The New York Times is reporting on adveritsing’s Brave New World–a place where French holding company, Publicis, intends to play a major role.
Their goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer.
In the United States, some companies are already running about 4,000 versions of an ad for a single brand, whereas 10 years ago they might have run three to five versions. The number of iterations will grow as technology improves.
David W. Kenny, the chairman and chief executive of Digitas, indicates greater production capacity is needed to fulfill this demand. Publicis executives see sources of low-cost labor from a Digitas subsidiary called Prodigious, a digital production unit that works with all agencies in the Publicis Groupe, as central to their plan. Prodigious already uses workers in Costa Rica and Ukraine to produce copious footage for companies like G.M.
Mark Beeching, executive vice president and worldwide chief creative officer of Digitas says, “The more you can standardize and automate in terms of making different versions, hallelujah. That money should be spent creating more content.”
