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WPP Links With NVIDIA to Make Generative AI Advertising

Photo credit: Mike MacKenzie/Flickr

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AI chatbots may pen your company’s next advertising jingle.

WPP, one of the world’s most dominant advertising agencies, is teaming up with chip-maker NVIDIA to employ generative AI to create advertising campaigns. Hey robots, here’s some sage advice from our favorite (and tragically human) ad masters, Don Draper: Make it simple, but significant.

Mad LLMs

It’s a partnership years in the making, Rev Lebaredian, NVIDIA’s VP of Omniverse and simulation technology, told the Financial Times over the holiday weekend. The two firms have long been at work perfecting a new platform that will use 3D imaging software to create hyper-realistic images, both video and photo, to create countless versions of the same ad in just a few clicks.

For WPP and its scores of clients, that means cutting lots and lots of costs:

  • “We are able to use generative AI to now personalize and . . . customize [advertising] to every environment in the world: you can create 10,000 versions within a couple of minutes,” WPP’s chief technology officer, Steph Pretorius, told the FT.
  • In one example noted by the FT, that could mean using generative AI to create an ad featuring a car rolling into Times Square to market to customers in one corner of the world, and a similar ad featuring the same car driving through Hong Kong to show to customers in a different corner of the world.

On the Chopping Block: The cut costs, obviously, will come in the form of labor — while it may take a human production crew a few days to film an ad, it could take generative AI just a few minutes to create a digital Frankenstein version. “It’s much easier to identify the jobs that AI will disrupt than it is to identify the jobs that AI will create,” WPP CEO Mark Read told the FT. “We’ve applied AI a lot to our media business, but very little to the creative parts of our business.” Yeah, but could a bot create Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl ad? Or Mr. Clean … okay, we’ll stay open-minded.