2024: The year AI broke advertising, for the better
Matt Lawton, CMO of Five by Five Global, reflects on the huge impact AI has had on the advertising industry over the course of the year.
At the start of this year we saw big tech entrench AI into their platforms and agencies took a collective deep breath. Google’s Gemini integrated into search ads and powered functions like audience expansion for brands looking to build out their first party data lakes. Google execs at January’s IAB conference assured us all that AI was just an enabler.
At this stage AI was mostly seen in ad-tech but it wasn’t just the global platforms that were deploying it. Innovators like Mutinex were receiving funding to expand out of Australia to take on the world with AI driven marketing mix modelling.
In March, Ad Age announced ChatGPT’s new brand integration had brought commerce to AI and the industry realised AI wasn’t just about saving money, it was about making it too. But then, Sora came to be and the hysteria reached new levels with creative appraisals of AI generated films like this. The creators said “As great as Sora is at generating things that appear real – what excites us is its ability to make things that are totally surreal.”
By April, Linkedin was still cluttered with long lists of AI models for various use cases. Curating AI tools for marketers, like this, dominated feeds and fed our overwhelming sense of dread at the task of keeping up.
