“We’ve seen that in test-and-control scenarios, something like 5-to-1 or greater ROI when we’re leveraging that approach vs. more of a siloed traditional approach to target those customers,” he said.
Fannie McWatt, PhD, head of data and AI strategy for Publicis Health, attributed the success of one of her agency’s most successful Super Bowl campaigns to interconnectivity. The idea for the campaign, “Relax Your Tight End,” to promote prostate cancer screening was sparked by a conversation between Publicis Health’s chief medical officer and a doctor who said patients would be more likely to screen if they realized it was a blood test.
“That insight then led to thinking about audiences, thinking about different segments, how men behave in their healthcare journeys, and then led to the creative insight and the media strategy,” she said.
Weaving technology and AI into workflow
Adopting technology for technology’s sake can be a costly endeavor, which is why the panelists stressed the importance of identifying the problems they want the tools to solve before forcing implementation.
“How do you put those safeguards in place and make sure that people are thinking about the end goal of their technology usage and not just, ‘It’s cool, it’s fun, it’s different, and it saves me time on some slides’?” posed Farber. “What do we want out of it as a work product and how can it better benefit our clients?”
The panel also emphasized the need to keep humans in the loop, with McWatt warning against treating people like data points.
“In the end, what we’re doing is delivering on human needs, and you have to make sure that whatever your solution is, it has to be a human solution,” she said.
Keeping pace with and staying open to new developments can also help agencies set themselves apart.
“Nobody knows where the industry is heading. What was interesting and new last year has completely changed and evolved,” said Elawadhi, going from talking about prompt engineering to navigating and training agents.
