best of technology to get to more interesting places?” says Bambach.
Alongside Uncharted’s structural/production partnership with Territory Studio, it also has relationships with AI-driven businesses including consultancy Obsolete, cultural intelligence tool Codec and LLM Bolt AI. By bringing these businesses on board as partners, rather than just suppliers, the hope is that in the long run they will also be able to build AI tools together. And while it’s still early days, the agency already boasts clients including ticketing marketplace Seat Unique, Danish brand Pas Normal Cycling and Marlow Distillery.
For Nick Price, who previously founded BBDO’s content arm Flare, art direction is another common AI use case for agencies that is set to explode in the coming years. In this vein, his latest venture Nmatic is a creative studio that uses generative AI to create stills, storyboards and animatics for agencies and brands. Price is leading the studio as chief executive, alongside former BBDO ECD Chris Catchpole and AIS founding partner Steve Stretton. Together, they have several decades’ worth of experience as creatives, producers and specialists in the post-production space.
“What we’re trying to do is bring to market an offering that can open people’s eyes to actually how creatives can get in control of these tools,” says Price. “The whole key to making AI, particularly gen AI, work well for you is knowing how to control it, and that is a mix of learning how to prompt, using multiple AIs and traditional post-production – that doesn’t disappear from the system. The single most important thing though remains a creative eye to control it all, we’re not going to get away from that.”
For the brands that agencies are working with day-in-day-out, the appeal of AI is already glaringly evident. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey, 65% of respondents said their organisations are now regularly using generative AI and 34% said they are using it specifically as part of their marketing mix. “Brands, and especially procurement departments at brands, are pushing for it because it’s faster and cheaper and, for many things, it’s better. Not everything, but for many things it is,” says Raillard.
I don’t think anyone is going to lose a client because they’re not using AI, it’s more about how efficient they are in terms of putting that work out
But for agencies, the ongoing concerns around intellectual property and the replacement of human creativity is resulting in greater caution and, in some cases, resistance to the growing influence of AI. Having been embedded in the agency world for over two decades, part of Des Tapaki’s current remit as founder and CEO of XP3 has been speaking to agencies ranging from Media.Monks to the Clearing about how they are embedding AI into their business models. “Because of my background, I thought it would be a good idea to help agencies with this, because I know they’re probably scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do,” she says.
Tapaki started her career in agencies leading digital teams at a time when ‘digital’ was still viewed as a dark art and sat as a separate offer to everything else. Reflecting on more traditional agencies’ attitudes towards AI, she’s noticed a number of parallels between the two phenomenons. “Back in the day even doing a campaign online it was like, ‘I’m not sure about that’, so it was me trying to explain to everyone in that business how it would enhance things. It’s the same with AI; I’m giving people the understanding of how it can fit into their everyday without interruption, or how it can make their relationship with a client even better because they are creating something of value.”
Having previously worked in big agency networks herself, Bambach believes the sheer amount of regulation and red tape they have to deal with on a daily basis will be one of their biggest challenges as they try to keep abreast of rapid technological developments in the coming years. “It’s always going to be harder to change a tanker, because you’ve got certain processes, you’ve got structures, you’ve got a muscle memory, you’ve got a lot of people. I think some of the big companies are adapting better than others, and those that are really started to get on the AI bandwagon a lot earlier on than the last six months,” she says.
For those that don’t adapt quickly enough, there are also huge potential implications when it comes to retaining existing clients and winning new business. “I don’t think anyone is going to lose a client because they’re not using AI, it’s more about how efficient they are in terms of putting that work out,” says Tapaki. “So if it takes them a lot longer to do something because they are doing everything from scratch versus using an AI assistant to help them speed the process up, then obviously the margins are going to suffer because they are not utilising resources as well as other agencies that do use AI assistants,” she says.
As for what the agency model of the future will look like in the era of AI? “It’s a really interesting time to ask, how is this going to work in the industry? Because there is no rulebook. This is the time to start laying down the business models and the ways of working, so that creatives can take control of AI rather than AI take control of creatives,” says Price. “The ones who are going to win with AI are the ones who are going to do stuff that is really honed down to their pillars,” Tapaki adds. “It’s as simple as that, because that’s what the clients hire them for.”
