UM’s Andy Littlewood: Future media buying and content creation will be done by AI

Generative AI (GenAI) is already having an impact on the way a brand shows up in the marketplace, according to UM Worldwide’s Global Chief Product Officer Andy Littlewood.

Global agencies like Universal McCann are paying attention. They are leveraging GenAI more, feeding models brands’ patterns to produce new creative and further automate media buying on a bigger scale.

Littlewood spoke with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik about how AI algorithms are going to shape the future of advertising.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve had extensive experience working in agencies and with data and insights, and I’m sure you’ve been exposed to so many clients. What is the one thing that you wish more marketers were doing right now?

The biggest thing for me is commitment. When I see advertising and marketing media fail, or not perform as it could have done, it’s generally because people didn’t commit fully to that course of action. [Whether it was] they had other priorities [or] there were things distracting from the field of vision.

Focusing on those, committing to those, and then orchestrating everything around that and making sure that you absolutely have a song that can sing from one hymn sheet and is very focused around one point of attention. Something that can ultimately play across all of your many touchpoints.

What is the most interesting data point you have seen this year? Maybe something that’s influenced the way you’re doing business?

We have two big stats that we’re thinking about in UM and globally. One is that 75% of media will be bought in an automated way within a few years. Coupled with that, 90% of content will be produced by AI within a few years.

You put those both together, and I think it’s safe to assume that media decisioning more and more will be done by GenAI. And content production will be done by GenAI. And I think they’re incredibly important stats for us to think about and focus on, because what that means is that we’re really going to be partnering with, and propelled by, algorithms into this next stage.

Those are the two biggest things we are thinking about right now. And how can we really understand the patterns of those algorithms and how they’re in play in the marketplace.

With AI, the direction that you point in matters. Saying what you’re trying to accomplish is half the battle. So how do you ensure that the brands you’re working with have the right inputs?

It matters what you feed AI. And we believe that the start of that is really understanding your pattern. Brands are already interpreted by AI. If you put a brand into Midjourney and you say, “Make me an image that relates to this brand,” that will produce a certain type of imagery based on the pattern that it has for that brand.

The same happens in media algorithms. When you think about bidding and automated bidding, that happens in programmatic, a lot of that is triggered by the brand and the brand presence online. We think the biggest understanding you should have before is what your pattern looks like, and what that feeds into the algorithm and how you can manipulate that.

The biggest danger we see is that brands at the moment aren’t necessarily aware of that.

They’ve been using some quite oversimplified models like the marketing funnel, for example, and that’s dangerous because if you’re using a simplified model that’s very similar to lots of other brands, then you’re going to get pulled to the mean by these algorithms. So that’s essentially what we are putting forward and trying to avoid.

I love that you bring up the funnel because one of the most popular stories The Current has published so far in 2024 is an opinion piece with the headline “It’s Time to Retire the Marketing Funnel.” If you had a chance to retire the funnel, what would you bring back in its place? What’s the right metaphor?

It’s had its time. It was a very useful model. It got us a long way. People have oversimplified it, I think, in a lot of cases.

But what it’s led to is a lot of siloed thinking. A lot of dangerous practices and marketing where we’re taking certain parts of marketing and saying well that’s upper-funnel and that’s middle-funnel and that’s lower-funnel. And then they are separating in how they deliver. And I think that’s incredibly damaging for brands.

So, if we agree that the funnel is gone somewhat, then I think we need to move on from that. Our belief is that the funnel is replaced by brand patterns. And that’s essentially a more holistic understanding of how the brand functions over time. The kind of networks of associations that you have within brands. The interplay of those associations and then how they lead to outcomes.