Summary

Kiran Kapur speaks with Chris Woodward from Oliver Agency about how marketing agencies are putting AI to work in their day-to-day operations.

They discuss automation, Oliver’s Agencies' in-house model, measurable cost efficiencies, and how teams are being trained to use new tools effectively. Chris also shares why many smaller businesses might see stronger returns by investing in AI software and skills development rather than adding another hire.

 

Key Points

  • Inside Model Approach: Oliver Agency creates dedicated, bespoke agency teams for individual clients rather than serving multiple clients from one location, allowing for highly tailored AI integration [0:52]
  • Proprietary AI Platform: Pencil aggregates all major generative AI platforms into one subscription, provides brand-specific data security, and offers predictive performance scoring based on $5 billion in aggregate media spend [5:55] [6:56]
  • Process Integration Over Technology: Success comes from redesigning workflows, training, and team structures around AI rather than simply adding AI tools to existing processes [4:22] [12:05]
  • Comprehensive Training Program: All 5,500+ global staff have been trained in AI usage relevant to their roles, with both formal training and sandbox environments for experimentation [15:53] [16:39]
  • Dramatic Efficiency Gains: Teams now produce TV-quality ads in weeks rather than months, with huge cost savings [23:32]
  • SME Accessibility: Smaller organisations can access similar AI capabilities through platforms like Pencil at costs lower than hiring additional mid-level staff

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated

Kiran Kapur (00:01):
Hello and welcome. This week, we are in the world of marketing agencies, and particularly how marketing agencies are adapting to the use of AI, and I'm delighted to welcome Chris Woodward, Executive Director of the Oliver Agency.


Chris Woodward (00:14):
We always want to avoid is that the technology is another bolt onto, often a very busy marketing department. It's got to be a proper rethink of their people, their processes, the way they get stuff done.


Kiran Kapur (00:26):
Chris, welcome to the show. Could you explain the Oliver Agency's business model because it's slightly different to what people might expect?


Chris Woodward (00:33):
Absolutely. Morning, great to be on your show today. So Oliver was founded approximately 20 years ago by Simon Martin, our founder. He had always worked client-side, and had become frustrated by how agencies were servicing his business and felt there was a gap in the market for something different. So he pioneered what we call the inside model. And what we mean by that is that we design, build and run dedicated agencies and teams on the behalf of clients. That's different to normal agencies. So with a normal agency, it's a group of talent normally based in one location who will be serving multiple clients and so on. Whereas for us, we will go to a client organisation, we'll go through a solution, design, process, and understand what it is that they're trying to achieve from a people process and tech perspective with their marketing. And we will design, build and run them a solution that delivers against that.


(01:31):
Those solutions can be larger ones. So for some clients, we have dedicated teams of 500 people working on just one client, across perhaps 38 countries. For other ones, it might be just 4 people working in, for example, the UK, and the type of work that they do is also hugely tailored to whatever the client's requirement is. So for some clients, we might be more of a low-level production partner. For other ones, we might be a strategic leader of their marketing and commercial function, and for some, we'll do both. So again, it's hugely tailored and bespoke to each of our clients.


Kiran Kapur (02:10):
And you've got some extremely large clients, as you say, down to some much smaller companies, but there are some household names amongst your client list.


Chris Woodward (02:18):
Yeah, yeah, no, we're fortunate to work with a huge variety of brands from BMW, Mini, Unilever, Diageo. There's a huge range across the 38 countries we operate in now.


Kiran Kapur (02:30):
One of the reasons I was very keen to talk to you is that your agency has adopted the use of AI quite strongly. It's all over your website, you do podcasts on it, there are insights on it, and what have you. And at a time when I find that when I talk to people, there seem to be two schools of thought of, I sort of know that I should be doing something with AI, but I dunno where to start, which is probably the majority of us if I'm honest. Through to those that have just embraced it and really feel like they're getting the benefit from it. So can you talk me through how the agency started to incorporate AI into their business model?


Chris Woodward (03:04):
Yeah, absolutely. So I think it almost goes back to before AI. So whenever we work with clients, we've always had technologies as a core component of how we deliver our services. That's now evolved to include AI. We're part of something called the Brand Tech Groups. That's our parent company, and they're a marketing services group, much, much smaller than a WPP or an Omnicon or Publicis, who were founded in 2015, and they were set up with the premise that all marketing can be done better, faster and cheaper through the use of technology. So I guess the point here is that we've invested heavily and early in technology via the Brand Tech Group. That has meant that we've bought a proprietary generative AI platform. We bought that in 2023, it was founded in 2018 by a bunch of ex-Google folk. That platform is called Pencil, and it's the market leader in the generative AI space for marketing services.


(04:01):
We've incorporated that into how we work with our clients so that when they work with us, they're not just getting talented people who can help 'em with their marketing, they're getting bespoke processes, workflows, ways of working and so on. And they're getting that cutting-edge technology in our case via Pencil, our generative AI platform. And it's the aggregation of all of those things that helps us give our clients competitive advantage through their marketing. If we were just to give them the generative AI technology, sure that would be a step in the right direction, but if that's not integrated into your workflows, how you structure your teams, how you organise your talent and so on, you'll never really realise the full potential. And you, as a brand, would just be taking a platform off the shelf as it were, which all of your competitors can do as well, and therefore, there's no real opportunity for competitive advantage. You might get some first-mover advantage, but everyone will catch up to that. Whereas if you can build it into your ways of working and your processes and your team and everything, that's where you create an opportunity to leap ahead of the market as we've done with a number of our big global clients over the last two years. So it's almost not a new thing for us anymore. It's something we've been doing for quite a while.


Kiran Kapur (05:16):
Yes, you do. Your website does make it sound like it's just another day in the office using the AI, whereas I think again, for many of us it's still sort of, oh, I've got to go and play with the AI. So you've said two completely different things there, both of which I want to explore. I want to come back to marketing automation and the automation processes. I think that's a really, really key side, and so many of us just play with the generative side of oh, ChatGPT can do something. I wanted to explore the fact that you have a bespoke generative AI, Pencil. So you said that that's something you own. So, is it purely looked after by the Brand Tech Group? Do they keep it up to date and that sort of thing?


Chris Woodward (05:55):
So, it's a wholly owned product that we at the Brand Tech Group have, and via Oliver and some of our other Brand Tech Group brands, we can deploy for our clients. The way it works, or the way Pencil works, just to explain it really briefly, is that it's basically an aggregator. So all of the major latest and greatest generative AI platforms are aggregated into Pencil. So the benefit to a client of that is that you have one subscription, one fee, one terms of reference conditions and so on. And then you can access all of the platforms. That's important because each of the different platforms, whether it's Google or whichever ones you're using, have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are better for performance marketing, some are better for image, some for motion, some for copy and so on. And they're all leapfrogging each other at the moment.


(06:42):
It's almost like an arms race. They're all trying to outdo each other. So if you subscribe to Pencil, you get all of them, and you are future-proofed. You don't have to worry back the wrong horse that can only do one thing really well. Always going to get leapfrogged. You've got all of them in one place. The second major advantage is that your Pencil instance is dedicated to you, so you can upload all of your brand data. So it could be tone of voice, campaign results, assets, brand guidelines into your instance of Pencil. So whenever you are generating assets via Pencil, it's learning and feeding on your brand information, and therefore producing work that is brand compliant, that looks right, that feels right, that feels appropriate for your brand. And then the third major factor is that all of the work that's produced in Pencil is pre-flight tested for the channels you are going to deploy it on, before you launch it, and it gives you a predictive score of how likely that work is to work or how effectively that work's going to work. And obviously. If the work doesn't look like it's going to work particularly effectively, don't put it live, rework it and so on. And it does that by profiling the work against the aggregate media spend that we've had through Pencil so far from all of the brands that we work with, which currently stands at just a little below 5 billion dollars. So it's a very good sample size. So in that sense we can give real uplifts in terms of speed, quality and also performance of the marketing that's delivered.


Kiran Kapur (08:10):
And presumably, if it's Pencil and you're saying upload all your brand assets, that is kept safe and secure because one of the big things, so you don't necessarily want your key brand information going back to train someone else's AI. Okay.


Chris Woodward (08:24):
Exactly that. So it can all be in a walled garden, and again, we're able to provide that to clients because we're a really big global partner of Google, and Adobe and so on and so forth. And therefore we've got the buying power to negotiate preferable terms of use for our clients, so we can build in those sort of productions, which ordinarily, as a brand, if you were going direct to some of these AI providers, you wouldn't necessarily have that.


Kiran Kapur (08:50):
Okay. So it gives particular larger companies, but also smaller companies that sort of extra heft, that extra power to their elbow to say this is what we're looking for.


Chris Woodward (09:01):
Exactly.


Kiran Kapur (09:01):
Brilliant. So I'm very intrigued by, it's an aggregator, and I appreciate that this is the Brand Tech Group's work. So forgive me if I'm pushing too far, but how do you just then evaluate which AI you're going to use or is that done by Brand Tech or is it done by the Oliver Agency deciding what's right for each client?


Chris Woodward (09:20):
When we start work with a client, we have what we call a solution design team. So we will go in and understand a huge amount of detail about our clients. One's done their marketing priorities, the commercial priorities, their team structures, their workflows, information about their target audiences and so on and so forth. So there'll be a really deep dive immersion into what's going on in the client world, and through that we are able to solution design the right composition of technology people, and process to help them open up their marketing opportunities. So through that understanding, we'll know that they need this type of AI for image generation versus another option and so on and can be very tailored and specific, which again is in contrast to how most agencies work. So the agency environment is hyper-competitive, it's oversupplied, and most agencies pitch for and prospect for clients in a very similar way, and that's how I spent most of my career working what I would term as normal, normal agency.


(10:25):
So BBH, Saatchi and Saatchi, people like that, who are all brilliant by the way. I'm not denigrating them for one second, but the way that they work is very interchangeable with one another. Whereas with us, our model is very distinct, and the level of immersion and understanding we have to or seek to get from our clients and what's going on in their world in order to allow us to pull together a very bespoke solution for them is our USP. And then the technology and various other things we bring to the party are just enablers of that USP.


Kiran Kapur (10:58):
I want to come back to the marketing automation side. You said that was the really key to using AI, and I think it is very much the side that we don't tend to think about. It's not necessarily the sexy side, so it doesn't always get the big headlines of discussions about what generative AI can do. So can you talk me through how some of those processes work?


Chris Woodward (11:15):
Yeah, so with each of our clients, almost before the technology actually, we just look at how they get things done. How do they brief things? What are the key campaigns they need to get out the door? How do those campaigns link back to their commercial KPIs and so on and so forth? Through understanding that we process map and put in place a marketing project management software. Again, we have a priority one in this space, it's called Oliver Marketing Gateway, and that allows us to make sure that built an integrated AI and anything else we're deploying for the client, into their ways of working and adjusted their ways of working to effectively embrace that new technology and so on. So what we always want to avoid is that the technology is another bolt onto often a very busy marketing department. It's got to be a proper rethink of their people, their processes, the way they get stuff done.


(12:19):
And only through doing that and putting the right workflows, the right marketing operational software in place, including generative AI capability, can we make that step change for our clients, and where we can do that, we've had really, really significant impact. So for one big global client we're featured in their annual report because over the first, I think it was 18 months of working with them, those new ways of working, those new workflows and the use of generative AI help them save just under half a billion pounds in annual marketing spend, which again is massively attractive not just to the CMO but also to the CEO often because, that saving can then be taken from what's termed non-working spend and apply to either working spend of media spend, or be taken to the bottom line to increase the EBIT down and therefore the valuation of the business.


Kiran Kapur (13:15):
Can you give an example of the sort of automation that might be going in? Is there something sort of more specific? Because I think as listening to you, it all sounds absolutely great, but I'm just struggling slightly to visualise.


Chris Woodward (13:30):
So how do I explain this? I normally have slides to explain this. So I'm trying to try and paint a picture with words, and you can be the judge of whether I'm successful. When we go into a new client, we will roll out our project management software, which all of the clients are trained on and can use to brief us. So they can log on to that platform, and they could say, I need to create a campaign to this audience using this media and so on. They will brief it, that brief is triaged and then sent to the right individuals to work on it using whatever tools are appropriate to answering that brief and that workflow, that organisation, that bringing order often what can be quite a paper-based or email-based marketing ecosystem, just brings order and logic and so on to how work gets done.


(14:19):
And if you imagine that you're working with a big global brand across 38 countries, they've got hundreds and hundreds of marketers potentially duplicating effort and so on. So we streamline everything and bring that order in the first place to make sure that there are clear briefs with clear KPIs that are working to clear commercial imperatives. We then execute against those briefs. So we'll produce whatever the work is that's required. So that might be a bigger brand campaign, that might be a huge amount of social media, or aways-on performance marketing assets. And we'll then deploy that on behalf of the client, and we'll monitor the effect or the impact of that work real-time or near real-time. So that work once it's out in the world is being optimised and adjusted so that it's working as hard as possible to generate whatever the action is that we're seeking to have for the client.


Kiran Kapur (15:16):
I suppose my other questions are really around, because you've been using AI for a while, how has it changed the way that you work? Has it impacted other things? Has it impacted your composition of your teams or the type of staff training that you need to do?


Chris Woodward (15:34):
Yeah, hugely. So we went, if I compare us to our competitors, so other agencies, we went heavy and early on our adoption of AI. So we're over two years into the journey now, this doesn't feel new to us. We did that through a number of steps. First, we identified the right technology and acquired it. So in our case that was P,encil. Secondly, we invested very, very heavily in training our global workforce. So within Oliver we have approximately five and a half thousand people globally. So all of our people are trained in the use of AI in a way that's relevant to whatever their job function is and have been for over 18 months. It's quite interesting when I speak to colleagues in other, let's call it more normal agencies, they're still dabbling if at all, and there's actually quite a resistance to it because fear of taking jobs and so on.


(16:29):
Whereas we think of the opposite. If we don't embrace it and get ahead of it, we won't have jobs because we're no longer competent for the reality of how work gets done these days. So we've invested really heavily in training all of our staff in it, and also just giving the time and the space and the funding to play with it, in effect. So they've got sandbox areas where they can experiment with it safely and trial and error, and see how they're going to use it in their jobs as well as more formal training and so on. We've then worked really closely with two in particular, but increasingly now many more. But two years ago, it was two key global clients, who we began the rollout of AI with them. So by that I mean we worked with them to understand their workflows and what they were trying to achieve, and how we would integrate AI into a re-imagining of those workflows and how they deploy their marketing activity.


(17:28):
And we've embedded that. There's been some trial and errors, we've gone through it, but the impact's been huge in that we've now got multiple large global clients as well as smaller UK and several market clients, who have now adopted AI and it's a standard part of what they do. It's almost BAU. That doesn't mean not still changing and evolving, of course it is, nothing stands still, but it's established. It's not an experiment, it's not particularly new. Two years feels like quite a long time in today's world. It feels established, and trusted and integrated. And because we've done that with a couple of really big clients, it's now become relatively easy, touch wood, for us to then introduce it to new prospective clients because we're not coming in with a vision of what AI might be able to do for them. We're coming in with a vision where we've done this for this brand and that brand and so on, and if you'd like to go and speak to our clients, you're very welcome to and so on and so forth. So we can, in that sense, we're very proven and established and so on. So that's allowing us to continue to grow very quickly as a business, which is fortunate in what is quite an economically challenging time.


Kiran Kapur (18:42):
It's a very economically challenging time. So I'm very intrigued by the training side. Obviously, you're on the Cambridge Marketing podcast, we're very interested in training. So you've trained a workforce of five and a half thousand people and allowed both formally and allowed them to play in with the sandbox, but presumably you also have to train clients as well.


Chris Woodward (19:06):
So when we roll out new solutions for any of our clients, whether it's an evolution for an existing client or we'll welcome a new client into the world, what we do in both those scenarios, we roll out a training programme for that client to make sure that they understand how we're all going to work together, what those processes, those ways of working are going to be, but also culturally get the buy-in hold people by the hand, take them intellectually and emotionally on the journey to wherever it's heading to and so on. So we've had to do a huge amount of that. And again, unusually or certainly in contrast to traditional agencies, we have a large team of people whose sole job is to do that, is to work with clients, to solution design these new solutions, and to work on the adoption and the embedding of those solutions.


(19:55):
So we have training teams, we have a training department. We produce potentially similar to you I'm guessing, but course material and so on. So whether that's people-driven learning or whether that's prerecorded modules or it's online tutorials where you'll read things and answer various questions and so on. So it's a combination all of that, some of which will be formal, which clients will go through to get accredited on it, so that they're prepared to work in the new way that we're going to work together. Some of it will be reactive, so if they hit a blockage with something they're trying to do, they can go and self-help through online tutorials or other training that we will make available for them. So it's a combination of multiple things that we do to help our clients evolve their team and take their talent on a journey, perhaps a glib expression. But I think the talent still remains more important than the tech stack at the moment. That's certainly our philosophy. We absolutely believe you need the humans in the loop. They've got to be central to all of this, and the tech is an enabler for people who know how to get the best from the tech.


Kiran Kapur (21:02):
So for a couple of things there that I thought were really interesting. One is, you talked about it being people-driven and taking people on a journey with it. Is there a lot of resistance because people are worried about the job side of things? My company's bringing this in, this is scary. They're going to try and halve the marketing department, which we hear, we hear about.


Chris Woodward (21:26):
There's definitely a factor, and not an unjustified one. Because the reality is there are efficiency savings to be made. So I think we do definitely encounter that. And other examples of resistance to change, which is understandable and often valid. I think we have various training programmes and so on that in part can counter to it, but the reality is that there will often be fewer people. So it's not that people won't be important there, crucially important, but the reality is some of the more, let's call it functional tasks, are being replaced by the technology. So I guess we can either fear that and so on, or we can be excited and motivated by the fact that actually perhaps there's more interesting things we can be filling our days with. Not everyone's up for that journey is the honest truth. I think what we've seen with the majority of our clients and certainly our staff over the last two and a half years now really, but certainly two years, is that the vast majority after some initial scepticism, very, very quickly embrace it and realise that whether they're working for Oliver or whoever else they might choose to work for in the future, if they don't embrace these skills and future proof themselves to some extent, they will be left behind.


(22:55):
And the really good people, and we're fortunate to have many of them as colleagues and so on, very quickly get inspired by it and actually realise that they could be more creative, more productive, more imaginative, create award-winning work and so on. And it's really exciting when you start seeing how, whether it's creative teams or strategists or production people, once they've got an element of skill and experience in this era, suddenly the scales fall from the eyes, and you suddenly realise and they realise that there's so much more that they can do. So we've got teams who are now producing TV ads, 92nd logs are big, quite anthemic brand TV ads, that if I was still in my previous job in a more agency, we would take six to eight months to produce that for a client. We would charge probably somewhere between 600 million pounds worth of fees for that plus production costs on top.


(23:58):
We're producing equivalent quality TV ads in several weeks, certainly less than a month, and for let's say roughly 200,000 pounds. So still a lot of money, but in the scheme of things, a fraction of the cost and for creative people and so on or for marketeers and brand organisations to realise they can create work of that impact and that quality without that huge time, effort, barrier that might have prohibited them from doing in the past. That's massively, I think comparing, and enabling. The more that people were realising and learning how to do that this is just snowballing, it's accelerating all of the time. So I think that when I look across our client teams, the quality uplift, there's absolutely quantity uplift as well. Whether that's good or bad, that's probably more nuanced. I'm not sure the world needs hugely more content or marketing. There's no shortage of that, but the quality bit is the bits that's really exciting and the enabling for creativity and therefore also the enabling for driving ultimately commercial growth for our clients. Because if marketing's not doing that, then what's the point?


Kiran Kapur (25:14):
That was brilliant. And you're right. I mean if all our agencies has been in this space for two years, two and a half years, I mean basically that's the equivalent of being decades ahead of many other companies if you haven't actually used the AI and embraced it. And it's lovely to hear somebody just, it's just another tool. It's just there. It's part of the workflow. If anyone listening to this is thinking, well actually I can't afford the Oliver Agency, but I'd like to know where to start. Would you have any suggestions?


Chris Woodward (25:40):
Yeah, I mean actually Pencil when it was founded in 2018 was founded on the premise of helping really small organisations. So SMEs get an unfair advantage for their marketing through the use of technology. So Pencil has about roughly 5,000 brands who are actively using it. Now, the majority of those are actually very small organisations. Now the ones that we work with via Oliver are the really big ones, but that's the tip of the iceberg. So if you are a smaller brand, whether it's Pencil or other platforms obviously exist, I would definitely be embracing it early. You obviously still need people and Pencils called Pencil because it's supposed to be like a pencil. It's a tool for a human to use. But once you've got your core, if you're a relatively small SME, once you've got that core nucleus of a team in place and you're thinking about your third, fourth, fifth hire into your marketing department, that's where I would pause and potentially not make that higher.


(26:45):
Instead, I would put that investment into making sure that I'm training and equipping my talent if they're not already self-training, which ideally they should be in the new technologies and so on, and I would be getting a subscription to something like Pencil. An SME level subscription to something like Pencil is going to be cheaper than employing a mid-level designer, for example. So the price point is not prohibitive, and the potential to then take a really big step forward in terms of your marketing capability, providing you've got an expert person who's driving the platform, is there for the taking. And you also then get the other, again, unfair advantages if you like, where you can, for example, pre-flight test all of your work. So as an SME being able to use a sample pool of 5 billion of media spend to pre-flight test your work to see what work's going to work.


(27:40):
Most SMEs haven't got anything anywhere near that. So that's a massive step up. Or not that an SME would necessarily do a TV ad, but you could do a really interesting online film, for a fraction of the cost of shooting it real, if you've got an expert user of a generative AI platform and so on. So again, there's just ways that if you're really smart and have a smart person at the centre of it, I think small organisations absolutely should be adopting it in a considered way. So obviously do your research and so on. Don't rush into it. Everyone's talking about at the moment, the bandwagon is one that we should be jumping on, but jump on with eyes open and with caution and having done your research. Because there's a lot of options out there. So you want to make the right choice.


Kiran Kapur (28:30):
That is fantastic advice to finish on. Chris Woodward, Executive Director of the Oliver Agency, thank you very much for your insight and your time. That was incredibly useful. Thank you.


Chris Woodward (28:41):
Complete pleasure. Thank you.