At Brandweek Atlanta, ADWEEK brought together four agency executives to compare notes on exactly how they’re doing so at an Agencies Vanguard roundtable hosted by ADWEEK’s vice president of community programs and development Liz Kneebone.
Melissa Berger, chief solutions officer at Digitas; Sharon Napier, founder, Partners + Napier, and strategic partnerships at Project Worldwide; Pereira O’Dell’s co-founder and CEO, Andrew O’Dell; and Frances Webster, CEO at Walrus, sat down to compare notes on how they’re evolving operations, staffing, and workflows to keep pace.
Future-gazing
Asked what they wanted to change over the next six to twelve months, each leader focused on bringing their people along for the ride.
O’Dell—who also founded Silverside AI, the AI innovation lab behind campaigns including Coca-Cola’s AI-generated “Holidays Are Coming” and Svedka’s Super Bowl debut—said upskilling employees around evolving tech is a top priority.
“As an industry, we have to really lean into what’s happening in this new transformative revolution,” he explained. “That’s going to require us to really look at our businesses and our people.”
Digitas’ Berger hopes AI can simplify and speed up work, giving agencies more time to focus on growing clients’ businesses. Importantly, AI can also give senior leaders more time for conversations that get beyond the brief and uncover the client’s business challenges.
“Forget the brief you gave us; that’s maybe just a symptom,” she said. “But what are you actually trying to do?”
Napier said she wanted to ensure young women were being brought along on the journey her own business, and others, are on. “We need to make sure we’re finding ways to bring them in and [for] clients to pay for them because they are our future, but they can help us transform AI much faster than probably anyone in this room,” she said.
