Artificial intelligence is often incorrectly touted as a one-size-fits-all solution to any problem.
By contrast, Omnicom’s new generative AI virtual assistant, Omni Assist, is being used by agency employees to narrow AI’s focus and solve for specific agency challenges, like analyzing audiences to make media-buying decisions.
Imagine logging onto ChatGPT and getting access to individual, agency-focused functions, or “agents,” designed to assist with tasks like researching a target audience for a brand.
Omni Assist was first announced last year alongside the third iteration of Omni, a data insights platform launched in 2018 by the holding group’s data management arm, Annalect.
One of the 2,000 clients with an individual landing page in Omni is Hormel Foods’ Planters, a BBDO client that used Omni Assist’s different capabilities on its recently launched “Ah, Nuts!” campaign.
What the agents do
Using a “chief strategist” AI agent, a media planner (or other hypothetical human employee) can create a list of marketing objectives that would be best suited to a CPG snacking brand like Planters. Previously, they might have brainstormed these objectives from scratch; now they’re able to use the AI-generated version as a base from which to iterate.
Another “audience intelligent” agent can review 10,000 different data attributes, create new audiences – “mature nut snackers,” for example – and then generate a rough profile of members of that audience.
The audience data is brought in from a variety of different sources, including Experian and PlaceIQ, and even from opted-in brand clients – on an anonymized basis, of course.
Most clients do choose to opt in, said Annalect Chief Experience Officer Clarissa Season, because they’re then able to access similarly anonymized data from other clients for comparative analysis.
If any elements of the agent-generated profile stand out as particularly interesting (such as an assertion that the mature nut-snacking audience is more likely to vacation in the Caribbean), the user can directly download the related data into an Excel chart to verify it.
There’s even an “influencer agent” that can recommend content creators to partner with based on the social media platforms that audience members are most likely to visit, which users can also unearth using the “social media analyst agent.”
A social media manager may choose to accept these suggestions or disagree with them. Either way, said Alan Parker, chief innovation officer of Omnicom-held agency Energy BBDO, “I have a starting point through the agent that’s sitting in the campaign workflow.”
How the agents work
Each “agent” function can also be tailored to individual clients by feeding it brand guidelines and other background information.
In fact, custom agents can be so specifically attuned to a specific brand that it wouldn’t even know what to do if you gave it a document with the wrong brand name on it, said Parker – similar to the confusion one might feel if they tried to analyze a poem using algebra.
Behind the scenes, the key to making sure each of these “agents” is as effective as possible is matching each task to the right knowledge base, so the AI knows where to look (or, more importantly, where not to look) for the information it needs.
Similarly, each agent has to be provided with specific prompts that provide adequate details for every element of the request – things like the persona of the user, the context of what’s being asked for and why and the format in which the results should be delivered.
This is part of why Parker believes AI won’t ever be able to fully replace human expertise, because only true experts will be able to create the most specific prompts to generate the correct information.
“If anything, our creatives and even strategists need to be even more articulate in what they are telling these things to do,” said Parker.
More broadly, Omnicom’s leaders maintain that the ultimate goal of technology like Omni Assist is to free human workers from repetitive tasks – like sifting through thousands of spreadsheet cells to do the same kind of analysis – or give them an ability to sift through more verifiable data sources than they are able to do on their own.
“My guess is if we gave you all the raw data to this, you probably wouldn’t know what to do with it,” said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital. “After 30 minutes, you would give up in frustration, which is what most people’s reaction is when they see 100,000 rows of data.”
With Omni Assist, he said, all it takes is asking the right question. “This is how humans actually communicate, and that is why this is so exciting.”
