Joshua Nafman, left, and Mark Zagorski

On Tuesday, the Nobel Physics Prize was awarded to artificial intelligence pioneers Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto and John Hopfield of Princeton University, making it fitting that AI dominated conversations at Advertising Week NY that same day.

Not that marketing industry experts need encouragement to discuss AI.

Strategy attended two panels on Tuesday morning at the festival – one on how AI technology is being used to optimize brand campaigns and secure a higher ROI, and the other on how brands write compelling narratives using AI.

AWNY 2024: “AI in Action: A new era of advertising effectiveness”

During a fireside chat, DoubleVerify (DV) CEO Mark Zagorski and VP of data and operations for Diageo, Joshua Nafman, discussed how DV’s Scibids optimizes numerous data sets at scale and drive a higher ROI.

According to Nafman, Diageo – a multinational beverage company that owns Guinness, Baileys and Johnnie Walker – has achieved 25% efficiency on CPMs and a 30% increase in ROI per campaign by using DV’s Scibids AI technology.

Zagorski said Scibids AI quantifies numerous sets of data points, which takes into account brand safety, ROI and brand lift. “You’re looking to unlock all of these different aspects of your media buy,” Zagorski said. “People used to use spreadsheets, used to try to just pick one versus the other, but we know we’re now in a world in which there’s tons of pressure on media budgets and, more importantly if you’re a media buyer, tons of pressure to perform.”

Nafman said Diageo is using the tech and the data it generates to improve media relationships and to build a data culture. Additionally, the company is determining how to collaborate rather than being siloed. This information is particularly important to Diageo’s unique challenges, Nafman said, citing marketing regulated brands, navigating media inflation, as well as integrating data and AI.

“As soon as you touch data or AI, my expectation is that my media costs actually skyrocket,” Nafman said. “Therefore, when I measured all the way through, my ROI just wasn’t there. We made a lot of mistakes doing this early on, where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to target the hell out of something, [but] that made it such a small pool of people that I wasn’t able to move the needle on the business.”

Diageo has been working with DV specifically to inventory optionality, Nafman added. “So really going through brand safety, suitability, inventory, SSP and DSP. Really going into the details of what is my total pool of people across the world, or audiences across the world, or placements across the world that I can actually reach.”

By working with Scibids AI, Nafman said Diageo has been able to optimize hundreds of campaigns. “The sole purpose is to drive down costs,” he said. “As soon as costs were driven down, we’re allowed to have a lot more interesting conversations.”

From left to right: Juliet Hindell, Toni Clayton-Hine and Amy Angelini

AWNY 2024: “AI in the Spotlight: Creating compelling narratives that resonate”

In another panel on the morning of day two, Juliet Hindell, executive producer for Reuters Plus, led a discussion with Toni Clayton-Hine, CMO at EY Americas, and Amy Angelini, AI innovation comms of corporate affairs at IBM.

Both Clayton-Hine and Angelini emphasized the need to focus on the people behind these AI technologies. For instance, Angelini said, IBM often produces content about the researchers themselves, many of whom are building foundation models and quantum computers. “So that’s how we bring technology to life and bring in that human loop,” she said of IBM’s storytelling approach.

In May, she said, IBM announced InstructLab, a revolutionary product that develops and customizes large language models (LLMs) for chatbots, and which was born out of the minds of frustrated researchers at a conference staying up all night in the hotel lobby wanting to find a solution. “It’s those kinds of stories that show the people behind the breakthroughs and bring it to life,” Angelini said.

But there is more to putting a human face to the (highly technological) picture. There are also practical applications when it comes to using AI to craft narratives, Clayton-Hine said, citing a case study that EY published with life sciences company Bayer AG which discussed using AI for agronomy, a branch of agricultural science that focuses on crop production and soil management to improve farming.

“You basically figure out how to get all the data that the farmers can use to figure out what crops to plant and when,” she explained. “So they had all this…data that they need to use AI to bring it all in, to make it more structured and normalized, and then figure out how to personalize it for the individual farmers.”

Using AI to gather data that helps tell human stories is a way to create compelling narratives that resonate, Angelini said. She cited a partnership between IBM and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Germany to track and protect African elephants and endangered species. “That obviously has a more human interest, mass appeal,” Angelini said. “But at the same time, you can see how AI can solve real-world problems and make real impact, so we focus there.”