Lannie Byrd of mhp.si, the Little Rock advertising firm, recently rewatched all episodes of “Mad Men,” the cable series that made fictional New York ad man Don Draper a household name.
Byrd, his firm’s COO, was fielding a question about how artificial intelligence might eventually change ad agency billing.
“In the early days of ‘Mad Men,’ they would just charge commission for media and do everything based off that commission,” Byrd said. “Then they changed to this fee for time and material system that we use now. It was just an evolution of the industry.”
Byrd was reacting in part to a recent Wall Street Journal article headlined
“AI Saves Ad Agencies a Lot of Time. Should They Still Charge by the Hour?”
“We have had AI in our digital media suite since 2015, doing programmatic advertising and search advertising and social advertising,” Byrd said. Those were machine-learning programs offering automation and optimization, not generative AI, he explained.
The Journal article suggested a pay-for-performance model, “and we’ve had conversations with clients about paying per lead that they get, or paying for a certain percentage of revenue,” Byrd said. “But most of our clients lack the historical data that we need to base those kinds of agreements,” or even to train AI bots.
“I definitely see us getting to a day where a doctor’s office pays us by the number of potential appointments that we give them. But no, we’re not there yet. Should we be moving that way? Yeah, because AI is going to introduce efficiencies.”
AI is just a tool, he emphasized. “We use human intelligence and artificial intelligence to create something better for clients,” Byrd said. “But we will always need that human guidance.”
Mhp.si uses an AI bot to join meetings with clients’ permission, and it takes notes and sends summaries. “We let it sort our email and things like that,” Byrd said.
And AI has proved particularly useful in creating search-friendly summaries for human writers and then evaluating the writer’s content to suggest edits to optimize it for online searches.
One mhp.si writer using those tools is former Arkansas Times reporter David Koon. “He’s a great, wonderful writer,” Byrd said.”He has made amazing steps with SEO using those tools.”
AI doesn’t write the copy, mhp.si Vice President of Marketing Technology Mark Samber emphasized. “It’s just giving suggestions based upon analyzing more data than any of us could ever look at in a reasonable amount of time.”
A Southern California health care client has seen its search results climb above better-known sites like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, Samber said.
Samber completed the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ Generative AI Certification program in July. And he was among the first cohort of advertising pros to finish the immersive four-week course.
“The program had a lot of outside-the-classroom activities,” Sambar said. “One exercise was to come up with a media plan for a sample client with a set of AI tools. We broke into groups, came back into class and we would present. But we would talk about the challenges and pitfalls, all of the unexpected things that we encountered.”
The point was to envision how AI would impact the agency’s work in all its different disciplines, Sambar said. “Then we had a companywide training meeting to share that learning and talk about all those issues.”
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