Businesses must take back control in an AI-driven future: S4's Martin Sorrell

India is one of the most coveted markets for the global advertisers and marketeers. The advertising and marketing industry is on the verge of massive changes coming in the future. Speaking about this aspect, Sir Martin Sorrell, S4 Capital Chairman addressed the audience at Amazon MX Player's Streamnext revealed three things agencies and marketeers should think about.

He spoke about how important these factors are and said, "The first is agility. Easy to say, every CEO standing on a stage like this of an agency or of a client says their organisation is agile. And in a world where there is so much volatility and so many challenges, Agility is absolutely key. So speaking about it is one thing, but actually doing it in it, fermenting it is critical.

He spoke about how taking back control is integral to any agency. "You may find that odd coming from an agency man. But the reason I think is quite clear. In the great financial crisis in 2008 and after it, the financial function inside clients said, outsource. Let's get the headcount out. That's totally wrong in an an AI technologically driven world. Businesses and clients have to take back control. And they have to internalise more and more of their functions. That's because control of content and ideation is critically important.

The third thing that he revealed was how and why first party data is critically important. "Having an understanding on a detailed basis, particularly in areas such as visualization, copywriting, and personalization of scale and media planning buying is pretty important. So what we are seeing, for example, at the work that we're doing with General Motors, who are the first company on a global basis to really look at AI in a truly analytical way and change their organization as a result. The sort of things we're doing are very much about changing the nature of control by client and agency. There are 3 models. There's an embedded model where we put our people into the client. There's the in house model and there's the outsource model to us. So take back control is also model to us. And the third thing is first party, and the final thing is first party data."

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Data for control of first party data together with the signals, for example, on Amazon, is critically important. So in summary, a difficult world, but a world where picking geographies and using technology to drive efficiency is pretty important. "A world where digital dominates and the platforms, the key platforms, the 6 in particular that I mentioned, along with Nvidia and Microsoft and Apple and Salesforce and Oracle and Adobe, I think in particular will become increasingly important in an AI driven, energy driven, capital investment driven world," he concluded.

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