Ad industry peeks at the ‘agentic’ era

As with the agent era overall, its presence at CES was still quite nascent as of Monday, technically the day before CES officially opened.

Samsung and Google each unveiled plans to bring AI features to their respective connected TV platforms. To be clear, having Google’s Gemini read a news briefing on the big screen isn’t exactly the epitome of the agent era. But for AI agents to become mainstream, LLMs need to become both ubiquitous (or so it would seem) and more sophisticated. And they are.

In its CES presentation on Monday, Nvidia — the company whose processor technology is effectively powering the age of AI — unveiled plans for AI agent tools that described as “the building blocks for developers to create the next wave of AI applications that will transform every industry.”

During a panel at Monday’s CES Digital Hollywood: Hollywood & Innovation conference, Google’s director of partnerships Aaron Luber cited the giant’s big Gemini 2.0 language model, unveiled in December, as indicative of the agent era.

“We’re thinking of Gemini 1.0 as the ability to understand information, and Gemini 2.0 as the final moment when it can be really useful. So the agent era is really true because now there are capabilities in terms of multimodality,” Luber said.

This year’s CES theme is likely to focus on the utility of large language models. At the Las Vegas Convention Center, on the Las Vegas Strip and around the Aria Resort & Casino, where advertising and media executives usually gather, there will be a lot of talk about AI. But AI has been talked about for more than two years, ever since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT.

“Last year we heard a lot about the potential and experimentation of AI in different ways. It quickly became imperative for marketers and media companies to show some real use cases where it was being used. We’re going to hear a lot more from practitioners this week,” Christopher Vollmer, managing director of UTA-owned MediaLink, a consulting firm that hosts “Marketing Reinvented” during CES, told Digiday.

When advertisers will have to enter the era of agents, it seems to be a long way off. Search is likely to be the area where AI agents will see the biggest disruption, which helps explain why Luber would like to focus on connecting Google’s updated LLM with the advent of the agent era. But Vollmer said the discontinuation is “probably a few years away.”

At the very least. If Google’s recent AI-related search updates are any indication, that could take a while. In 2023, Google introduced its Search Generative Experience, but those AI search results were “very much a black box” and “uncharted territory that no one could test or scale,” said Deanna Cullen, head of media investment at Wpromote. interview.

“Test a new offering, that’s a topic for the industry. You see the first movers, but not necessarily an exodus from anything,” she said.

Could the Age of Agents Impact Advertisers? Eventually, sure. And CES—the domain of jetpacks and self-driving cars—is the perfect context in which advertisers can showcase the next generation of AI tools. But for now, it’s a brand new toy.

“It’s a nice to have versus a need to have,” Cullen said. “For us, the functionality depends on how much you actually have to move the needle to tap it.”

Ads aren’t good enough to be everywhere

“Everything is an ad network” was the joke in Digiday’s newsroom. But LG Ad Solutions CMO Tony Marlow seemed pretty serious when he floated the idea that electric cars would one day be equipped with LG screens so someone could watch a show with ads at the charging station.

“That’s an advertising opportunity that didn’t exist,” Marlow said during a “Digital Hollywood” segment about streaming advertising.

OK, but is this an advertising opportunity that should exist?

Companies are coming up with all kinds of ways, old and new, to shove ads in people’s faces. Marlow’s hypothetical example is little more than gas station television for the EV era. Uber, meanwhile, has created its version of Taxi TV with its JourneyTV product, which places TV screens in ride-sharing vehicles so people can watch videos and, of course, commercials while on the road.

And it’s not like this “put ads everywhere” strategy doesn’t work. During the same panel, Ashan Khan, Uber’s head of agency partnerships, stated that JourneyTV led to a 20% increase in brand popularity for advertisers and that 35% more brands advertised on JourneyTV in the second half of 2024 than in the first half.

But if the ad industry is going to insist on making every screen and every idle moment an opportunity for advertising, it needs to really consider the actual ads it’s going to put there. Because quality vs. the amount of ads is unbalanced.

In what ended up being the panel’s mic drop moment, Havas Media Network Chief Strategy Officer Sarah Ivey said the following:

“I don’t think anybody looks at the advertising industry right now and says, ‘Wow, these are great experiences.’ In general, the ad experience is not that great…. We cannot spend more time on advertisements than we currently do. From an advertiser’s point of view, the emphasis on the quality of the experience is therefore increasingly important,” said Havas Media Network Strategy Director Sarah Ivey.

And then Ivey said this at the end of the discussion, a moment that drew several applauses from the crowd:

“Ad experiences are generally bad, and we don’t want our clients’ ad experiences to be bad [claps from the crowd]. It looks like table stakes, but it’s not.”