How Generative AI Has Boosted Productivity

Generative AI continues to be an area of investment for many businesses and the ad industry is no exception. Over the last couple of weeks, two of the major ad agency holding companies have indicated they are each investing heavily in Gen AI. It was interesting to see that many of the investment areas they are mentioning publicly involve operational efficiencies. If you’ve been following any of the blog posts we’ve written about Gen AI over this past year, you know that we’ve been taking a similar path in terms of focusing on productivity and efficiency.

At our ad agency, we have been integrating Gen AI into our company for the last year, and we have seen great productivity results as well as some added creativity along the way. And, because we know that many of our clients and other mid-sized businesses are still struggling with how to best integrate Gen AI into their operations, we’ve been sharing some of our integration playbook to help businesses safely and responsibly adopt Gen AI. So, as a privately held ad agency, here are some of the more basic ways we’re using Gen AI to help us improve our work and deliver better value to our clients.

Streamlining tasks

One of the areas where Gen AI has been very useful is in the curation and management of some social media content. For example, we have used Gen AI to automatically assemble a list of possible strategic events we could be promoting on behalf of clients. What used to take hours each month now takes minutes.

We’ve also used Gen AI in combination with some additional development to streamline the tasks of running contests and giveaways on various platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and X. By using AI, we can automatically extract and organize information received via private messages, reducing the manual labor of typing out winner information such as full names and addresses needed for prize delivery. All of this results in an already busy social media team getting some hours back in the day to focus more on strategy and results.

Greater and faster insights

Gen AI has generated initial data analytics reports that help us more quickly understand the performance and impact of our digital media campaigns. By using Gen AI, we can get closer to data insights much faster than if we humans did it alone. This allows us to optimize our strategies and tactics and increase the return on investment for our clients.

Adding creative ideas to the ideation phase

A third area where Gen AI has been very helpful is in adding creative ideas to the ideation phase across all of our disciplines. By using Gen AI, we can expedite early-stage ideation sessions and explore a broader range of concepts in a short amount of time. This inspires and challenges us to expand our horizons and helps us generate new and original ideas.

The human + technology solution

All of our uses of Gen AI combine humans and technology, which we believe is the perfect mix for creating better output for our clients. Gen AI is getting better every day, but it isn’t perfect (just like humans), so using it responsibly in a controlled environment helps us get to the next level by boosting our productivity, creativity, and efficiency. And, most importantly, it enables us to deliver better results and outcomes for our clients.