Generative AI is giving our employees superpowers: Jonathan Nelson, Omnicom Digital

In an interaction with IMPACT Magazine at Cannes Lions 2024, Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, delves into the evolving artificial intelligence (AI) trends, strategies employed by his company and more.

Emphasising the role of AI in today’s media landscape, he points out why actionable insights gained from data are more important than data ownership. Yet, he still underscores the value of humane connection in marketing amidst technological evolution. 

Excerpts:

What big tech trends have you seen this year, which could dominate at Cannes Lions too?

Everybody, right now, is talking about AI, what it is and what it can be. So, that is certainly dominating the conversation this year, as it did last year in Cannes.

We're living in a world where data means everything. There've been several acquisitions in the space by your competitors. And, today, somehow, we're seeing that the focus has sort of changed from owning data to deriving insights using that data. What is Omnicom’s approach regarding that?

At Omnicom, we're sitting on more data than anybody else, at least on the buy side of the relationship. Whether that's first-party data, second-party data or transactional data. We have many tens of petabytes of data, but data is just a means to an end. In the end, it’s about what you do with it, the insights you drive from it, and ultimately the outcome of it. 

You've built both Omni and Annalect from scratch, in-house. Tell us about the merits of having an in-house setup, as opposed to acquiring one. And what are the other tech platforms that you're building right now? 

Firstly, I want to give a big shout-out to India because half of Annalect is actually in India. I co-founded it in Bangalore many years ago. Building your own platform gives you that ownership and it’s also custom built. As we built the system from scratch, we control all the APIs, all the data in and out, all the outputs of the system, and it's custom-built for our clients. It fetches us the results that we’re looking for, and going forward, you can see more of the same.

With the advent of Digital, we’re seeing campaigns becoming more transactional. It's so much about point-of-sale or performance marketing that sometimes after the purchase, the customer doesn’t even remember the campaign or brand. Do you think that's one flip side of Digital or is it really the future?

As you move through life, you're bombarded by marketing messages. These messages tend to be very brief but they do have an impact, particularly if they're tailored for you. We're about to go through a creative revolution, where we talk about mass personalisation scale and where the advertising moulds who you are and what you want.  While the messages may be fleeting, the purchase is not. The payoff is when you actually buy the product, you experience the product and hopefully return again, recommending the product to your friends. The most powerful type of marketing is when you buy something, it fills the need that you have, and you go back to repurchase it and hopefully become a customer for life.

Please tell us about how Generative AI can become a great partner for agencies and how are you using it at Omnicom?

Generative AI is a huge partner. I don't think it solves all the problems of the agencies or does all the creative campaigns or summarises all of the data. However, it will get you take you some distance very, very quickly. At Omnicom, we talk about how Generative AI is giving our employees superpowers. It’s allowing them to do inhuman amounts of research in seconds, generate new ideas, innovate, and ultimately show the connection back to outcomes. That is really what we're investing in and that’s how Annalect is going to evolve our platform Omni.

You've been coming to Cannes Lions year after year. Tell us about that one change that you want to see here.

Oh gosh, yes, this is my 23rd Cannes, consecutively, barring an absence of a year or two that fell under COVID. I love Cannes because it's the connection of human creativity with technology as it's evolved. We can't forget that there are human beings at the centre of this. Marketing exists in the service of commerce; people wouldn't do marketing if it didn't result in an action on the consumer side. And we need to never lose sight of the fact that one it's about real people and two, it's about people actually doing things and buying products. Sales drives marketing. What we are doing at Omnicom is that we’re connecting marketing to sales.

We repeatedly hear that agency heydays are over, and there's reducing margins, and tech companies and consultancies slowly taking over. What do you think is that one business idea that can be tapped to bring back the agencies into the limelight?

We've touched on how marketing drives sales. If you are the company that is driving sales, you are going to be important to anybody. And if you can prove it on an accountable, repeatable basis, you're going to be in the conversation. That's exactly what we're doing at Omnicom.