TLDR: Leading advertising agencies, including Dentsu and Apollo Partners, are rapidly advancing their adoption of AI tools and recruiting specialized AI talent. This strategic shift is driven by the imperative to leverage generative AI for deeper consumer insights, faster decision-making, and improved operational efficiency, with a focus on agentic offerings and hybrid skill sets.
The advertising industry is witnessing a significant acceleration in the integration of artificial intelligence, with major players like Dentsu and independent agencies such as Apollo Partners leading the charge. This rapid buildout of AI tools and talent is deemed critical for agencies to remain competitive and innovative in an evolving landscape.
At the holding company level, Dentsu’s agency, Carat, recently announced a strategic partnership with tech firm Vurvey Labs. This collaboration aims to develop a suite of agentic tools designed to unearth new consumer insights. These tools are integrated into Dentsu.Connect, the holding company’s internal integrated platform, and are engineered to enhance media and creative strategies across Carat and other Dentsu agencies. Their functionalities include creating detailed consumer personas, serving as brainstorming assistants, and automating trend analysis. The system is designed to ingest diverse data formats, drawing from Dentsu’s proprietary research, such as its Merkury data center, as well as clients’ first-party data and other third-party sources. The primary objectives are to facilitate deeper insights and quicker decision-making, with the added benefits of time and cost savings.
Michael Liu, Executive Vice President and Head of Innovation at Carat, emphasized the supplementary role of AI in their teams. Liu stated that the Vurvey partnership helps to ‘supplement teams with another virtual brain — one that thinks fast and intuitively once it’s been taught properly.’ He further elaborated, ‘We can build assistants, which are sort of like myself and other of my colleagues, specialists who are dedicated to trend spotting, or understanding insights — someone who’s dedicated to brainstorm with us.’ Liu clarified that the goal is not to replace human colleagues but to augment their capabilities, providing ‘colleagues that we have 24/7 across our global teams.’ Beyond this partnership, Dentsu is also pursuing other AI-driven initiatives, including a collaboration with Adobe to integrate its GenStudio suite with Dentsu’s audience intelligence and technology stack.
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Meanwhile, Apollo Partners, a media agency comprising 20-30 professionals founded by Eric Perko, has adopted a different yet equally impactful approach to AI integration. The agency is focusing on hiring a new breed of hybrid personnel who possess a blend of traditional media skills and coding abilities. Digiday has reported that Apollo Partners has brought aboard Trevis Milton to spearhead its automation and AI solutions. Milton brings valuable media agency experience from his tenure at Starcom and has recently applied his hands-on coding expertise to implement automation and AI solutions directly within media workflows at Yahoo. This strategic hiring underscores a growing trend of agencies seeking talent capable of not just understanding but actively building and deploying AI-powered solutions within their operations.
