Omnichannel Commerce, AI Are Disrupting Advertising: Omnicom’s Joanna O’Connell

MIAMI – Streaming services have given consumers more control over the television viewing experience, including the ability to interact and transact with advertisers. At the same time, more retailers are selling advertising to brands, giving them a way to convert awareness into shoppable moments.

“You have the kind of dynamic of retail media where brands are finding ways to get closer to consumers in that path to purchase via retail media networks,” Joanna O’Connell, chief intelligence officer at Omnicom Media Group, said in this interview with Beet.TV at the Possible event. “You also have a whole dynamic around shoppable advertising.”

The evolution of advertising into an omnichannel experience for consumers is changing their expectations of what brands can do.

“They have a purchase lifecycle that’s really, really fluid,” O’Connell said. “They are getting used to being able to get whatever they want, wherever they want. And you have brands and retailers really adapting to all of those changes to drive modern commerce.”

Artificial intelligence has become more familiar to consumers in the past couple of years as generative AI apps such as ChatGPT and DALL-E provide them with tools to not only find customized answers to their questions on the internet, but also to create text and graphics quickly. However, other kinds of AI have been around for much longer in a commercial setting.

“There are applications of AI that have been used in planning and activation and measurement and creative assembly and optimization for a long time — that part’s not new,” O’Connell said. “What’s new is generative AI, which is something that is now influencing everything from how consumers perform searches to how brands think about content development to how giant organizations like Google think about kind of future ad models.”

This disruption is pushing marketers to consider how they can get the most out of the technology.

“There’s the efficiency opportunity….making your employees better, smarter, faster, getting tasks done better, smarter, faster,” O’Connell said. “There’s also effectiveness. How can we actually make these machines help us make better decisions that improve performance iteratively over time?”

You’re watching ‘Anything Is Possible: The Rising Tide of Programmatic Streaming,’ a Beet.TV Leadership Series at POSSIBLE 2024, presented by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.