LONDON — God forbid the idea that marketers are not sentient. But sentience is also coming to the world of automated advertising, in the shape of artificial intelligence. That’s the name of a book, Sentience, released by Omnicom agency PHD earlier this year.

“Anybody in marketing needs to understand a bit about AI,” says PHD‘s worldwide CEO Mike Cooper. “It’s the next really big thing to happen for us.

“There are people saying AI will be as significant as the invention of electricity.”

In the book, PHD’s thinkers explain: “If only half of what these engineers are saying comes to fruition, then the way that we navigate our waking world is about to undergo the biggest transformation that any single generation has ever experienced.”

This year, the media agency  has secured new work from Unilever and GSK around the world. Cooper says is differentiated by focusing on media planning, not execution.

He imagines a world in which advertising algorithms send messages to autonomous agents acting on behalf of busy users.

 

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