The Brandtech Group’s whole schtick is that it knows more about generative AI than the other holdcos and it’s got the tools to prove it.
Lately, the group’s been trumpeting the Share of Model platform developed by its integrated agency, Jellyfish. Specifically, it wants the world (or at least the part of it that holds marketing budgets) to know how AI insights can improve the performance of paid media campaigns.
To that end, Jellyfish execs John Dawson and Jack Smyth published a paper in the Journal of Brand Strategy highlighting some success it’s had introducing its Share of Model insights into clients’ Google Performance Max campaigns.
By augmenting the search themes entered into PMax with terms suggested by the Share of Model tool, eyewear brand Gentle Monster was able to improve its return on ad spend by 39%, according to Jellyfish. MSC Industrial did the same and boosted its incremental ROAS with PMax by 758%.
It’s hard to argue with those kinds of results. What I struggle with, however, is the broader assertion by Dawson and Smyth that for marketers AI represents a technological shift unlike any that came before it. The internet and social platforms may have changed how brands distributed their communications, write Dawson and Smyth, but AI introduces a new audience — namely, LLMs — to which they must cater.
Unless or until fully agentic shopping becomes a reality and we have LLMs making buying decisions and transacting on behalf of people, I’m not convinced that this is a helpful framing of marketing’s relationship with AI. Shy of that fully autonomous future, the ways that brands will have to adapt to LLMs still seem to me to have more in common with how brands are already optimising for search and social algorithms than some entirely new paradigm.
There are drawbacks to holding this view, though. As Dawson told me earlier this week, ‘What happens in advertising a lot is we use analogies of the past to try to predict the future, and that limits our imagination in some ways.’
A safer assumption, then, is probably the one voiced by strategist James Hankins on WARC’s podcast recently. LLMs are still immature, he said, and the brands that get in there early stand to make outsized gains. But it won’t be long before these tools become more broadly adopted and so start to better reflect market realities. So any marketers that want to see increases like those enjoyed by Gentle Monster and MSC Industrial should move quickly.
