WPP Media has ranked 12 of the world’s most sophisticated technology companies on their merits as advertising partners, and OpenAI places last.
The Advertising Intelligence Framework report, which was written by Kate Scott-Dawkins, the global president of business intelligence at WPP Media, is pitched as a guide for global advertisers.
The framework assesses leading ‘intelligence providers’, such as Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, on five criteria: data assets, AI/tech, distribution, commerce/transaction and content/media.
OpenAI is placed last in the overall rankings of the 12 leading intelligence providers, just behind Elon Musk’s combined SpaceX/XAI business. But the maker of ChatGPT also did not make WPP Media’s recommended list within the individual AI/Tech category.
Scott-Dawkins explained: ‘The only thing we double weighted [in the assessment of intelligence providers] was the recommendation/prediction algorithm. Because if we want advertising to feel additive and valuable and less interruptive, one of the things it should do is be more predictive and helpful. And in order to do that, you need depth and breadth of understanding about a person, so that you can make the most relevant suggestions.
‘OpenAI doesn’t have the ability to do that yet. They have a lot of text information and text context but nothing really about what you’re watching or buying, and the history of their data doesn’t go back very far, compared to Meta or Google, and so their score, particularly on that predictive algorithms piece, knocks them back a bit in that category.
‘They’re also reliant on Azure [Microsoft’s cloud computer service], so they don’t have their own infrastructure. They have frontier models, but they’re buying space on others’ infrastructure. And we look, not just at how good the models are, but also how easy it is for them to access and utilise compute going forward.
‘The other thing we say in this report is that this is a very fluid system, and we’re hoping to do it quarterly. So, I would expect [OpenAI’s] score to improve over the course of this year as we get more and more information about how their ads are working.’
Alphabet and Amazon came out on top WPP’s overall ranking, on the basis that they scored highly in at least three of the five categories, and demonstrated ‘broad consumer reach and multi-surface distribution with diversified monetisation’.
MediaCat also asked Scott-Dawkins about classifying Apple and ByteDance as ‘challengers’, given that one is valued at over $3trn and the other is reportedly worth $500bn.
‘Size isn’t everything, you know!’ she joked, adding: ‘It’s very much to do with key gaps at all of those companies. ByteDance is working on some glasses, but there’s no [hardware] really that exists, which means they have the same problem that Meta does — they’re tenants on the other platforms.
‘If Apple and Google decide to stop offering their app or are told to stop offering their app for any reason, that’s it — they have zero distribution.
‘Apple has a significant advantage in distribution, in terms of owning the hardware and software, and they’re actually a pretty big ads player, but it’s a very different type of advertising. They’ve done a lot in app-installs and app search, and things like that. They’re not taking what they know from the Apple HomePod and applying it to a message in a car or whatever. We haven’t seen evidence that those connections exist. Some of that is because of how data has been treated internally at Apple, which is fine. But that, and their slowness to the AI race, has left them in that position of challenger rather than being at the forefront.’
In the report, WPP Media refers to the beginning of the AI era of advertising, and Scott-Dawkins confirmed this is meant to reflect the belief that the technology will come to define the industry, not just augment it.
‘We’ve been integrating elements of things like machine learning and generative AI over the last 10 years,’ she said. ‘But now feels like the beginning of the next era where it is really dominant and all-encompassing, and helps determine a lot of the decisions that are going to be made, both in boardrooms and marketing offices and in consumers’ homes, alike.’
But she cautioned that the industry must learn from the mistakes made with social media, referencing the trial in Los Angeles, attended by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on 18 February, over whether the platforms did enough to protect children from the harms of social media.
‘[AI] is such a powerful technology,’ said Scott-Dawkins. ‘We cannot do the same thing again, right? It has to be very conscientious and thoughtful in terms of how these companies work with clients to come up with metrics that are well thought through in advance and don’t have some of those same unintended consequences.
‘We are all of us in a situation where we are putting a lot of trust in these companies to design these systems in a way that is healthy and helpful for all of us, as consumers of these products.’
