Independent agencies, held back by the big budgets of holdcos, have a more experimental way of integrating AI.
The media agency industry has a disconcerting churn rate, with 26% of staff leaving annually on average, which is especially high among people with one to two years experience.
AI can tackle this issue Sparro and This Is Flow revealed on stage at Sydney L!VE.
But AI is overwhelming and a lot to add to employees already busy schedules.
In Australia, 51% of people have not used Generative AI and 88% are unclear about its impact.
So This Is Flow has made AI a playful activity, This Is Flow chief strategy officer Catherine Rushton told AdNews L!VE.
Headed up by an AI taskforce of self-appointed employees from across the business, the indie media agency is making the more annoying and repetitive tasks for employees ‘fun’.
For example, Flow has made campaign reporting more bearable.
"The reporting is crucial for clients but the process is manual, tedious and wears teams down," Rushton said.
"By the time employees come to writing the all important commentary requiring useful insights, it is often rushed.
"So the experiment was use Chat GPT to assist account coordinators to writing and editing report commentary."
Overall Flow saw improvements in quality of commentary based on clients’ feedback, improvements in speed and ease for account coordinators and team leaders spent less time reviewing commentary before it went to clients.
Similarly at Sparro by Brainlabs, the agency is de-siloing client communications by using data scientists, Sparro data science specialist Jordan Taylor told AdNews L!VE.
The digital marketing agency has put data scientists at its core, pairing up each client and each client team with the experts in product development, data engineering and analysis, machine learning and now AI.
This is important as the agency has built its own proprietary AI tools on Google Cloud platform for a secure, anonymised data sandbox.
"This helps the whole agency understand the types of AI tools we can build, sharing that knowledge around the agency helps everybody," Taylor said.
"And allows the data team to better understand what AI prototype we should build next for clients."
Thank you to our supporting partners: Blis, Mamamia, Meta, Ryvalmedia. Associate partners: nexxen, Quantcast. And friend of AdNews: IMAA.
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