IAB Digital Day 2024, Sofia: "From Agency to Agentsy", from marketing copilots to marketing agents

“From Agency to Agentsy”: a talk I gave as co-founder of Tremend, together with Florin Ionescu of Tremend, at IAB Digital Day 2024, the 14th edition of IAB Bulgaria’s yearly conference on digital marketing. 14 November 2024, Interpred, Sofia, theme “Generationally Speaking”: 19 speakers, about 250 people from digital and advertising agencies, advertisers and media.

§Automation, augmentation, amplification

Three types of application (slide 25): automation, the same with less effort (cost out, efficiency); augmentation, more with the same effort (productivity, effectiveness); amplification, significantly more with a little more effort (growth, innovation). Their estimate: about 70% of generative AI use cases were in efficiency and taking costs out, about 25% in effectiveness and productivity. The space still to fill is amplification: doing things better, not only faster and cheaper.

§The reasoning layer and the application layer

Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2, intuition and reason: the focus was shifting to the reasoning layer, where System 2 thinking happens (slide 26). The foundation layer was settling around a few scaled players and alliances, Microsoft and OpenAI, Amazon and Anthropic, Meta, Google and DeepMind (slide 27). The model makers compete at the model layer and stop at the API; the end-to-end workflows of every function in every vertical are left to the application layer, the open space for the people in the room (slide 28).

§From marketing copilots to autonomous marketing teams

Three steps (slide 29): marketing copilots, marketing agents, autonomous marketing teams. After copilot tools, the next step is automating the work with marketing agents, and marketing moves from one-to-many to one-to-one, hyper-personalised. An agent runs the whole flow: it generates the content, personalises it, sets the send schedule, monitors open rates and adjusts the content to the results. Generative AI brings marketing and sales closer, the idea of the closing slide.

§Marketing exists because 1:1 sales is too expensive

“We only have marketing because 1:1 sales for everything is too expensive”. I love this quote from Andrew Chen and the convergence of marketing and sales we are exploring today with Generative AI technologies.

The line is Andrew Chen’s, from a May 2024 essay on how AI will reinvent marketing. Generative AI makes the one-to-one conversation cheap, so marketing and sales start to converge. From my post after the conference: “It was nice to talk about it as part of the transition from ‘From Agency to Agentsy’ together with Florin at the recent IAB conference in Sofia.”

Elsewhere. The full argument: From Agency to Agentsy.

§In the Bulgarian reports

Before the event (Economic.bg): artificial intelligence, integrated into communications, can do a great deal in bringing marketing and information technology together. After it (MSL press room): generative AI should not frighten communication specialists, who should integrate it into their work to their own benefit, with examples from the industry of teams already using it in their campaigns.

§Speaker page

IAB Bulgaria’s speaker page, published on 11 October 2024: “Engineering and technology enthusiast with 25 years of focused delivery in the software industry.”