The word “innovation” gets thrown around in every press release and new product announcement, but what does it actually mean?
Carol Reed, Ogilvy’s new chief innovation officer, says one of the key elements of innovation is knowing what sort of companies to partner with – the “usual suspects,” like media, social and tech platforms, but also AI, data, and creative tech platforms.
The goal shouldn’t just be reducing time or saving money, said Reed, but rather achieving more and “making the impossible possible.”
Although Reed only started as CIO in November, she’s been at WPP since 2021 in various data and strategy roles, and has a clear vision for what’s ahead.
“Let’s blow minds,” she said. “Let’s reach more people and give more people tingles.”
Reed spoke with AdExchanger about her new role, and how, exactly, minds will be blown.
AdExchanger: What does the of role a chief innovation officer actually entail? Like, what are you innovating?
CAROL REED: It’s such a good question. I have wrestled with that existentially for some time now, because it’s so broad. It could mean anything and nothing at the same time.
I sat with Laurent [Ezekiel, Ogilvy’s global CEO] and he’s rolled out these three strategic pillars since he arrived, called intelligence, imagination and influence. I think of innovation as a fourth that goes across all of them.
I’d love to dig into each of those pillars. Let’s start with intelligence – what falls into that bucket?
In the intelligence category, we talk about things like, what are the insights that creatives are looking for? What kind of data are you looking for?
Data for media planning and targeting and audience buying is always built around this concept of the aggregate, like the highest index of reaching an audience, or the biggest group that I can target and reach efficiently.
What’s really interesting is that Ogilvy’s strategy team specifically said that when they look for an insight or creative idea, they’re looking for stimulus, and things that are happening on the fringe before they’re big.
If it’s already big, and 10 million people are already talking about it, it’s not going to be an interesting creative idea, right? It’s got to be on the fringe, bubbling, but at a really high passion, or velocity.
That’s the kind of intelligence that they’re craving. So now I’m brokering conversations with partners, like Amazon or TikTok. They definitely have the data on what people are talking about at scale, but also what people have been talking about within the last three weeks that everyone’s super passionate about.
How do you figure out where to get those insights and seize on those cultural moments?
For example, they tell me the Michael Cera CeraVe campaign came from one Reddit post.
Someone made a joke like, oh my god, is this Michael Cera’s company? And that one funny little insight created this really hilarious campaign. That’s not something you would find in a traditional audience report in an ads manager.
So one of the first things I’ve done is roll out the Reddit insights platform to maybe 100 plus strategists all over the world, and they’re really enjoying having access to that tool now.
That sounds like a really useful – and fun – tool. Do you have any examples of how you’re approaching imagination and influence, and how they tie in?
Imagination is what differentiates Ogilvy and why I’m really excited to be here. Imagination is another word for human intuition and inspiration, and we have a breadth of really amazing creatives.
What’s really interesting is on the other side of that, WPP has made a lot of investment in tech.
But what I want to be super cognizant of is not how tech replaces imagination, or like, oh, “we built an agent for that.” That’s not what I’m trying to do.
I actually got invited to Cadre this year, which is this once-a-year session where Liz Taylor brings in all of the top creatives from all over the world at Ogilvy, and they come together and they share their work and they give each other feedback.
It was like a master class in what’s good, what’s not, how do you help each other and how do you give feedback?
There’s a whole school of thought that’s like, with technology, those spaces are not important.
But I’m all about that. What’s happening in that room is still super important, and I want to find a way to have technology make that even more visible to people.
How can you bring tech into such a creative space without taking the human element out of the process?
I’m working on how to take things like idea generation workshops that we have with clients and figuring out how to put them on steroids, with the help of AI coaching and things like that.
Never to replace that human element, but just champion our creatives more.
Brands and marketers need to still feel that there’s magic happening. It’s not being automated to some tool. It’s still these people that are amazing barometers of what’s cool, or what will make someone feel something, or how to make something memorable. So I really want to think about a way to put that imagination on a showcase.
And maybe we do that by productizing something where we aren’t off in a corner doing it, but ideating together with clients.
The tech can be there provoking you, like, “that’s a great idea. How about we do this?” or by sharing brand guidelines or partnership guidelines.
Speaking of partnerships, how does influence fit into these other pillars?
Influence is interesting. Our creative teams are always looking to get closer to culture, and I think about how I can help connect that.
For marketers, the holy grail that we’ve always been talking about is the one-to-one personalization, right time, right place, right message.
I don’t know if we’ll ever crack one-on-one messaging. But I do think that marketers are going to build a deeper content system, which AI is going to help enable.
How do you extend content to be always on, and how do you get the ability to update it in context of what’s going on in culture? If there’s a funny meme, or something happens in the news or sports or entertainment, you want to reference it to show that the campaign is adjacent to that.
The question is how to produce that in a way that’s super quick and cost efficient, especially if you’re working with talent.
That segues into another question I had for you – where is Ogilvy choosing to use AI, and where is it intentionally not using it?
I saw someone on LinkedIn say something like, “I want to use AI to do my laundry and clean the dishes, not to do creative and art.” And I think there’s something to that but applied to work.
WPP Open does a really good job at starting to get down to some of the dishes and the laundry, and creating a comprehensive workspace for our client teams.
I think of it almost as a Netflix or Amazon Prime – we have access to all the best LLMs all the time. So it’s really interesting to toggle between some of them and see who does a better job with reading documents and helping you synthesize them or creating images or whatever.
But when I think about our secret sauce, or how AI can help the Ogilvy magic be more m
agical, that’s where I feel like it requires a little more thought and care.
It’s super tempting to say, oh, I can just, like, create a super agent that does all of that. But I’m not a creative director, and I’m sure that if I showed a creative director my creative agent, they’d be like, “That’s crap, that’s not me.”
And I would hope they would say that.
We can use AI to make storyboards faster or help you start writing a manifesto. There are nuts and bolts that we can help fuel. But what I never want to do is replace that human craft and intuition.
Fast Company just wrote an article about how AI is actually helping us make things more average. It keeps recombining things that we’ve seen before.
You still need provocateurs out there that are going to show you something you’ve never seen before or felt before.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
