Throughout the year that AI came of age, we’ve earned a significant new achievement of our own: in November, we were named Adweek’s first-ever AI Agency of the Year. Having experimented with the technology for years, both internally and in our work with brands, this moment has reaffirmed our approach to helping brands navigate new opportunities (and challenges) using AI with speed and confidence. 

“How you manage existing teams and processes and allow them to adopt, rather than compete with, AI will define success,” says Michael Neveu, Sr. Director ML & AI Solutions. “Rather than looking to maintain the status quo and asking if you have to adopt AI, most brands should be asking themselves how it will be of benefit, and for what.” As the year draws to a close, we’re looking back at how we’ve helped our clients and our own team manage navigate these questions.  Want to see the latest that we’ve been up to on all things AI? Check out our freshest AI-related content here. 

We were fast and first in the AI race.

Early in the year, we launched our report, The AI Revolution Will Be Generated, which offers a practical vision of how brands can begin their AI transformation. The report confidently explores the early moves that brands can take using the technology that’s available right now, while also identifying key outcomes as they progress on their journey to AI maturation. This report drew on a variety of experiences, perspectives and existing work from people across the Media.Monks team.

Shortly after its release, we made the annual pilgrimage to Cannes, where we opened shop at Les.Monks Café once again—this time with a full program of AI-related talks and demonstrations. After weeks of sparring with chatbots, nothing beat meeting up with clients and colleagues face-to-face. Catch up on everything we covered at Cannes in our recap.

We gave our people superpowers.

Outside of our AI wins, we were thrilled to have made the list of Newsweek’s Global Most Loved Workplaces 2023—an important milestone to helping our people thrive. This goal continued to take shape through a series of initiatives aimed at upskilling our team to excel in a workplace transformed by AI.

This process began by quickly creating an AI-Core steering committee focused on ensuring that we adopted AI responsibly across the organization. Among the AI-Core are representatives from legal, procurement, infosec, engineering and marketing—a multidisciplinary team whose expertise helped us quickly navigate AI tool risks and selection.

Through the work of the AI-Core, we were able to provide our people unfettered access to the latest models from OpenAI in the form of our own internal large language model tool, MonkGPT. In addition to giving our people a sleek interface and the ability to share, upvote and export high-performing prompts to their colleagues, MonkGPT adds a crucial security layer that safeguards against data leaks or the danger of proprietary information being shared to further train the public model.

Michael Balarezo, our Global VP of Enterprise Automation who led the formation of the AI-Core and development of MonkGPT, says, "LLMs unlock a revolutionary gateway, empowering our teams to explore untapped possibilities and unleash unparalleled productivity. Swift and safe integration of this cutting-edge technology is vital to equip our workforce with the essential skills for embracing AI-powered workflows and transforming our operations."

We tinkered away in collaboration with deep partner relationships.

From highlighting emerging tools to brainstorming new efficiencies across the creative process, people throughout our global team gathered in Slack channels and hackathons to play with emerging tools. This inspired a series of innovation sprints focused on technologies from some of our key partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google. These sprints allowed for the development of use cases that cater to brands’ emerging needs—notably, ownership and data security—and an enhanced understanding of commercially available tools. Through experimentation and by nurturing our tech partnerships, our team is now better equipped to build custom-made solutions for clients.

Having gained more hands-on AI experience across our team, we were able to envision a wide range of ways that AI is already transforming marketing workflows. This led to the launch of Generation AI, our second AI-focused report, which we published in collaboration with Salesforce. The report guides daring marketers on their path to amplify human creativity and marketing effectiveness across the full funnel, touching on themes like understanding customer behavior with incredible precision and how to effortlessly build content at scale with AI.

We helped brands set a solid data foundation to build AI solutions upon.

Behind every successful, AI-first company is a strong data foundation, because access to large amounts of data from across business units is a prerequisite to delivering value throughout the enterprise. The need to get one’s data in order has compounded this year with the sunsetting of Google Analytics 360, requiring brands to begin their transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The Data.Monks have been helping brands like St. James’s Place make a smooth transition using a proprietary automation tool that ports over thousands of pages and partner properties within a just a few hours.

Tyler Pietz, Global EVP Data, spoke to Forrester about how CMOs can strategically integrate data across functions to overcome familiar challenges like disorganized data and departmental disconnects. The very same strategy sets brands up for success by unifying data to build a comprehensive understanding of the consumer and train AI models.

Earlier this year, we launched Blue Sky Thinking with Salesforce Data Cloud, a guide for marketers to understand what sort of features they should assess when looking into a customer data platform—and how one can help bridge the gap between the CMO and CIO. By helping provide a holistic view of what’s happening across the business, solutions like customer data platforms are essential for brands who are eager to invest in AI.  

We dove into strategies for optimization and effectiveness.

With data at your fingertips, you can harness AI to optimize the performance of your campaigns or individual assets. We’ve covered a handful of strategies throughout the year, including the development of bespoke tools built for specific client needs. This was the goal behind our work for Philips Domestic Appliances, in which we built an automated tool that identifies key creative elements that drive performance at scale, backed by campaign performance data.

Market mix modeling (MMM) is another approach that our Measurement.Monks have used to help brands better understand the market forces that influence sales. MMM employs advanced algorithms to drive insights for both CMOs and CFOs, speaking growth opportunities across the organization. Co-Founder Michael Cross explored this in more detail on our blog.

For marketers with insights at their disposal, but who are still looking to understand how AI and machine learning fit into their digital advertising and data strategies, look no further than Modeled Value-Based Bidding. Our data experts picked the brain of Drew Whitehead, Predictive Modeling Specialist at Google, in a webinar about the tech, covering how to determine if it’s right for your business and how it can help you draw insights in real time while safeguarding consumer privacy. 

Elsewhere on our blog, our media experts have kept a keen eye on other emerging tools from Google—like Performance Max—that may change the way marketing teams optimize discoverability in an age of AI.

We set our sights on delivering new, incredible consumer experiences.

By joining deep data insights with content production in an integrated marketing workflow, brands can leverage AI to enable truly personalized experiences like never before—and ultimately live up to the promise of digital.

We put this thinking to the test with the reveal of Fan-Focused AI Highlights at the 2023 International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam. Announced in partnership with AWS and NVIDIA, Fan-Focused AI Highlights is an offering within our software-defined production offering. The proprietary system utilizes AI and machine learning to select highlights from live broadcasts and more effectively distribute custom content highlights to tailored, interest-based audiences.

We leveled up our creative potential.

Did you ever wish you could speak one-on-one with history’s greatest? The Labs.Monks have given influential English playwright and poet William Shakespeare a digital double in the form of Asketh Shakespeare, a virtual Twitch streamer waiting to answer your questions either in verse or ye-olde turns of phrase. Asketh Shakespeare brings together a series of AI innovation—OpenAI’s text-to-speech capabilities, Wav2Lip lip-synch applied to real footage, and a voice clone made possible by ElevenLabs—and offers a look into how individuals and groups alike will be able to converse directly with mascots, characters from entertainment or other high-profile personalities. Learn more about it and dive deep into other creative innovations in our Creative Tech Inspiration series, which also launched this year.

At Amazon re:Invent, we demoed a similar experience, only in person: a moving, talking, interactive animatronic alien that converses with people in natural language. The robot relies on audio transcription to understand people, a large language model for response generation and audio synthesization to talk back. In addition to precise lip-synching, the robot uses eight axes of movement to achieve lifelike expressivity.

In addition to these unique experiences, we’ve also been helping brands overcome traditional production constraints and amplify their creative potential. Group Creative Director Chris Hoffman shared how he and his team have embraced AI in the realm of video and film projects. Meanwhile, our work for HP Omen demonstrates how AI, when joined with virtual production techniques, can scale the ambition of a creative idea. You can read more about the work here.

There are other, less obvious ways that AI is making its way into the creative process. Our recently launched report, AR Unleashed, explores how AI-enabled workflows are helping brands quickly build 3D content and spatial experiences—often with little to no coding knowledge involved—as usage of mixed reality headsets continues to grow. AI’s role in 3D content development is a great example of how the technology can help teams adapt to new trends even if they historically lacked the expertise required.

We’re guiding brands on the journey to become AI-first.

Brady Brim-DeForest, CEO Tech Services, met with Fox Business to share more about the persisting role of the human within a creative process augmented by AI. This speaks to a larger theme that he’s explored within our technology services practice and other consultative work: that AI can help turn work into a more human experience by automating away mundane tasks and allowing employees to focus on deep, innovative work. Brim-DeForest shared more on that topic in an article for the Miami Herald.

For brands hoping to do the same, Brim-DeForest laid out a step-by-step strategy at Forbes. There, readers can learn more about how to set goals, balance scale against cost savings, address risks and liabilities, and more.

Speaking of reducing risk, Brim-DeForest’s team has launched a service that empowers decision-making by allowing professionals to quickly extract insights from corporate documents. DocRobot is a chatbot capable of answering questions based on data from PDFs that the user shares with it. The bot scrubs sensitive information and encrypts communication in real time, meaning all of your information is safe from being shared with third parties. It solves a critical need that many brands grapple with early in their AI transformation: how to use the tech while maintaining control, ownership and security of proprietary information.

Cheers to 2023!

It's been a fast-moving year, and with the accelerating rate of AI’s evolution, 2024 will probably move even faster. Throughout 2023, we have embraced AI as a powerful tool, helping brands navigate the ever-changing landscape with agility and confidence. These efforts have earned us the title of Adweek's AI Agency of the Year, a testament to our unwavering commitment to harnessing the potential of AI.

But more importantly, it’s helped us guide brands toward similar success in their journey to become AI-first. From establishing strong data foundations for brands, to forging strategic partnerships and seamlessly integrating AI into marketing workflows, we’re continuing to push the boundaries of tech—all with the aim to deliver personalized, assistive, and highly effective advertising and experiences. Here’s to more innovation in 2024!

And opportunities there are. In the last few months alone, we’ve completed three innovation sprints in collaboration with some of our key cloud partners. First, we joined forces with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host a challenge across time zones to create internal AI tools using Amazon SageMaker. A few weeks later, Google gave us, in our capacity as a large Workspace customer, the chance to play with Vertex AI and push the technology to its limits in two multi-day events focused on experimentation.

From the outset, the purpose of these sprints is to benefit our cloud partners next to our own business, as we collaborate on solving key industry challenges, developing use cases that drive brand results, and strengthening our partnerships.

Seizing every opportunity to tweak our expertise. 

The setup of innovation sprints is as follows: together with our partners—AWS and Google in this case—we come up with a challenge. Hereafter, our talent dedicates their time and creative chops to come up with ideas and execute on them by using the partner’s AI technologies. 

The needs of brands are at the heart of every sprint. Privacy, for one, is always a bright golden thread, as most brands are highly concerned with making sure everything is safe and sound. Collaborating with AWS and Google to develop AI tools guaranteed we were operating in a privacy-safe environment within their cloud computing platforms. For instance, when you’re deploying a project to Vertex AI, it’s going to be sort of sandboxed within your own hosting environment, which means it’s only pulling data from a knowledge base that you control. As for Amazon SageMaker, this service is GDPR-compliant. 

When it comes to AI-driven projects fully hosted by our partners, our Technical Architect and one of our AWS Certified Solution Architects Ben Moody says, “We used to tackle AI projects with high-level tools like Amazon Rekognition and Transcribe, among others. With Amazon SageMaker, we can be entirely flexible, covering any custom AI solution, high AI data privacy needs, and low latency requirements.” 

In developing AI-driven solutions for brands, it’s critical to know all the capabilities as well as limitations of the tools you’re working with. As our Senior Creative Technologist Angelica Ortiz highlights, “We use a lot of the latest tools from our cloud partners, and these innovation sprints are a great opportunity to formally dedicate the time towards testing their capabilities.” Such early-stage testing enables us to truly understand the limits of what we are pushing certain tools to do—and as a result, McDonald says, “New ideas get spun around all the different ways we could use a technology, which is 100% going to show up in our client work.” 

Accelerating experimentation to drive results for brands.  

As anyone who works in the field of technology knows, experimentation has a ripple effect. Whether you run into a roadblock or discover a new possibility, you’re always expanding your knowledge and skills. But these ripples have a much further reach than just the individual creative, designer or developer. By experimenting with building our own AI tools in partnership with leading technology brands, we’re able to create truly crafted, custom-made solutions for our clients. Let’s be honest, massive AI tools can’t really do that (yet).

“With tools like SageMaker and Vertex AI being made available to us, we’re really able to supercharge our experimentation processes,” says McDonald. “And then, we can feed these generative AI learnings back into our existing projects and new pitches for AWS and Google as our clients.” As it turns out, most of the solutions our Monks come up with during these innovation sprints are transferable and can be wrapped up and applied to various other scenarios. 

Feedback is a very powerful ripple. Once a sprint comes to a halt, we always share our learnings with the aim to help our cloud partners improve their tooling. For example, Moody says, “During the AI challenge with AWS, we had ten teams with members across different time zones, and so we quickly noticed that it was not easy to set up a seamless MLOps and Monitoring strategy. Since our team was lucky to have direct contact with AWS, they supported us right away and provided learning resources for future production iterations.” 

Similarly, innovation sprints allow us to offer our cloud partners an exciting new take on their technologies. “They’ve been working on their products for years and years, so we can provide fresh perspectives—and sometimes even discover bugs in the system—by applying what we know using their tech. While they help us learn more about these technologies, we give them valuable feedback on how they can improve their products and services, so it’s really a win-win situation,” Ortiz says. And as a fun bonus, it often makes our partners excited to explore uncharted territory together.

Nurturing partner relationships is an ongoing process.  

This feeling of excitement to keep experimenting has been echoed by every participant and organizer of our recent innovation sprints, including myself. Now, all there’s left for us to do is to keep carving out the time, so that we can continually develop our creative ideas inspired by the technologies that our cloud partners kindly make available to us. Our Technical Solutions Engineer Sarah Sheppard highlighted that it’s great to “finally get the time to build some momentum on something. We have so many day-to-day things that can slow us down, so to actually set aside time and create space so we can keep our ideas moving forward—I think that's the best thing these sprints do for us.” Her team, for example, had several weeks to flesh out ideas, while getting trained on the AI tools. “This made the whole experience feel like a sprint, as we tried to do as much as we could in the allocated time,” adds Sheppard. 

Ultimately, this time spent on experimenting with existing technologies and creating new applications allows us to not only drive technical solutions for our cloud partners (and ourselves), but also push our partnerships forward. As Sheppard tells me, “One of the best parts of these sprints has been working with our partners and seeing where their heads are at in a totally different context. Instead of reaching out about a fire that needs putting out, I was now messaging them to say I had some cool ideas and if we could work on it together.” In the end, when it comes to team play, you always want to make sure that you add some fun to the game.  

Virtualization defines the transformation of digital.

As the world opened back up, an era of digital transformation gave way to the transformation of digital. By this, we mean virtualization: a set of new audience behaviors, cultural norms and technology paradigms resulting from 30 years of digital transformation, hyper-accelerated over the past five years. Virtualization, covered in our report earlier this year, marks a revolution in consumer behavior as people demand more from the digital platforms they engage with, which implicates the ways they look at digital experience, community, ownership and identity. For example, the design of ComplexLand, a virtualization of the hype-fueled annual event ComplexCon, was built around the insight that today’s fashion trendsetters are becoming just as invested in their digital identities as their corporeal ones.

The Social Innovation Lab, who explores up-and-coming trends in social, delved deeper into what motivates some of these behavioral changes in The Search for Meaning. By exploring how technology shapes the ways consumers find and make meaning in their lives, the Social Innovation Lab uncovers how brands can adapt to the new era in digital.

Experiments in the metaverse drive real success.

One of the biggest manifestations of the virtualization trend has been the rise of the metaverse, which many brands have experimented with this year to find their footing. Duolingo celebrated the birthday of its lovable (and persistent) mascot by hosting a game jam in Roblox and building larger-than-life public artwork in Decentraland. Logitech for Creators reinvented the awards show format by building the first music awards show in the metaverse, the Song Breaker Awards.

The fashion industry in particular has found a lot of success in the space. Liam Osbourne, Global Client Partner at the FLUX.Monks, our dedicated fashion and luxury team, shared with Vogue some insight on how the metaverse is an opportunity to become more inclusive. For brands exploring that question and more, the FLUX.Monks have authored a quick bulletin on why the metaverse matters.

As the metaverse continues to take shape, now is an excellent time for brands to continue experimenting in the space, which was a large part of a discussion shared between SVP Web3, Metaverse & Innovation Strategy Catherine D. Henry; Chief Innovation Officer Henry Cowling; and Mike Proulx, VP and Research Director at Forrester as part of our Meet Me in the Metaverse series. Eager to get started experimenting in the metaverse yourself? Our map of the metaverse can help you find the right home for your brand within this quickly evolving space.

Web3 and other emerging tech begin to mature.

In addition to the metaverse, other emerging technologies have fueled transformative digital experiences—most notably Web3. We showed up at NFT.NYC, the biggest Web3 conference on this side of the screen, with an immersive installation for Cool Cats that blurred the boundary between virtual and the real. Meanwhile, Gucci opened the virtual door to an immersive gallery space used to host an auction of NFT artwork.   

More than just a new tech infrastructure, Web3 marks a foundational shift in brand-consumer relationships, a topic covered in a bulletin we released in collaboration with Salesforce this year titled Web 3: The Future of Customer Engagement. For those wondering how to begin making moves in Web3, check out insights from our In a Monk’s Opinion series, which lays out everything you need to know about NFTs and the blockchain. One tip from the Labs.Monks: be sure to make your NFT projects sustainable.

Speaking of the Labs.Monks, our R&D team has continually released missives on the bleeding edge of tech throughout a year of innovation. Their most recent report on generative AI explores the potential of AI tools like Dall-E and Mid Journey that have captured creatives’ imagination (and people’s social feeds). One example of what the tech can achieve: unlocking efficiencies in animation and other production needs.

Creativity and media go hand in hand.

Throughout the digital era, it’s been tempting to focus attention on vanity metrics. But as CMOs invest more dollars into media (and face increasing budget scrutiny with a possible recession), they will benefit from transforming their approach to a more holistic strategy that blends media and creative to optimize their spend. Speaking to Digiday, Media.Monks Global Head of Media Melissa Wisehart unveiled how our integrated media pillar is designed to help brands make this leap.

Uni's relaunch campaign demonstrates this more holistic approach through the development of both the creative and media placement by one partner. With three creative variations and four measurement initiatives, we ensured the creative rolled out across today’s most relevant channels according to their purpose within the brand ecosystem.

When it comes to creative optimization, wellness brand Hatch found great success—and shared some of their secrets in an episode of In a Monk’s Opinion featuring Hatch’s VP Growth Marketing Holly Elliott. Many brands that rely on digital platforms for their marketing face a series of challenges: rising acquisition costs; a limited ability to manage their performance, attribution and audience targeting; and the risk of losing brand authenticity. Hatch assuaged these concerns by striking a balance between creative and performance. In the episode, Holly and our creative performance experts offer insight into how historical performance data can fuel further creative iterations.

Brands prepare for the oncoming privacy era.

While media optimization and performance may be top of mind now, budget conscious CMOs are also eyeing another obstacle on the horizon: overcoming their reliance on third-party cookies as attitudes in privacy shift and as Google aims to sunset third-party cookies with the Chrome browser. And speaking of cookies, VP of Data Services and Technology Doug Hall recently shared ways marketers can rethink cookie consent and management using the Privacy Sandbox platform.

Add to the mix that Google is sunsetting GA360 to make way for its new GA4 platform, meaning brands have plenty of adjustments to manage in the near future. Thankfully, GA360’s sunset was postponed to July 2024, meaning they have more time to perfect their migration strategy. Our data experts put their heads together to create a short guide on how to maximize your move to GA4 before the deadline.

We’ve also got some inspiration based on how other brands have future-proofed their data strategies with great success. We began our partnership with Molson Coors in 2021 with the goal to bring more of its digital media in-house. By taking an ambitious, holistic approach focused on modernization, we’ve since helped the brand future-proof with a robust, in-house digital media team: a data transformation that ranges from data acquisition, data activation and enrichment, and optimization.

And in the commerce space, leadership from Canadian retailer Reitmans shared the role cloud computing played in building a single source of truth throughout its entire organization, joining online consumer behavior with data from over 400 brick-and-mortar locations. Check out the episode of IMO to learn how a strong data foundation helped the brand adapt at speed.

Speaking of data foundations, emerging technologies like Web3 offer new ways of connecting with consumers and strengthening relationships. In an episode of Meet Me in the Metaverse, Ashley Muscumeci, our Director, Go-to-Market, sat down with Jordan Cuddy, Chief Client Officer at Jam3, and Avanthika Ramesh, Senior Product Manager, NFT Cloud at Salesforce, to explore how building a resilient data foundation will help brands get a head-start into the Web3 future. One key insight: despite being a new space, the same rules apply when it comes to user consent. “Even if you are bridging Web3 and Web2 data to bring all these identifiers about a consumer together, it’s really important that the user opts in and provides consent to merge these identities,” says Ramesh.

Commerce goes social and creators go virtual.

In recent years, creators have expanded their digital footprint into new spaces—like gaming and social audio—and have even adopted new content ventures to translate audience engagement into revenue for brands. So, what does the intersection of content, commerce and entertainment look like today? The Social Innovation Lab launched a report earlier this year, The Year of Digital Creators, to explore the state of the creator economy in depth, available in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

One example of how creators have transformed the consumer journey is through the rise of live commerce, the subject of a recently released Social Bite from the Social Innovation Lab. Live commerce blends communities and real-time connection to offer entertaining, interactive and personalized experiences for audiences, and the short deck offers a glimpse into the live commerce journey and how brands can activate audiences every step of the way.

What’s next in the realm of digital creators? Expect more and more virtual influencers in the form of CGI-rendered fictional characters or avatar alter-egos of real people. With the rise of the metaverse and more accessible motion capture technology, virtual influencers are primed to become a more common presence in brands’ influencer marketing strategies—and if you’re curious about the role one could play in your own marketing, check out another Social Bite about how virtual influencers are coming alive.

Here's to a new year of innovating!

With so much innovation in the last year spanning experiences, content creation and optimization through data, there’s a lot to celebrate as we cap off 2022. Looking ahead into the new year, these trends will continue to shape brands’ strategies as they seek to engage with hyper connected audiences in the new digital era.

Where will you begin? Reach out to start your 2023 journey with confidence.