What new features does Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition offer?

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition offers a broad range of new product features, particularly focused on helping smaller marketing teams do more with less. At a crucial time when brands are racing to achieve new efficiencies with AI, enhance experimentation of user journeys and effortlessly collaborate across teams, new features in Advanced Edition are sure to please. Here’s what to look forward to:

Reimagined campaign home. Like Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition includes a reimagined and reengineered Campaign home. In this new experience marketers can view guidance on building key marketing components. Those include access guidance cards for tasks like creating audiences, creating content, and creating campaigns. Accessing recent campaigns in the new campaign home is easily done as well—just review a list view of your most recent campaigns.

AI-powered features. The Advanced Edition introduces robust AI integration, making sophisticated marketing tactics accessible to SMBs. Einstein Engagement Scoring will enable you to predict engagement to segment and personalize more effectively. Score every individual on their likelihood to open, click and stay subscribed to email and to convert. Then use those scores to create audiences, segments, split paths in Flow, and personalize content. Einstein Engagement Frequency helps ensure you send the right number of messages to optimize engagement. Markers will be able to see a distribution of their email sends and subscriber engagement for a given period of time. EEF will predict the optimal frequency range of emails to maximize engagement goals. This will allow you to adjust messaging cadence based on data, and create data extensions for over and under-messaged subscribers.

Dynamic content creation. With the Data Cloud data graph, marketers can build dynamic content directly within the content builder. This feature, which is also available in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, allows the configuration of rules that operate against your data graph, ensuring that your marketing material is as dynamic and responsive as your audience demands.

Event-driven messaging. Like the Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition supports event-driven messaging, enabling marketers to trigger communications based on specific events, such as form submissions or commerce purchases.

Two-way conversational messaging. Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition enables marketers with Service Cloud and Digital Engagement to turn one-way promotions into a connected conversation. With help from Data Cloud, marketers gain the ability to respond in real-time with unified data to deliver connected interactions across departments and respond instantly.

Path Experiment. Companies using Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition are able to test up to ten paths to multiple variations of your campaign paths with varied channels, messaging copy, and cadence. Users can remove bias from testing paths by randomly assigning individuals to different paths to ensure fair and unbiased distribution. It is also possible to tailor the distribution of individuals across paths according to your specific testing needs.

There’s even more to look forward to soon. In addition to these Advanced-specific features, Salesforce will continue to build out innovations in both Growth and Advanced Edition, which customers will be able to use in October.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition addresses key CRM use cases.

Each of these new features are engineered to address key challenges and priorities marketers face today, ensuring their businesses can deliver highly personalized and effective marketing experiences. In fact, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report (Ninth Edition), a staggering 88% of marketers believe they must innovate to meet rising customer expectations—but achieving that is impossible without a unified view of the customer. Here’s how Advanced Edition is designed to enable that use case and more.

Unify data for personalized engagements.

With both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions, marketers can now personalize every customer engagement using a unified data source. This allows teams to create campaigns faster and more effectively with the aid of Salesforce's trusted AI.

Enable collaboration through greater data visibility.

Built on Salesforce's platform, both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions offer brands or companies the opportunity to remove silos in their sales and marketing technology stacks. By choosing Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced you are bringing your core sales, marketing, service and commerce technologies together under one roof. This enables a profound change in the availability of your customer data, already in Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud, to be used by your marketing team. This goes a long way towards realizing the goal of gaining a unified view of your customers. This holistic view supports informed decision-making and enhances the overall customer experience.

Better understand customer journeys through detailed engagement metrics.

The upgraded Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions transition from simply measuring marketing influence through campaign members to utilizing detailed engagement metrics. Both editions will include Opportunity Influence, a feature launching in October, which use engagement data to tie closed and won opportunities and their revenue back to specific campaigns. This shift provides marketers with profound insights into how customer interactions drive sales. By understanding which engagements are more likely to lead to conversions, marketing teams can focus their efforts more strategically, including the creation of multi-channel journeys through both email and SMS.

Moreover, the feedback loop created by these metrics feeds data back into the marketing system. This allows for more targeted campaigns and sophisticated lead scoring, ensuring that only the most qualified leads are passed to sales. As a result, marketing becomes a more evident driver of growth, enhancing the value of every interaction and elevating the role of marketing within the business.

Is Advanced Edition fit for your team’s specific needs?

When considering whether the Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is the right fit for your business, it's essential to understand who stands to benefit the most from these offerings, how they compare to other Salesforce products, and what your existing Salesforce setup looks like.

What separates Growth and Advanced Edition from other Marketing Cloud products?

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition are streamlined versions of Salesforce's comprehensive Marketing Cloud, specifically designed to be intuitive and accessible. Built on the Lightning platform—the same foundation as Salesforce Sales Cloud—these versions allow new customers to set up and begin testing customer journeys quickly, without ever leaving their salesforce org.

For small and medium-sized businesses who are moving to Salesforce or already use Salesforce, it is in your best interest to use Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced for your marketing. By choosing Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, businesses immediately gain the ability to scale their marketing operations with one of the most cutting-edge marketing platforms available today, all from within their Salesforce instance.

What About Marketing Cloud Engagement?

If you are already utilizing Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, this announcement does not affect the availability of those platforms. Salesforce will continue to innovate and enhance these existing platforms. While Growth and Advanced Edition both bring new features to the table now, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement will continue to receive updates that bring each version into greater parity—meaning current customers won’t need to migrate to the new platforms to access future innovations.

Get started with Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition.

Getting setup with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is designed to be straightforward and accessible, ensuring that your team can quickly harness the platform's power. The Advanced Edition is available in November, enabling businesses across AMER, EMEA and LATAM to begin leveraging advanced marketing functionalities without delay.

For current Salesforce customers, upgrading to Growth or Advanced Edition is seamless. Your team can continue operating on a single platform as your marketing footprint expands, eliminating the need for disruptive migrations and ensuring continuity in your marketing efforts. Importantly, all your existing marketing engagement data remains intact, preserving the insights and analytics you've built over time.

I’m excited to see these tools become more accessible to a broader range of businesses, granting them robust, enterprise-level data tools at a pivotal time as we navigate the new AI economy. And whether you're an existing user of Marketing Cloud or just starting with Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition, we are here to help you maximize the platform's features. Let us help you unlock the full potential of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions to ensure that you can seamlessly integrate and leverage these capabilities to drive your marketing success.

StreamSearch.Flow is an advanced AI technology tailored for live broadcast environments, enabling broadcasters to pinpoint and segment particular objects, brand logos, keywords and more as they appear in content in real time. It isn’t just visuals that StreamSearch.Flow picks up; it can also recognize designated words within the audio stream, ensuring content—like real-time highlights, post-event recaps and more—is curated with precision.

Effortlessly capture and segment the content your fans crave.

While content segmentation itself isn't entirely new, StreamSearch.Flow stands out by offering broadcasters the capability to perform these tasks instantaneously during a broadcast. This means broadcasters are no longer limited to curating highlights post-broadcast, but can instead enhance viewer experience dynamically as events unfold, seamlessly delivering the output to live audiences across streaming channels.

This unique functionality is powered by NVIDIA Holoscan for Media, an AI-enabled, software-defined platform for live media. Additionally, StreamSearch.Flow integrates seamlessly with Monks.Flow, our professional managed AI service, providing broadcasters with a robust and comprehensive AI solution that enhances live broadcast operations effortlessly.

Why does this matter? Well, imagine being able to compile highlight reels based on precise criteria, such as capturing every slam dunk made by a basketball player wearing a specific brand's shoes. Or using real-time content segmentation to manage brand safety by instantly censoring inappropriate content, such as foul language, whether it's spoken or displayed on signs in crowd shots.

Similarly, StreamSearch.Flow can be used to verify how long a brand is featured for product placement or other sponsorship opportunities. For instance, during a morning show cooking segment, it can measure and verify the screen time devoted to a branded cooking product, ensuring that it receives the intended exposure in alignment with the brand's marketing goals. Similarly, in the context of a sponsored event, you could track the duration that a brand's logo is displayed on screen—confirming that it meets the agreed-upon airtime in the sponsorship agreement and, thus enhancing accountability and trust between sponsors and the broadcast team.

Each of these above use cases are possible, whether you’re streaming over the airwaves or on platforms like TikTok, Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitch and more. So, how does it all come together? Let’s look under the hood.

Software-defined production paves the path for AI transformation in broadcast.

StreamSearch.Flow uses a highly adaptable large language model that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of a brand. By training the model to recognize keywords, logos or other content, broadcasters can ensure that their (or their audience’s) unique objectives are captured with ease. And because the model is trained specifically for their needs, brands mitigate the risk of sharing data with a publicly trained model, ensuring that sensitive information remains protected and proprietary.

AI tools like this thrive on software-defined production pipelines, which involve software to control and manage production processes in a way that is both flexible and automated. This replaces the traditional single-use hardware found in control rooms with versatile software applications. By integrating digital technologies instead—on premises or in the cloud—broadcasters can optimize their manufacturing and production workflows while reducing their physical footprint.

Traditionally, software-defined production involves using multiple virtual machines in the cloud, with each machine running a single software application due to the individual CPU requirements. Holoscan for Media enhances this approach through containerization, allowing multiple applications to share compute resources such as GPUs, CPUs, and RAM. This not only reduces the overall resources required but also facilitates lower latency and higher video quality. The efficiency of shared resources translates directly into superior performance and cost savings.

Holoscan for Media’s repertoire of applications for containerization is continuously expanding, with a substantial amount of software already containerized for broadcast pipelines. This makes it an ideal choice for us and our clients, supporting our vision that containerization will define the future of broadcasting by enabling functionality like StreamSearch.Flow.

Keep ahead of emerging viewing habits and cultural affinities.

The ability to segment content in real time opens a new world of possibilities for enhancing viewer engagement. For example, broadcasters can move beyond traditional demographic categorizations, curating content that resonates with viewer interests and cultural affinities. This personalized approach ensures that the content delivered aligns more closely with what audiences truly care about, such as the sneaker-themed basketball highlights mentioned above, thereby offering new and exciting advertising opportunities for brands looking to sponsor tailored content.

Additionally, streaming platforms can act on the consumption data they have collected from viewers to provide highly targeted and personalized viewing experiences that reflect individual preferences. This level of customization not only enhances viewer satisfaction but also helps validate viewer identities, accommodating interests that might not traditionally fit within traditional broadcast contexts—like the intersection of fashion or music with sports.

As viewing patterns and demographics shift, particularly among audiences who prefer social platforms for viewing highlights rather than live events on TV, StreamSearch.Flow enables broadcasters to adapt seamlessly and maintain relevance with their younger, more digitally savvy fans.

The broadcast landscape is evolving. Are you ready for it?

Software-defined production is revolutionizing the broadcast industry, enabling broadcasters to work more efficiently and effectively than ever before. With the growing adoption of Holoscan for Media, broadcasters are empowered to take greater control of their workflows, enhancing their ability to deliver new and engaging viewing experiences to their audiences.

StreamSearch.Flow exemplifies the seamless integration of AI technology into broadcasting, helping broadcasters provide hyper-relevant content that resonates deeply with viewers. As the developer of one of many innovative technologies driving this transformation, we seek to demonstrate the potential of AI to reshape how content is curated and consumed.

We’ll continue to push the boundaries of what's possible in broadcasting, leveraging the latest technology from partners like NVIDIA to bring about the next wave of technological advancement—all to deliver cutting-edge solutions that meet the evolving needs of broadcasters and their audiences.

This award was established to celebrate customer champions and how they are using Workato technology to transform their teams and build organizational effectiveness. Our innovation experiment leveraged Workato’s integration capabilities to bring together Salesforce, Google Gemini and Slack to enable us the ability to talk to our CRM data. Weaving these technologies together into an intuitive natural language interface significantly simplifies the user experience while streamlining complex workflows and enhancing data accessibility.

My colleague Erin Freeman, Director of Automation Strategy at Monks, emphasized the strategic importance of integrating AI to democratize data access across the organization. She stated, "Our goal was not just to simplify processes but to empower every team member to make data-driven decisions effortlessly. This project represents a significant leap towards achieving that vision."

Enabling technical and nontechnical people both the ability to analyze and extract insights is key to a healthy, modern business. Earlier this year, S4Capital Executive Chairman Sir Martin Sorrell noted that democratization of knowledge was a primary opportunity for AI innovation. He told the International News Media Association, “You will be able, with AI, to educate everyone in an organization. AI will flatten organizations, de-silo them. It will bring you a much more agile, leaner, flatter organization.” Building off of our experience developing end-to-end, AI-powered workflows like Monks.Flow, we sought to experiment internally how we could leverage Workato to help information travel across the business.

Automated data analysis could be as easy as having a conversation.

Imagine a world where you can interact with your business systems as easily as having a conversation. This vision becomes a reality when you bridge multiple systems—like project management tools, NetSuite for financials, and client presentation software—into a unified, conversational interface. Integrating these systems can streamline complex workflows to enhance data accessibility and improve the user experience.

When it comes to CRM adoption, a longstanding challenge has been simplifying interactions for end users who are unaccustomed to complex concepts like Opportunities and Stage Lifecycles addressed by their platform of choice. Traditionally, navigating through these systems involves convoluted click paths, prompting the question: what if simply conversing with your system was the norm?

A few years back, Salesforce took an interesting step toward this vision with Einstein Voice, which aimed to connect Amazon Alexa to Salesforce. While those conversations were very scripted and limited, they showcased the potential of conversational interactions with business systems. But today, the rise of large language models (LLMs) are inspiring new ways of supporting sophisticated conversations with Salesforce.

Automating CRM insights is as easy as one, two, three.

To bring this innovative solution to life, we began by leveraging the robust capabilities of Salesforce as our core CRM platform. Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management platform, providing comprehensive tools for sales, customer service, marketing, and more. Despite its robust capabilities, navigating through its vast array of features can be daunting for users who are less familiar with CRM. Our goal was to simplify interactions with the platform by enabling natural language communication.

We then turned to Workato to bridge Salesforce with other essential systems and services. Workato's powerful integration capabilities allowed us to create seamless workflows, enabling data flow and process automation across platforms. By configuring Workato, we ensured that Salesforce could communicate with Google Gemini and Slack, forming the backbone of our conversational interface (more on those immediately below).

The integration of Google Gemini's API was a pivotal step. With its advanced language understanding and generation capabilities, Gemini allowed us to embed natural language processing into our system. This enabled users to perform complex Salesforce operations simply by conversing with the system, transforming user interactions into intuitive experiences.

Finally, we chose Slack as the prompt interface, taking advantage of its widespread use and intuitive nature. By developing a Slack bot, we created a familiar environment for users to interact naturally with Salesforce. Slack's robust communication tools allowed users to issue commands and receive responses effortlessly, making complicated CRM operations as simple as a chat.

Here's how this innovation works in practice. Imagine the typical start to Carli's day, a project manager at an advertising agency. Previously, beginning her morning routine involved logging into various systems, sifting through multiple tabs, and deciphering complex dashboards just to get a handle on client projects. Now, with her morning coffee in hand, Carli simply opens Slack and types a message to the integrated agent: "Hey, what are we doing with Acme?" Instantly, the system, powered by the Google Gemini, replies, "We are currently in the proposal stage with Acme, with a scheduled presentation next Tuesday."

This seamless interaction illustrates the transformative power of integrating conversational AI with business systems. Gone are the days of cumbersome navigation and overwhelming interfaces. But the benefits don't end there. Later, when Carli needs to update the status of the Acme project, she simply types, "I sent the proposal to Acme.” Immediately understanding the context of what to do with that information, the system swiftly processes her request, triggers the appropriate workflow in Workato, and updates Salesforce—all without her having to leave the Slack interface. These interactions not only demonstrate ease of use but also highlight the enhanced efficiency and strategic insights that conversational interfaces can provide, freeing Carli to focus more on her strategic role rather than the mechanics of data entry.

This is only the beginning of what we can do with AI in CRM.

The journey towards democratizing data and fostering seamless information sharing is far from over. Empowering users with the ability to interact naturally with their business systems transforms how information travels across an organization. This democratization not only enhances organizational effectiveness but also aligns with the vision of creating a more agile, de-siloed business environment. Looking ahead, the potential for expanding this conversational interface into additional systems is immense.

Imagine integrating financial management systems like NetSuite to offer real-time financial insights, making the complex world of accounting as simple as asking a question. Or consider connecting project management tools such as Jira, where tasks, deadlines, and project progress can be managed through straightforward conversational commands. Moreover, the ability to seamlessly access and update presentation software could redefine client interactions, allowing for effortless preparation and presentation without the need to juggle multiple platforms.

The integration of Salesforce, Workato, Google Gemini and Slack represents a pivotal step towards the dream of conversational business systems. This proof of concept not only highlights the transformative potential of advanced conversational interfaces in enhancing CRM adoption and usability but also sets the stage for a future where interactions with business systems are more intuitive and user-friendly than ever. As LLMs continue to evolve, we anticipate even more powerful and seamless interactions, paving the way for a new era in enterprise software. By incorporating additional systems into this ecosystem, businesses stand to gain unprecedented efficiency and accessibility, heralding a future where managing complex operations is as effortless as having a conversation.

Once a conference for graphics experts, SIGGRAPH offers much to marketers with generative AI and 3D asset creation.

Traditionally an event focused on computer graphics and attended by the tech-savvy, SIGGRAPH doesn’t hold a privileged place on marketers’ agendas—yet. While the conference has historically been research-focused, potential applications of the technologies showcased are too significant for advertisers to ignore, and I expect I will see a larger marketing presence at the event for years to come.

Marketers seem very interested in applying new generative AI technologies in their work, but are struggling to discover the immediate, impactful utility of these technologies in their day-to-day life. It’s clear that the technology is outpacing what the marketing industry is capable of today, and this makes it more important than ever for marketers to show up, learn, and understand the benefits of cutting-edge AI innovations for their workflows.

AI made a significant impact at SIGGRAPH 2023, showing up in the contexts of interoperability, asset management, and generation, and importantly, in 3D asset creation. We’re seeing a lot of progress in terms of creating and managing 3D assets, especially from NVIDIA. The advancements in AI infrastructure, with new chipsets, workstations, and devices dedicated to AI, were also noteworthy. Additionally, licensing and ethics were prominent topics, with Shutterstock and Getty playing key roles in enabling brand-safe, licensed model training.

High-profile products and services showcase compelling, AI-powered marketing use cases.

One such platform explored in-depth at the conference was NVIDIA’s Omniverse, designed for collaborative 3D content creation and real-time simulation. This means artists, designers and developers can work together seamlessly on complex 3D projects regardless of their physical location.

The focus at SIGGRAPH was Omniverse’s integration with OpenUSD, a universal scene description framework that enhances interoperability and collaboration across different 3D tools and applications. With an entire day of sessions dedicated to OpenUSD, and with tool vendors like Blender and Autodesk involved in the Alliance for OpenUSD, it's clear that interoperable assets for 3D pipelines are no longer a thing of the past.

Showcases included 3D scene generation and rendering with Edify, as well as innovations in safe asset creation with Shutterstock and Getty using Omniverse. These developments will undoubtedly enhance our capabilities in creating and managing 3D assets efficiently—and offer immense potential in streamlining the production process through integration into AI-powered workflows like our own Monks.Flow.

Another standout innovation from the show was HP Z Captis, a material-scanning tool that has just launched. It works in tandem with Adobe Substance to instantly digitize fabrics and other textures for digital workflows, greatly enhancing 3D-to-content workflows that we’re already deploying for apparel brands. Today, we can take 3D renders of products and create thousands of variations of hyper-realistic product shots (even including generated models in photoshoots), but soon, with partners like HP, Adobe and Autodesk, we will be able to ship entire marketing campaigns before the first product even leaves the factory—a velocity that brands have only ever dreamed of.

SIGGRAPH paints a bright future for further marketing innovation.

Looking ahead, the potential for leveraging AI innovations presented at SIGGRAPH is immense for marketers. As partners of tech leaders like HP, Adobe, and Autodesk, we are at the forefront of integrating these advancements into practical marketing solutions.

For instance, our collaboration with Adobe plays a critical role in transforming end-to-end content supply chains. Through the Brand Model Practice, we utilize Adobe GenStudio, a generative AI-first offering, to help marketing teams quickly plan, create, manage, activate and measure on-brand content. Integration Monks.Flow allows for generative AI brand models that can significantly reduce costs, enhance creativity, build business intelligence and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts to drive growth. The overarching theme between this tool, NVIDIA Omniverse and HP Z Captis is that your marketing workflows are about to become a lot more integrated—and a lot faster.

Innovations in AI and 3D asset creation presented at the SIGGRAPH have significant implications for AI workflows and our own tools, like Monks.Flow. As marketers, it’s crucial to stay informed and adapt to these rapid advancements to maintain a competitive edge. The future of AI in digital marketing is developing rapidly, and I’m excited to see how these technologies will continue to transform how we approach our work each day.

As EVP of Innovation, Products & Solutions Development, I’ve had firsthand experience helping brands innovate through our brand model practice. This service, strengthened by our recent partnership with Adobe, delivers three key components: fine-tuned models, updated brand prompt guidelines for the AI era, and a prompt bank to jumpstart AI usage. Together, this enhances our ability to help brand marketing teams quickly plan, create, manage, activate and measure on-brand content.

As you can imagine from that description, building brand models relies on more than just technology. Change management and the people element are just as crucial. With that in mind, here is a recipe to bring data, people, processes and technology together to create powerful, bespoke brand models—and some of the successes we’ve seen so far with their implementation.

Data is essential to building brand models—but is only part of the equation.

First, it’s no secret that artificial intelligence relies on vast amounts of data for training, including customer insights, media data and historic brand IP. Therefore, it may seem as though the more data you have, the better—but it’s not that simple.

While a data lake is nice to have, its benefits will diminish over time. Brands seeking to build AI models tailored to their specific business needs require a constant stream of fresh data to adapt and improve over time. This begins with the adept orchestration of data pipelines: the process of designing, managing, and optimizing the flow of data from various sources to ensure it’s current, relevant and seamlessly integrated into your AI systems.

But equally critical is fostering a collaborative environment where your team can effectively leverage the technology and ultimately keep these models up to date. A Forrester report by Forrester VP, Principal Analyst Jay Pattisall—titled “Brand AI Models Will Reinvent How Marketing Creates Business Value”— discusses brand models in detail and hits on the role that people play in filling in those gaps left by historic data. There, he quotes me saying, “[Foundation] models are a picture from the past with data from the past. The future will be continuing to iterate with the model, and that’s the people.” Let’s dig deeper into how aligning your team around these data-driven initiatives can drive transformational change.

Organize people and pipelines into efficient, automated workflows.

We help brands re-engineer their workforce for AI readiness with a consultative phase focused on change management and breaking down silos. This involves pragmatic advisory to understand where you are in your AI journey and implementing a workflow infrastructure for your tech stack and teams, because ultimately the job of the orchestration layer—or the part of the tech stack that manages, coordinates and optimizes interactions between services, application and processes—is to amplify the best of the technology you have and the best of the people you have.

By leveraging technologies like Monks.Flow, for example, we can streamline how people and AI work together. Monks.Flow is an AI-powered professional managed service that connects employees, vendors, AI and enterprise software into efficient, automated workflows. This platform-agnostic environment is designed to work seamlessly across an organization’s existing tech stack, helping businesses achieve benefits like the integration of tools, people and processes; building business intelligence; and maximizing the impact of their marketing efforts to drive growth. Those who marry skillful use of the technology with deep brand expertise can provide strategic oversight throughout this workflow, thereby achieving stronger outcomes than if you relied on the technology alone.

A perfect example of this is an incredibly promising brand lift study we did with Forever 21. The fashion retailer leveraged Monks.Flow and Meta’s AI Text Generation to elevate the creative strategy of their shopping campaigns. We created 50 variations of Forever 21’s business-as-usual (BAU) creative and used Meta’s AI to generate copy variations powered by Llama 3. This conversion lift study aimed to measure the impact of these AI strategies on campaign performance. By incorporating AI to generate diverse copy and imagery, we were able to test and optimize for the best-performing creative. The results were impressive, showing significant improvements in click-through rates and conversion rates compared to BAU assets alone.

Talent is key to domesticating brand models and AI-generated output.

Just as it's crucial to prepare and collaborate with your internal workforce, it's equally important to engage with partners within your vertical for AI consultation and implementation. These experts are deeply immersed in your market of choice, understanding its nuances and dynamics, and can leverage this knowledge to fuel your strategic AI efforts. Moreover, a partner who knows your brand inside and out can provide tailored insights that align perfectly with your business objectives, ensuring a cohesive and effective AI strategy.

For instance, I spoke with April Huff, who has successfully incorporated AI into her role as VP of Research & Insights at Media.Monks to build audience personas and aggregate data from focus groups. As a researcher and strategist, she seeks intriguing differences in focus group data, because those unique viewpoints often trigger the best creative ideas.

She emphasized that because AI models excel at predicting the next most likely word when generating text, there’s a tendency toward homogenization of experiences—which can be valuable in market research, but not always. “What makes humans interesting is that they will  say something that is unpredictable,” she says, underscoring the role of talent who can parse these nuances and add depth to AI-generated insights.

One example of how humans teased a surprising creative insight from AI data is our work with Sephora on its “mAI colpevoli” campaign, which launched on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. We used AI to analyze online data and create three scripted monologues that retold typical episodes of gender-based violence.

The team realized the AI-generated scripts had something in common: written as monologues, they each featured a speaker who blamed herself for what happened to her. The output highlighted the pervasiveness of victim blaming, mimicking societal biases, and we realized we could use this insight to encourage audiences to reflect on their own propensity for blaming victims (or themselves) of injustices. By marrying AI insights with strategic oversight, we were able to create a powerful, purpose-driven campaign that supported women's freedom and self-expression, demonstrating how deep brand expertise and AI can work together to drive transformative change.

The secret to brand model success: people and tech working together.

The integration of artificial intelligence within the enterprise is a multifaceted endeavor that goes beyond mere data accumulation or technological foundations. To truly unlock the potential of AI, brands must focus on creating self-evolving models that adapt and improve over time, driven by continuous data generation and strategic human oversight. This approach ensures that AI systems remain relevant and effective in an ever-changing market landscape.

Ultimately, the successful implementation of AI hinges on the symbiotic relationship between advanced technology and skilled human operators. It requires breaking down organizational silos, fostering collaboration, and engaging with partners who understand both the market dynamics and the brand’s intricacies. As brands navigate the complexities of AI adoption, focusing on these strategic elements will pave the way for sustained success and innovation.

In partnership with Cannes Lions, this contest showcases emerging talent globally. Open to employees with up to seven years of industry experience, participants join in pairs to compete across multiple categories. Three teams will earn a trip to Cannes, with one standout team gaining the additional honor of attending the prestigious Creative Academy.

The contest includes three categories that explore creativity in different ways:

• Film: Deliver cinematic stories for screens of all sizes, featuring elements like original concepting, scriptwriting, visual treatments, film treatments, shooting, directing, editing, VFX, post—and everything in between.
• Innovation: Turn visionary, future-facing ideas into reality using the latest in emerging tech and formats, resulting in groundbreaking experiences and new possibilities.
• Interactive: Go beyond the mundane while putting the audience at the heart of every moment, giving them the opportunity to immerse themselves in compelling, transformative digital experiences.

So, what creative challenge were they trying to solve? This year, the brief focused on a fictional beauty and skincare brand called TriVitalize. The mission: build an innovative and social-first campaign to launch a new line of sustainable, luxury shower products, with the goal of recapturing market share and shelf space.

Interestingly, all three winning teams were from Latin America, with two teams from Brazil and one from Argentina. Juan Orlievsky and Julia Calvo won in the Film category for a campaign that plays on the “shower thoughts” phenomenon; while Everton Souda and Thiago Assunção won in the Innovation category with the “feelings translator,” an AI-powered technology that turns customer testimonials into beautiful, synesthetic works of art.

But the top win went to Hitamara Tamizou and Matias Marcossi in the Interactive category. Their project, “My Side of the Mirror,” is a clever take on self-affirmations inspired by the insight that women criticize themselves on an average of four times a day. Realizing that feeling good about yourself while looking in the mirror can often be a challenge, their concept centers around an AI-powered app that features a personalized digital double, based on the user’s likeness and voice, that greets them with messages of affirmation.

We had a chance to speak to Hitamara and Matias to learn more about their winning concept and how it came to be. Read below to peek behind the scenes into the creative process.

What were your initial impressions of the brief, and how did that lead to the beginning stages of developing your concept?

Matias: First of all, we found it a little challenging to work with a brand that is fictional, because you don’t have previous information of how the brand communicates with the public. So the challenge begins there.

We started by doing our research, which was pretty easy because we had a lot of material based on the struggles that women face through their lives. As a transgender person, I remember those struggles very well—and now I have new ones. So, the first thing was to think about this fictional brand and how we could bring them to life in a way that spoke to those struggles.

Hitamara: I say myself in those statistics about women criticizing themselves. So this work means a lot to me, because I not only saw myself within it but could participate in discussions that help solve those challenges and support women by building the self-confidence that they usually lack. That focus on confidence, for me, helped shape the creative idea.

Matias: Next, we tried to think how we could universalize that experience. We are both based in Brazil, so a lot of our initial thinking focused on that experience—but given the fact that this is a global brand, we had to think of how we could connect with women everywhere.

Universalizing the idea for “My Side of the Mirror” grew from the trope of fantasy and fairy tales that are well known across different cultures. For example, you see the queen in Snow White ask, who’s the most beautiful woman in the world? And it’s not her; it’s Snow White. We wanted women to be able to seek approval from themselves through self-affirmation.

You mentioned research, and your concept draws heavily on insights and statistics. What were you looking for when embarking on the research phase?

Hitamara: A lot of our research focused on the experience of Black women in particular, as they make up a significant portion of our population in Brazil. But while our finished concept is focused on fun and self-confidence, we were initially thinking around heavier themes like harassment and the lack of safety women feel, because in order to have the opportunity to take care of yourself, you have to make it home first. In Brazil, many women face harassment on the street.

Matias: We thought a lot about external issues like harassment and violence, but realized that we were creating more fear rather than finding solutions. This prompted us to look internally at what we can change within ourselves, seeking positive solutions to more personal challenges like self-confidence.

You had a diverse range of personas in mind when developing your concept. How did their particular needs influence your creative approach?

Matias: This goes back to what I said before about universalizing the experience. The personas were a very important part here, because while the creative idea is designed to appeal to everyone, how people engage with it can be very different. How does someone in the Deaf community see themselves, how might a blind person feel their skin differently?

We didn’t have a star at the center of the campaign; it’s about putting the focus on yourself. I think brands should do more of that strategy—instead of hiring a famous musician, how can we allow the consumer to be at the center of the experience? Many people with disabilities, for example, never see themselves in a beauty campaign, but we can change that. And focusing on a minority doesn’t limit the appeal, either; it creates empathy for everyone, because empathy is a universal feeling.

Did the experience of participating in the contest give you the chance to use skills outside of your day-to-day roles?

Matias: As a copywriter, representing and expanding upon the idea through copy was routine. But for the real clients that we work with, the brand is already well defined in terms of its visuals and overall look—so we have a limited range sometimes when it comes to producing really big ideas like this one.

Hitamara: I am a motion graphic designer, but in this work, I was able to take on the role of an art director. Like Matias said, real brands often have their design language and visuals laid out, so I was excited to have the opportunity to develop all the visual aspects of the fictional brand and its campaign—and I love working with Matias! This opportunity really encouraged me to do my best and to show my creativity. When we finished the project, I felt really proud of what we accomplished.

In addition to the AI-powered experience, your pitch also touches on making the experience shareable on social and using that to hijack toxic beauty trends. Could you discuss that aspect of the work?

Matias: Effectively using social media is key for a young brand, especially on channels like TikTok where it’s easy to go viral with the right content. Still, social media harbors a lot of toxic content that shapes how we perceive ourselves, so we thought, let’s hack that to deliver a positive message to people who need to see it most. Our concept prioritizes an organic strategy to social rather than a paid one, thinking that that approach would make the message more appealing and relevant to our audience.

Your work takes a very socially purposeful approach to the use of AI. AI is a technology that inspires both excitement and unease; what’s your take on its use and potential in marketing?

Matias: I see AI as a powerful tool to change self-perception. I have a bunch of ideas that involve AI now, especially when related to the trans community. I think it has the power to amplify connections, but for that we need to develop a very responsible and empathetic vision for it. We are trying to make that here, not just with “My Side of the Mirror,” but in other ways that we use AI.

For example, we can use generative AI to aid in representation; if I type “transgender person” as a prompt and keep pressing enter, it’s going to show me a different result every time. That can teach people that we can’t be put in a box; you may have expectations about my body, but there are infinite ways we can express ourselves.

Hitamara: As an art director and motion designer, AI can be incredibly helpful throughout the creative process, but there are ethical concerns as well. Artists are afraid of their style being stolen, and there’s a similar discussion to be had about the risk of cultural appropriation in AI’s output. So while I’ve relied on AI a lot to optimize and amplify my own work, I don’t forget or shy away from those moral or ethical concerns. It’s a powerful tool, but it comes with responsibility.

Finally, your prize for winning the contest is a trip to Cannes. How does it feel?

Matias: I couldn’t sleep in the days following the announcement that we won! I was really, really excited. It’s a great opportunity, especially as a transgender person; you don’t see a lot of us in the industry, so bringing that representation to such an important place is almost like a duty.

Prior to my time at Media.Monks, I was a teacher, but decided to switch careers in search of better working conditions. So, this is a message for all the people out there like me that you can do it as well. You have such great ideas—it is achievable.

Hitamara: I had originally studied chemistry, so I made a big change in my career as well. Media.Monks is the first agency that I’ve worked at, and I’ve been here for almost three years. During that time, I’ve found it to be a great place for talent development. Winning NextUp.Monks is like a dream—I’m living a dream.

Finally, we would also like to congratulate our Silver and Bronze winners.

Interactive, Silver:

• Leah Zhao, Creative Technologist
• Ed Lee, Developer

Interactive, Bronze:

• Rodrigo Escobedo, AV Social Developer
• Carlos Cravioto, AV Social Developer

Film, Silver:

• Santiago Cifuentes, Motion Graphics Designer
• Felipe Chavez, Art Director

Film, Bronze:

• Sergio Cardozo, Designer
• Alejandra Gonzalez, Designer

Innovation, Silver—which includes a tie between two teams:

• Eyleen Camargo, Art Director
• Kyara Ortega, Copywriter
• Mariana Ramirez Feijoo, Art Director
• Evelyn Su Pérez Islas, AV Developer

Innovation, Bronze:

• Grace Tankersley, Copywriter
• Diana Backer, Senior Creative

POSSIBLE, organized by MMA Global, first launched last year with the goal of curating content and offering masterclasses, workshops, programming and more focused on the future of marketing, communication, culture and technology—all delivered by the biggest names in the business. Naturally, we were there too, where Monks from across our practices together shared a holistic view of practical ways that AI is transforming marketing right now. Touching on content, data, media and the technology that makes it all possible, here's what we covered on the stage.

Brands accelerate success with a test-and-learn approach to AI implementation.

First, our Co-CEO, Content Wesley ter Haar joined MMA’s AI Leadership Coalition (ALC), a group of marketers dedicated to responsibly and effectively integrating AI into marketing. The coalition seeks to equip the industry with tools and resources to harness AI across creative, media, and operations—and met on the stage to share how major brands are embracing the technology through a test-and-learn agenda, where ter Haar shared insight into our strategic approach to AI adoption.

We follow a three-phase process designed to create self-evolving systems that are not only efficient, but also effective. This includes an initial consulting phase where we define high value workflows quickly: ones that increase revenue, decrease costs, and most enhance productivity. Next, we integrate tools and technology into cutting edge software workflows to deliver growth, cost reduction and performance effectiveness. The process concludes with an execution phase—but that’s actually just the beginning, because as the brand rapidly reaches cost neutrality, investments can be made to fuel further innovation.

“AI has transitioned from toy to tool,” ter Haar said. “This evolution is outpacing even the most optimistic forecasts from industry experts. With these advancements, we are finally on the path to realizing the initial promise of digital advertising: enhancing precision and delivering personalization at scale.”

Augmented by AI tools, teams extract more value from their data.

SVP, Media Greg Kirby participated in a panel hosted by Tracer, the marketing reporting and analytics platform, which focused on data-driven trends that are defining digital marketing. Tracer’s technology enables brands to unify data sources to gain a holistic understanding of their audiences; likewise, Kirby shared how our focus on embracing emerging media helps brands better follow their audiences and engage with them more effectively, especially when augmented by AI-powered workflows that span the entire marketing function.

This can lead to surprising insights, three of which were covered in the talk. For example: Taylor Swift drove female viewership for the Super Bowl—but social media ad delivery to women dipped because they were so busy watching the game instead of scrolling. The finding opens up interesting conversation into ways that consumer data and content can reach new audiences in innovative ways.

On a related note, the panel moved on to how AI is driving creative analytics. Marketers increasingly rely on AI to optimize their creative, identifying variables like messaging, colors and objects or models depicted and their effects on performance. But this is also familiar territory for marketers in the data and digital media space.

Finally, the conversation turned to emerging platforms and formats, including new ones from Pinterest, which enable high-engagement, low-cost opportunities for brands. It can be tricky for a brand to understand how to best engage their audiences on emerging channels, but with Persona.Flow, an expansion of our Monks.Flow professional managed service, brands can translate their first-party data into interactive audience personas, then converse with them to quickly adapt to trends and fuel continuous learning and evolution in their marketing strategies as formats continue to evolve. This exemplifies the crucial role of a mature first-party data strategy, enabling brands to not only respond to but anticipate market dynamics data that continuously feeds into AI-driven workflows.

AI-powered platforms drive emotional relevance in creative delivery.

In addition to understanding audiences more effectively, AI-powered tools are also helping marketers make the most of their media investments. Our Head of Brand Investment Matthew Kramer participated in a panel, hosted by marketing platform business Wurl, whose tools power advertising, marketing and distribution across the world’s connected TV (CTV) ecosystem. The panel ruminated over the prevailing challenges that advertisers face in CTV today, including clutter, fragmentation and breaking through the noise.

One solution to these problems is building emotional resonance with audiences. This is being solved by a newly launched service from Wurl called BrandDiscovery, which Kramer and his team got to explore hands-on in work for a financial client. This led to impressive results, including a 33% lift in aided brand awareness and a 15% increase in purchase intent. “What’s even more promising, the campaign saw a 200% improvement in cost per engagement—as measured by EDO—when the ad creative’s emotions matched the content right before the ad break,” he told StreamTV Insider.

The use of new, AI-driven tools like BrandDiscovery to overcome significant challenges like capturing attention in the competitive CTV ecosystem, and nurturing close partnerships with the teams who build those tools, reinforce our approach to embracing new media channels and formats to better serve consumers. “From a partner perspective, we’re thinking about how we use these data tools and targeting driven by AI to make CTV—which historically hasn’t been tied to lower-funnel results—into a full-funnel driver,” Kramer said.

You can hear Kramer cover some of these possibilities in a recent episode of the Nex6 Project, hosted by John Ghiorso, where the two discuss how CTV is affecting creative and the role that AI is playing in that evolution.

Embrace the future, now.

From ter Haar's insights on AI's evolution from a novelty to a fundamental tool, to Kirby's exploration of data-driven audience engagement, and Kramer's discussion on emotional relevance in CTV advertising, POSSIBLE captured a detailed picture of how AI is transforming marketing—along with actionable strategies of how marketing teams can adapt and thrive within it. It's clear that as we continue to build and harness these tools, the potential to drive brand growth and engage with audiences in meaningful ways is not just possible—it's happening now.