Artificial Intelligence (AI) is enabling powerful advances around the world. In the field of medicine, for example, AI-powered solutions have helped reduce false negatives and false positives in breast cancer screening and mammograms by up to 9%. Meanwhile, the Look to Speak app uses AI to give a voice to people with speech or motor disorders: it allows users to select phrases on their mobile phone just by moving their eyes.
When used to its full potential, AI can solve many of the world’s most complex challenges, including those in digital marketing. For marketers and agencies, the goal remains to engage customers in meaningful ways that drive business results. But this has become more difficult as people interact across a greater number of channels and touchpoints. Manual approaches can no longer keep up.
As marketers strive to keep up with changes, they can seek help from their partners. By staying at the forefront, agencies can work closely with brands to go a step further, redefine digital strategies, and combine their expertise with the power of AI to increase ROI and business growth.
Improving skills to achieve success
What sets any marketing strategy apart is the human judgment and ingenuity behind it, and that includes the management and direction of AI technologies.
AI enables agencies to multiply the value of their expertise to achieve business objectives now and ensure future growth. In fact, nearly two-thirds of surveyed agencies say that adopting AI and machine learning to assist and enhance skills is a high or critical priority.
“AI helps us discover more insights and empowers us to act quickly,” explains Jeremy Hull, Chief Product Officer at Brainlabs for North America. “It allows us to do more: act faster, improve performance, and get more value from our team members and help them have an exciting career,” he adds.
AI enables agencies to offer higher-value marketing services and drive better results for brands at all levels of their digital maturity. Recent research indicates that leading marketers, despite being more likely to have developed in-house digital marketing capabilities, maintain strong relationships with agencies. In fact, unlike their competitors, they partner with a large number of agencies, although the way they work with them is different. For example, leading advertisers tend to focus on overall strategy, while average advertisers tend to participate only in campaign execution.
When choosing which agencies to work with, advertisers are increasingly basing their decisions on strategic impact and proven business results, not on team size or the number of billable hours needed to manage campaigns. That’s why many agencies with traditional fixed-fee or retainer models are moving to more flexible, growth-oriented models. For example, 41% of agencies now use performance-based compensation models.2 By investing in new strategic areas that help drive AI-powered solutions, agencies can enhance the business results for which they are now responsible.
Emphasizing results is leading Jellyfish and other major agencies to expand their reach and reinvest in new strategic areas.
“The combination of media, human resources, and technology is changing, and I don’t think the industry has caught up with that yet. At Jellyfish, we focus on results instead of hours. Once the focus shifts to being results-based, the potential of AI increases and more can be done with the available marketing budget,” concludes Rob Pierre, co-founder and CEO of Jellyfish.
