4A’s Accelerate: Part One
Last month our team attended the 4A’s Accelerate conference in Miami to showcase how marketing professionals can implement AI today and what the future holds for our industry. While we were at the conference the Blackbelt crew was able to attend two days chock-full of intriguing trends and innovative ideas from industry leaders. From the speakers and also our many thought-provoking discussions with attendees, our team took away a breadth of valuable learnings and will share them with you in a two-part series.
This first one focuses on the three themes of Accelerate — creativity and innovation, talent, and the evolving relationships between agencies and clients — and the second post will focus entirely on our AI session. Stay tuned for part two!
Creativity and Innovation
Creativity and innovation today are being fueled by new technologies — technologies that Accelerate attendees were fortunate enough to view up close and personally. One of our favorites, since AI is in Blackbelt’s blood, was Louis Rosenberg’s, PhD, CEO and Founder of Unanimous AI, talk on swarm AI.
This fascinating principle uses AI to amplify human intelligence and shows that “social creatures, when working together as unified systems, can outperform the vast majority of individual members when solving problems and making decision.” The principle was pulled from animals, which use collective intelligence to establish tight feedback loops — think fish detecting tremors in the water — and uses algorithms to enable human swarms.
By setting up an online interface, Unanimous AI is able to combine “the knowledge, wisdom, insights, and intuitions of diverse groups into a single emergent intelligence.” Swarm AI analysis shows how people actually behave and not just what they report, and has proven to significantly amplify intelligence.
Rosenberg added during this session that “what [Unanimous AI is] aiming to do is build networked human groups and create AI Super-Experts. You can build a human swarm of consumers and optimized insights for market intelligence, product planning, and messaging, as well as business intelligence including teams and amplified intelligence.”
We love seeing how AI is being applied across our industry and shared our own thoughts on AI at Accelerate as well. We took a deep dive into how AI is advancing the creative process during our learning track with executives from IBM, End Cue and Nucleal, which we’ll take a deep dive into in our next blog — stay tuned!
Talent
The second theme of the conference was talent, which, in our increasingly competitive industry, agencies need to be particularly mindful of to promote creativity. In order to do this, our workplaces need to be more fluid than they’ve ever been before. We need more diverse ecosystems to promote cultural fluency and encourage bold, innovative ideas because this is where beautiful creative and experiences are born.
A point that has stuck with us since the conference came from Debby Reiner, CEO of Grey. She articulated that rather than focusing on insourcing or outsourcing talent, we should be best-sourcing. This means putting a focus on producing the best creative for customers, regardless of where the talent comes from. Essentially, we should tap a team of experts with an eye for bold experiences who will drive projects forward.
This is increasingly important because, as Stephanie Prager, Head of Global Agency Development at Twitter, pointed out “it’s never been easier to reach people, but never harder to earn their attention.” In fact, according to Jeff Fromm, Partner at Barkley, we have a whopping eight seconds to grab Gen Z’s attention. It’s never been more important to break through the marketing noise and pulling together the right team of experts is the only way to push the envelope on creative.
Another point that resonated with our team was the importance of having a multitude of perspectives in leadership. We have carefully curated our own team and have brought together experts from different marketing practices. In fact, creative, data science, account and strategy sit at our executive level and funnel into all of our agency activities. At Blackbelt, we’ll always put an emphasis on talent and we were glad to hear this conversation continuing in mediums such as Accelerate.
Evolving Relationship Between Agencies and Clients
The last theme — one that should come as no surprise to those in the industry — is the evolving relationship between agencies and clients.
It’s a trying time as clients bring budgets in-house while simultaneously more and more agencies pop up and then compete for those budgets. But rather than harp on the divide, Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand and Marketing Officer P&G, offered a different perspective, saying “we need to reinvent as clients to focus on brand building in the future to ensure [agencies and advertisers] grow and reinvent together.”
Accelerate was full of thought-provoking ideas and the themes of creativity and innovation, talent and the evolving relationship between agencies and clients were particularly timely and resonated with our team. At Blackbelt we’re investing in technologies that push creativity and innovation, we’re tapping talent from a multitude of backgrounds and perspectives, and we’re conscientious of the evolving relationship with clients, but we also put our focus into building revered brands through great creative and experiences. The conversations at Accelerate confirmed that these are top priorities and we can’t wait to see how these evolve!
Don’t forget to check back soon for a deep dive into our AI session at Accelerate!
