Brands are being constantly barraged with the message that agentic AI is the future of advertising.
But marketers are struggling with the question of how much power to put in the hands of a machine.
Making Science believes it’s hit the sweet spot.
The digital marketing consulting firm recently launched a tool called Creative Hub that helps advertisers optimize their marketing campaigns by bridging the gap between creative and execution while also providing brands with full control over their creative versioning.
Creative Hub is part of ad-machina, Making Science’s agentic AI platform.
Making Science has seen some resistance to generative AI because marketers feel a lack of control over brand guidelines, according to Costanza Ghelfi, chief product officer at Making Science.
Generally, brands have a performance team and a creative team. What’s often missing, Ghelfi said, is technology that “speaks the language of both.”
The best (re)version of yourself
Creative Hub allows brands to analyze current ads to determine what is and isn’t working and revise accordingly.
For example, Ghelfi said, one client saw that ads set in daytime performed noticeably worse than ads in nighttime settings. That brand worked with Making Science to update its preexisting ads so they appeared to be happening at night, while ensuring that nothing else about them was removed or revised.
But marketers can also use the tool to make more significant changes to ad creative, including adding net new elements, like animals or flowers or anything, really, so long as the ads perform better with those ingredients.
Creative Hub mandates a human’s approval before making any updates to an ad, and that isn’t going to change, even as the technology evolves, Ghelfi said. Advertiser control is “core in the value proposition,” she added.
Although Creative Hub can generate new visual elements and reversion existing campaigns, it “doesn’t generate anything from scratch,” said Ghelfi, and “it’s not in our road map” to include that as an option.
Plus, sticking to material that is already client-approved is part of how Making Science stays compliant with the EU AI Act – a “very restrictive” act, according to Ghelfi, of which the European-based company must stay abreast.
Lightening the load
Still, any use of generative AI in creative sparks concerns about how it will affect human roles.
Ghelfi insists that Making Science has only seen positive results on both the human side and the product side. “It’s allowing us to be much more efficient, to innovate much faster,” she said.
This has been the refrain of every company in the past year – including those who have undergone mass layoffs, like Business Insider and Cisco.
But Ghelfi emphasized that Making Science views agentic AI as a tool for growth, rather than for cost-cutting. The latter, she says, is likely just a “short-term effect” of early AI adoption.
The companies that will thrive in the long run are those that see AI as a way to innovate and expand their teams, she said, rather than to cut corners. “We are hiring much more now,” she added, “because we are able to create more, to sell more.”
When asked how Making Science is using that extra time – Creative Hub has doubled the company’s productivity, according to Ghelfi – her response was that, well, they don’t.
“We’re not offering a specific alternative to what they can do with that time,” she said. “They live better. They leave the office earlier.”
Oh, European sensibilities.
Ghelfi acknowledges that the proliferation of AI has “been disruptive” to many companies, but now that there are end-to-end AI marketing solutions and less expensive ways of developing new tools, she’s hopeful that more companies will approach AI the way Making Science does. As in, to help ease workloads while expediting production and innovation.
“I’m one of the optimistic ones,” she said.
