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As generative AI moves from shiny new object to table stakes across the media agency landscape – in fact across the entire media and marketing world – some agencies are putting it to valuable use in varying disciplines. Every holding company has either appointed an AI czar or formed units that harness generative AI powers to advance creative efforts.
Brandtech Group’s Jellyfish digital marketing agency has chosen to build generative AI tools to help advance search and SEO — drilling deeply into agentic efforts on behalf of clients. Although some of the tools go beyond just Jellyfish — Brandtech Group’s purchase of Pencil is just one of the many acquisitions the anti-holdco has made.
“At Jellyfish we can go from insights to creation to activation with a seamless AI approach,” said David Jones, Brandtech Group’s CEO in an email. “It’s humans and agents working together to create a new world. Clients no longer need the old studios, people-heavy production or lumbering research companies. We have reimagined the creative, tech and media departments into a new world of real-time creativity, immediate activation and continuous measurement and adaptation.”
Jones said he believes Brandtech is acting on rather than saying its intentions. “We have a simple mantra that ‘case studies beat press releases and demos’.”
Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester, credits Brandtech and Jellyfish for the progress it’s made, but he also sees it as keeping up with the, er, Joneses, rather than getting ahead of them. What Brandtech is doing “is on trend, and it’s at parity with a lot of what I’m seeing across the the industry,” he said.
Still, for an anti-holding company — Jones and Jellyfish CEO Nick Emery are both holdco refugees and strive to act differently than those experiences taught them — Brandtech has built out multiple tools and products in the last year, most of which have benefited Jellyfish, and most of them steeped in use of machine learning and generative AI. They include:
Pattisall remains impressed but not overly wowed by Brandtech’s focus on search and SEO. “It’s a hot area right now because it’s one of the more directly impacted areas of marketing because of the drop in traffic, he said. “But it’s something that all the providers are talking about and looking for ways to actively address using their stacks and their services.”
“A billion questions are being asked of LLMs for brand preference every day, and that we now have an SEO for LLMs — brands are hungry for that because it’s a competitive edge,” said Jeff Matisoff, partner at Jellyfish and head of U.S. operations.
John Dawson, Jellyfish’s vp of strategy, added that despite Share of Model’s agentic aspirations, “We don’t believe that agents will make human consumer journeys redundant. They will enhance and expand the types of journeys that your human audiences go on. We’re thinking about both/and, not either/or,” he said.
Matisoff said that he’s been most surprised by Switchboard’s use by clients — many of whom don’t invest enough into generating those kinds of insights. “Many major advertisers don’t have a single source of truth reporting dashboard that they own and can customize and feel great about,” he said. “That they trust what their agency, what different partners are looking at together to be able to have that single source of truth … So every time we’re winning an account, Switchboard is a huge piece of it.”
To that end, a case study Brandtech provided Digiday showed that a major CPG client the company declined to identify reduced hours spent building reports by 80%, while increasing the number of recommendations by four times.
“When you have all your data in one place and you can look across channel and audiences and creative messages, you can really start to build a holistic, full funnel, cross channel testing strategy and share learnings across all of your teams,” added Jess Nachtigall, Jellyfish’s evp of global investment analytics.
When it comes to Now-Next-Soon, Nachtigall said “we can make sure that we’re hitting the [client’s] overarching goals, but also make sure we’re hitting individual channel teams’ goals with the budgets that we’re sending through MMM, And that allows there to be more open and honest conversations between the c-suite who are looking at revenue numbers, and the marketing leads who are looking at platform numbers and engagements — and coming to a common language, which is incrementality.”
Another case study based on Now-Next-Soon’s work on an unidentified retail client showed a 30% reduction in model building time.
CEO Jones summed up the company’s efforts: “You only create a tool if it is going to help someone do their job better faster and cheaper . Going back to our founding mantra: you don’t need technology solutions to problems people don’t have.”
The IAB put out its annual report on U.S. advertising revenues in 2024, produced by PwC, showing an unexpectedly high growth year for digital advertising, said IAB CEO David Cohen. Of course, with tariffs and recession on the horizon, 2025 may look very different. “Our general view is that overall spend might come down, but digital could have a disproportionate share of growth depending on where the industry is going,” Cohen told Digiday. —Sam Bradley
Some highlights from the report:
“I expect that investment in streaming, particularly those who have a highly differentiated offering, will be up this year. And I think investment in the overall TV marketplace will be flat or down.”
British, Australian and EU regulators are all looking into mega agency merger.
The FTC has granted the Omnicom-IPG merger under unusual conditions with major implications for brand clients.
Much of the large announcements at last week’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity involved TV streaming and ad tech.
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