What’s the price of getting in on the AI boon? For two agencies, it’s just around $300 million.
Earlier this year, both Publicis and WPP pledged to increase their investments in the technology, with Publicis saying it would spend $326 million over three years and WPP promising to spend $318 million annually.
Generative AI is being used increasingly to support work in a number of industries, including in the advertising and agency world, while brands like Mastercard are building out teams with marketers who specialize in the technology. According to June data from Forrester, 91% of US ad agencies are using GenAI or exploring its use cases, with 78% of large agencies (defined as those that have over 201 employees) using GenAI, compared to 53% of small agencies with fewer than 50 employees.
As agencies have scrambled to adapt to new business imperatives, Marketing Brew took a look at how two companies that have made big investments in the technology are using it.
Totally automatic
In June 2023, Accenture Song’s parent company Accenture made a $3 billion commitment dedicated to AI that the company said would be spent over three years’ time. Since then, Accenture has announced AI-focused initiatives with Nvidia, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google, while investing in GenAI platforms like Writer, which help companies build AI apps, according to James Temple, global XR/spatial lead and global generative AI creative lead at Accenture Song.
Temple said that GenAI is already being looked at to help with internal tasks like market research and data analysis, and Accenture and Accenture Song worked with Fortune to build Fortune Analytics, an AI-infused platform tied to the Fortune 500 list, Temple said.
As a whole, Accenture now has about 57,000 data and AI practitioners across its organization, Julie Sweet, the company’s chair and CEO, said on an earnings call last month. The company’s goal is to grow that part of its workforce to 80,000 by the end of fiscal year 2026, Sweet told investors.
For Accenture’s fiscal year ending August 31, it reported $3 billion of bookings due to GenAI (the company reported $81.2 billion in total new bookings overall), with Accenture Song’s push into the tech contributing a higher percentage of total revenues than a year prior, according to Adweek.
Helping hand?
GenAI is being similarly embraced inside Publicis’s agencies, Akira Thompson, group creative director at Publicis content and production studio PXP, said. So far, Thompson said, PXP has been using GenAI to assist in the creation of visuals at the agency.
Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
One stumbling block, he said, is that some GenAI tools don’t always generate cohesive visual content. “One of the big problems with AI image generators is getting consistent characters across the frame,” Thompson said. “If you’re doing a narrative spot for a commercial, and you have characters that reoccur across the narrative story, you’re going to want them to be easily identifiable and look the same. You’re also going to want to have a level of control that tools like Midjourney don’t have, that text-to-image generators don’t have.”
To that end, PXP has been developing a model incorporating GenAI that aims to make framing characters easier, he told us. Using GenAI to aid in storyboarding has been a major focus for the agency: PXP set up an image-generation model that can create storyboards that are more detailed than what a storyboard artist could potentially do on their own in the same amount of time, Thompson said.
The agency is also experimenting with using GenAI to help with localizing commercials by creating voice clones of actors’ voices (with their permission and payment) and translating them into 29 different languages for various audiences, he said—something that could also save time.
Not slowing down
Going forward, PXP is exploring the GenAI tools on the market and vetting which ones could be appropriate to use for client work, Thompson said, as well as working toward streamlining some video production. The agency put out a report just last month detailing ways to apply GenAI to content production.
At Accenture, investment in GenAI will be “persistent” going forward, Temple said.