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How Marketing Services Companies are Reinventing Themselves With AI

Knownwell

As the landscape of Marketing continues to evolve, services firms and agencies must integrate AI into their operations or they risk becoming obsolete. But how can agencies go beyond using AI in areas that have quickly become table stakes, like using generative AI to accelerate content generation, to areas that have a more material impact on their business overall?

On the latest episode of AI Knowhow, we bring you highlights from a recent roundtable hosted by Knownwell CMO Courtney Baker, featuring 2X CEO Domenic Colasante, Cognitive Path Co-Founder Geoff Livingston, and Knownwell Chief Product and Technology Officer Mohan Rao.  The four explore how AI is reshaping Marketing services companies, enabling leaders and agencies to deliver more with less, and become the disruptors instead of the disrupted.

Embracing AI: How to Go From Table Stakes to Differentiation

The highlights start with Dom, who discusses why it’s important to think bigger about how to utilize AI for competitive advantage than many Marketing agencies are today. The real challenge lies in uncovering how to leverage AI not just for efficiency and productivity but for innovation and differentiation. Leaders should be asking themselves, “How could this be an opportunity?” Dom says. “How might we not be disrupted by this, but be the disruptor of large firms, professional services firms, internal Marketing functions where we can bring something that the Marketing leader needs that they don’t otherwise have?”

The Creative Edge in the AI Cycle

One answer to that question is to be able to utilize AI to drive increased value and ROI. Much of Marketing has always been about the creative, and Geoff highlights the impact AI is already having on how firms deliver impactful creative. From being able to generate hundreds of different versions of creative to test to creating more impactful creative in the first place, opportunities abound for Marketing services leaders to tap into the power of AI.

The speed at which AI allows you to test different variants of creative is one of the superpowers it’s already giving marketers. Geoff points to some of the rapid response political ads and formats we’ve seen during this election cycle as evidence that the cycle of how creative is conceived, tested, and launched is only accelerating. “That’s how we ended up with mobile video with all these candidates just shooting videos of themselves walking around,” he says. “When people use these polished videos and communications, it’s just less effective.”

The group also discusses how AI can create space to enhance human creativity, transforming Marketing outputs into something more engaging and effective. “AI doesn’t replace the human,” Dom says. “The human that knows how to use AI replaces the human.”

AI’s Role in Transforming Client Retention

The roundtable discussion also touches on AI’s potential impact for Marketing services firms beyond competitive differentiation and creative. 2X is an early user of Knownwell’s AI-powered platform for commercial intelligence, and Dom is already seeing the value such a platform can provide in helping his company keep and grow its client base.

“All of the churn prevention, the retention kind of conversations, the Net Promoter Score…all of these things are backward-looking,” Dom says. “We need to be living in a system where we’re seeing things before they happen or in the moment they just happened. And I think a tool like Knownwell can be really great at doing that and providing insights of all the signals going on right now and how might I decide what I’m going to do today based on that?”

Expert Interview: Jeff Mason of Power Digital Marketing

Our expert interview for this episode is with Jeff Mason, CEO of Power Digital Marketing. Jeff talks with Knownwell Chief Strategy Officer Pete Buer about how his company uses AI, including their home-grown nova Intelligence application, to help brands overcome growth barriers by getting to know their customers better.

Power Digital does this by integrating customer, advertising, and financial data to construct a comprehensive view of business challenges, often transforming what appear to be Marketing issues into broader business solutions. Developing a robust data strategy is often the first step in tapping into the power of AI to do so. “You don’t have a customer-related Marketing strategy unless you have a data strategy, and you certainly do not have an AI strategy unless you have a data strategy,” Jeff says. “And so what we help our clients do first and foremost is develop a data strategy. And that’s the beginning part of the journey of becoming AI-enabled.”

Understanding customer behavior is pivotal for what Jeff calls precision marketing, which he sees as the next frontier of AI-driven marketing. He envisions a future where AI facilitates hyper-personalization and dynamic content creation, aligning marketing strategies more closely with consumer expectations and desires.

Watch the Expert Interview

Watch Jeff Mason’s full interview below, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Listen to the Episode

You can tune in to the full episode via the Spotify embed below, and you can find AI Knowhow on Apple Podcasts and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

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