Adam Tucker of WPP
Does your AI do what you need it to do?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 262: Adam Tucker
Here's a question. Does your AI do what you need it to do?
I'm Charles Day. I believe that leadership offers us the greatest opportunity of our lives to make a difference. I'm asked to help leaders discover what they're capable of and then to maximize their impact. Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This episode is part of a series of conversations I've been having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Over the last few weeks, I've been focusing my study of leadership through a single lens, the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries. I'd planned on ending the series with my interview of Sir John Hegarty, but I recorded two bonus episodes during Cannes that I felt were an important part of the conversation.
This episode's guest is Adam Tucker. He's the Global Account Lead at WPP for Mondelez, and he reached out to me after listening to the first few episodes in this series. He pointed out that while we were focusing on how AI will impact the process of how the creative industries work, we hadn't talked about how it is already changing the work itself. WPP has made a significant investment in AI. The press reports that it's spending about $318 million annually in WPP Open, a set of AI capabilities that are now available to its 35,000 employees around the world. Adam explained why from his perspective, this investment creates a competitive advantage.
“You cannot use the tools that are publicly available right now to get to brand ready work. And that's the issue. Be it, they don't work very well with people, they don't work for logos, brands. They're good for concepting, but to get to brand ready assets and ideas, they're not there.”
I'm not an AI expert, nor have I seen WPP Open firsthand, to pass any judgment on its capabilities, and whether it is in fact superior to other forms of AI that are publicly available. This conversation is not intended to convince you whether WPP has created a competitive advantage or not. What it does establish is one clearly differentiated benchmark in the ecosystem of AI that are now springing up across the creative industries, and therefore, it provides one measurement against which to evaluate your own relationship with artificial intelligence.
I'll wrap this series this week with one more bonus episode and then a recap. In the meantime, thanks for listening. Here is Adam Tucker.
Charles (02:38):
Adam, welcome to Fearless. Thank you for coming on the show.
Adam Tucker (02:40):
Thanks for having me back, Charles. It's great to see you again.
Charles (02:43):
And here we are in the Majestic Hotel in Cannes. We are putting this episode together specifically because you reached out to me in the context of this series that I've been doing on the future of AI and the impact on the creative industries. Let me start where I've been starting all of these conversations. What's your relationship with AI?
Adam Tucker (02:58):
Okay, great, great question. So my role at WPP is a Global Client Leader, and Mondelez's International is my main client. And my job ultimately is to champion creativity and ideas, and facilitate great work to solve business problems across my global teams. And I frankly see AI, my relationship with AI, as a creative force multiplier. And it has a real impact in both the way we work, as well as the work itself. And I think, as I wrote to you, and I think about the conversations in the industry and some of the conversations you were having, there's a lot of emphasis on the transformation of how we will work and the way we will work, and maybe not enough on the work itself. And that's where, I mean, we're working with Mondelez on both areas, but the actual impact that we've been able to make around the work and using AI within ideas, to create them more engaging, more impactful, more personalized, to make them an experience that consumers can co-create and participate with, has made a big difference in the business and the quality of the work that we're doing.
So, as an example, we have a piece of work that we did our Ogilvy and Wavemaker team in India called Shah Rukh Khan, which last year won a Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness, was named this year Work 100 #1 Most Effective Campaign in the World. And it was an idea that our teams came up with for Cadbury during Diwali, which is the season of gift giving, to help mom and pop shops who are suffering during COVID to advertise themselves. And Shah Rukh Khan is basically the George Clooney of India, one of the world's biggest celebrities. And the idea was, how do you use one of the world's biggest celebrities to support the world's smallest shops? And we used Gen AI to deliver over 300,000 personalized ads using Shah Rukh Khan as the face of those little shops, geo-targeted, delivered to local people, and it did amazing things for the business.
And so when I talk about the impact of how Gen AI and AI can help the work, it's a ideal example. And for us, and for Mondelez, as well, when you have a seminal ideal like that, it then leads to more ideas and bigger ideas. And so, we've been on a journey now, we were ahead of the game. This idea came out three years ago. So we've been building on that success and really focusing on, where is Gene AI going to come into the idea development process, to build bigger and more interesting ideas?
So as another great example, we've got a piece of work that we've entered this year, again, for Cadbury celebrations, which you think about, there's 8 billion people in the world, but for birthdays, there's only one birthday song. What if we could give 8 billion people their own individual birthday song? Well, with Cadbury celebrations and Gen AI, we've been able to do that. We created, through the use of four different AI engines, the ability for someone to go on to Cadbury site and create a song and lyrics, and send them to their best mate who's having a birthday. So I think there's an amazing creative multiplier effect that when you think about when you're developing ideas, what role Gen AI can play to engage and add scale to those ideas with consumers, there's a ton of potential.
Charles (06:42):
It's a really interesting point, because Asmita Dubey from L'Oreal made a very similar point to the one you were making about Cadbury's ability, in her case, their ability as a beauty brand, to be able to scale that, and create essentially deeply personalized one-on-one relationships with hundreds of millions if not billions of people on a global basis. And the Shah Rukh Khan example you are describing has the same component, the same capacity, where those shop owners in India must now have a completely different emotional relationship with Cadburys as a brand and the way that they're now seen, in the world, in a way that they never were before. That's extraordinarily powerful.
I'm wondering on the flip side of that, because obviously nobody knows better than you, the value of brand equity. I was listening to a McDonald's conversation this morning on one of the main stages here, and they had Morgan Flatley, who's been on the podcast before, the CMO of McDonald's, talking with her global CFO, and he was saying, brand equity is the moat that we build around the business, right?
It is precious, hopefully not sacrosanct, because we have to allow the creator economy in, now again, the power of AI as well, to be able to allow members of the fan base, as McDonald's described it, to be able to influence the brand. But I'm also conscious that there is a flip side that the ability to democratize a brand at scale like that brings risks. It’s certainly conceivable that within 300,000 businesses, some of those might not be businesses that Shah Rukh Khan would necessarily want to have himself associated with. Can you use AI to factor that in, as well? Can you protect brand equity while you're also making it more broadly available and more broadly accessible?
Adam Tucker (08:16):
Yeah, I mean, look, in the case of Cadbury, the brand platform is all around generosity. So, this act of helping small businesses was the perfect manifestation of a generosity platform. But I think to your point, it's super important that when we're thinking about how we're developing ideas that might leverage Gen AI for a brand, it has to be anchored back to what that brand proposition and what that brand stands for. So, you know, the birthday songs is another really interesting example, where we've now said, when we think about our chocolate portfolio for Mondelez, we have a lot of celebratory occasions, and the idea of using songs can be a platform for us. But we have to do it in a way that's relevant to the equity of the brand and the occasion that we're talking about.
So, an example of extending that idea, we have a brand called Milco, which stands for tenderness. And we've been working with a rapper in Europe called Snella. And the idea has been, how do we use Snella to create tender raps, and give people the ability to create their own tender raps? And actually, we put the creative technology people in India together with the creative people in Europe to build that idea together. So back to your point, you can do a lot with Gen AI, but you have to ask yourself, should you do it? And you only should do it if it links back to the brand, what it stands for, and how it needs to connect with its audience.
And on all of those instances, the Gen AI has been an amazing multiplier. We've had work come through the system that we've said, wait, that's off brand. Why are you doing that? And they're like, well, people really, we really want to experiment and use Gen AI and get it into our ideas. Well, you don't do that just for the sake of doing it. It has to have a reason that connects back to the essence of the brand.
Charles (10:16):
Without being a doomsayer, could you imagine a scenario where the dividing line you've just articulated, which is, we could have AI do that, should we have AI do that? Could you see a time in the not-too-distant future where that line is eliminated and AI is deciding what it can and should do? I mean, I imagine that some of the scaling of the capability is going to be the automation between the creation of the asset and the distribution of the assets. That that's going to be something that will, brands will take over in many cases and entirely automate, right? Why would they not? I was talking to, I think I asked Mita the same question, and I had another client talk to me about the fact that when you're launching a new product for a global business, the number of assets you need to support that launch can be in the thousands, right?
Adam Tucker (11:04):
Yep.
Charles (11:05):
So the business is built on selling time by the hour. Brands are going to say, I'm not spending all that money on those people because I can do this automatically. Do you worry that we run the risk, if we're not careful, that we could end up in a situation where AI is deciding what content is appropriate to create, and then has the capacity to distribute it, as well?
Adam Tucker (11:25):
I mean, I don't, I don't worry about it within the context within which I'm operating within WPP and with our clients and with Mondelez, because we're building tools that allow us and ensure responsible AI, and that also are only going to be as good as the data that we populate them with.
And so, for example, we've just been working on a six week sprint to build a custom brand tool for one of the Mondelez brands. And it's been one of the most interesting and challenging things that I've worked on in my career, because as you're tuning and training the LLM with the data, and you've got AI and data science working with brand strategists, and those two people trying to learn to speak the same language, as you go through that process, you see how it can veer off-course quickly, because if something goes into the LLM that isn't the right brand data point, it goes left.
And we had an interest-- a situation as we were training it where the data science guys went off and found some social feeds that they thought were appropriate to put into the LLM, and we got back something that looked crazy, right? But the team going, through it, and this is where humans need to come into the process, said, wait, stop, we have to get this back on track, and that social feed actually is over here and not appropriate to be fed into this LLM. So I mean, I certainly think it's a risk for the industry. I don't think it's a risk for us in the way we're approaching building and training LLM models.
Charles (13:08):
So human curation is going to go on being an essential part of this for--
Adam Tucker (13:12):
An absolute essential, an absolute essential. I mean, going through that process, the importance of having a brand strategist who really understands AI and the application of AI, combined with a creative technologist, combined with an AI data engineer, who are all working on synthesizing, what's the right data, how do we get it in, looking at the outputs, feeding back on the outputs, it's, you know, it's human led, it's human run, and it's only as good as the judgment of those humans and the taste of those humans as they're going through it. So the human factor is going to be essential.
Charles (13:53):
WPP has famously made a very large investment, large, interestingly, by the standards of the advertising marketing communications industry, minuscule by the standards of the entire AI ecosystem, right? I mean, people are raising trillions of dollars, I read somewhere else. Nevertheless, WPP has publicly said they put it $250 or $300 million into building a closed AI platform for yourselves. Can you just talk a little bit about the advantages of that and also any disadvantages that you see doing it that way?
Adam Tucker (14:25):
Yep, absolutely. And you're referring to WPP Open, which is our operating system that allows us to create a uniform way of working with our clients that's powered by, well, it gives access to all 115,000 people to the latest and greatest AI tools, Gemini, ChatGBT, Claude, but also is powered for our brands. We create custom AI tools, brains, LLMs. We have the ability to create LLMs that drive brand performance, that give audience insights, that create brand assets. And so frankly, I have a client who has said to me, I want to be a leader in the industry and in AI, and we want to be out ahead, and I, as a global client leader, have the tool that I need through WPP Open, and the tools and the training and the talent that we have within WPP, to lead them on that journey.
So that's pretty significant for me, to be able to say to the client, we can lead you, and to do that with confidence. Because look, you could say I'm biased as a WPP person, but at the same time, my job is to be pretty objective and I either have what I need to lead clients or I don't. And when I don't, I can be relatively critical, but in this instance, we have more than what we need. And to be able to have everyone within the company have access to all of these tools and to be playing with them and experimenting with them, is a real advantage. And then to be able to take it to a client, and customize it to the client needs and create a uniform way of working with clients, and be able to build these custom LLMs for the client business, is a significant advantage, that I don't think others in the industry have or realize the impact of that.
Charles (16:18):
So I want to talk about that in a second, but just for my own understanding, WPP Open is a closed system, correct? It is closed in that only information, data that is safe, appropriate, legally valid, protected, trademark approved, all of that. So when you are getting stuff out of that system, you can lean into it emotionally as well as practically because you are completely confident that that's, you don't have to worry about infringing anything.
Adam Tucker (16:46):
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Charles (16:48):
So the confidence part of that must be enormous.
Adam Tucker (16:50):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, look, one of the, I think, biggest challenges for anyone who wants to get in and leverage Gen AI today is the technology infrastructure, and being able, it's expensive to build, it's super complex. And we basically have it at our fingertips. And to your point, it's closed, it's confidential, we use it how we need it. And so it gives us a big advantage in that sense.
Charles (17:17):
So let's pick up on the point you were just making about where the industry is in its evolution. Let me frame it through this lens. How long ago did you start to get smart about AI? Because this was not part of a conversation you and I used to have. There was no, no part of it. We never mentioned AI. So how long have you been smart about it?
Adam Tucker (17:38):
Three years ago when we developed the Shah Rukh Khan idea, and we saw the success of that on the business, that that was the moment where we said, particularly the creative application of AI, that we need to get smarter about this and we need to help our teams understand how this technology works, so that we can leverage it within the creation of other ideas. So we've been on a journey, and over the course of that time, we've probably got 10 to 12 amazing ideas with Gen AI at heart. So it's been some time we've been playing with it.
And then it's, that was, the initial days were kind of a normal journey, and now from last year, it's super accelerated (laugh) and we're running. We’re sprinting.
Charles (18:24):
So global, I mean, so holding company CEOs don't spend $300 million likely under any circumstances. So how did that come about?
Adam Tucker (18:31):
Mark and Stefan Pretorius and the team started working on WPP Open four or five years ago as part of Stefan Pretorius’s initial vision when he joined the company. So I think they saw this coming and were ready for it as it kicked into high gear, which has been fantastic for us.
Charles (18:50):
And to your earlier point, as well, there's not, there's no other example that I'm aware of yet of anybody else doing something like this, of this scale. Have you heard of anything comparable?
Adam Tucker (19:00):
No. No.
Charles (19:01):
What does that say about the industry, do you think?
Adam Tucker (19:04):
Part of it is, there are pretty significant barriers to break into leveraging Gen AI, be it the investment, the tech infrastructure, having the right people to figure out how to use it, ensuring that you've got all the legal and responsible AI practices as part of it. So, I mean, interestingly, as I think about it from a career perspective, here we are at probably, in my career, one of the biggest transformational moments. And I go, okay, where do I want to be? And I know there's a lot of talk about, well, the startups are going to rule the world in this, or the smaller, more agile companies are going to be AI powered. But I don't know how they get there quick enough. Whereas I have what I need as a leader within WPP at my fingertips, and I also have the ability to learn and play and experiment and make sure my teams are doing the same, so that this is where I want to be. And actually, I believe that we are ahead and we'll stay ahead as, as a result of that.
Charles (20:08):
Now, one of the fundamental changes that this is going to create is the change in the economic structure of this industry. It has to by definition, right? This industry, and I've made this point on this series of podcasts, many times, but this industry is paid by the hour. A lot of its margin is generated by getting young people who are paid less to do a lot of content creation, which gets charged back. All of that, most of that, if not all of that, is going to be gone in, you tell me, a year? Two? At the outside, right? That's undeniable. The economic structure of this industry will not sustain. It cannot sustain. And yet I see no evidence, I hear nothing about anybody sitting down with anybody and saying, we have to completely revolutionize the way that the compensation structure for this industry takes place. That needs to happen, right?
Adam Tucker (20:56):
Yeah, it does. I mean, look, we're having those conversations with our clients. The thing that I think this will do is accelerate the move to outcome-based compensation.
Charles (21:08):
The value of an idea suddenly becomes valuable.
Adam Tucker (21:10):
The value of ideas, deliverables-based remuneration. And I've had the opportunity now to work on several clients who have moved to deliverables-based remuneration. And I don't really want to go back to the old way, because frankly, this works so much better. You do not spend any of the time that you spend in the old way, justifying who's on the business, what their title is, how much they're paid, either inside the company or to the client. And whereas on an outputs deliverables-based remuneration, you're talking about the work, what you're delivering, what you need to deliver, you have to be pretty sophisticated with scoping, but it's a breath of fresh air. And so I think this is the perfect instigator and catalyst to get clients to move more toward the outputs-based comp.
Charles (21:58):
And do you think it allows agencies to finally become more selective about who they work with? Not just from a creator quality standpoint, which has always been a determining factor for some agencies, not all, but for some, but also clients who are willing to recognize, okay, I'm going to pay for the things that are actually valuable to driving my business. And so agencies can now become more selective and discerning about saying, I want to work with clients for whom the outcome is important, not the process.
Adam Tucker (22:22):
Yep. Absolutely. And I think it'll have a big impact on making choices about, who are you going to pitch and what is the criteria that they have? Are they looking to be more innovative? Are they looking for a different remuneration model?
I mean, I'm hopeful that we continue to see the work get better and better and better. And here in Cannes, we're celebrating more ideas that have AI at heart, that are powered by AI, but are done so in a way that create magic experience for consumers, and at the end of the day, add value to consumers' lives. Because that's what we're here to do, right? We're here to represent brands that need to connect with consumers and bring meaning and value. And I think Gen AI is a tool that allows us to supercharge that, and as we look to the future, I'm hopeful that we're here in Cannes in the next five years, and the work on the stage, is the best work, has AI at heart.
Charles (23:23):
And what are you afraid of?
Adam Tucker (23:25):
I'm afraid of using AI to take the easy path to generate average content. Because we are going to have the ability to push a button and send out thousands of assets that just fill the void, and don't add any value or meaning to consumer's lives and just fill space. And I'm sure there will be a lot of people there who are tempted by the ability to go for mass, versus ensuring that what they go for has empathy at heart and has an idea to it.
Charles (24:05):
Let me ask you two other questions before we wrap up. If you were starting your own agency today, your own creative, creativity focused, creativity driven agency, how would you build AI into it if you don't have access to $300 million worth of capital investment?
Adam Tucker (24:23):
I wouldn't. This is the challenge, right? I mean, I think we all, for any of us in this business who have an entrepreneurial mindset like myself, we all fantasize about our own startup. And so, yeah, I mean, I'd love to do a startup if I had the capital investment to literally make it a business powered by people in AI. That would require a lot of cash that I don't have.
Charles (24:51):
But could you imagine doing it with the tools that are publicly available? Or would you have to put so many constraints around those that--
Adam Tucker (24:57):
You can't. You cannot use the tools that are publicly available right now to get to brand ready work. And that's the issue, be it, they don't work very well with people, they don't work for logos, brands, and I think it's going to be a long time before they get there. So you can't just use those model--they're good for concepting and, but to get to brand ready assets and ideas, they're not there. So this is where you need the technology infrastructure, and that's where it gets complicated.
Charles (25:27):
So I think what's insightful about that and clarifying actually, is that I've been interested in these series of conversations, when I asked people what's their relationship with AI, have had a range of answers. You've listened to many of those episodes, thank you for listening to them. The range, as you've heard, is, it's a tool right? To, it's a partner. And more than that, it feels to me like you are saying it's at least a partner. It's as valuable as many employees used to be to you.
Adam Tucker (25:56):
Absolutely. It's like having a second creative team, on your team. I think the minimum is that it's a tool. Absolutely. And I know some on the podcast described it as like the Photoshop moment. It's much bigger than that. It has much bigger impact than that.
Charles (26:15):
Is part of the reason that there's a difference in perspective, whether it's perspective or choice about how it's described, do you think part of the reason is that if you don't have scale, you can't actually use it as more than a tool at this point because it isn't safe to use it as anything beyond that?
Adam Tucker (26:31):
It's not safe to use it if you don't have scale. It's really challenging to have access to all the data that you need to populate it so that it's useful. If you think about the applications, whether it's creation, whether it's audience development, segmentation, insights, performance or channel based insights and direction, the amount of data that you need to be able to populate those models and make them useful is huge. It's significant. And so between the tech infrastructure and the data, to really get to an ecosystem of tools that works for a specific brand, is a significant undertaking.
Charles (27:11):
So what does this mean in terms of creativity across the industry, which obviously exists at different scale in different kinds of organizations and businesses? Where do you see the future of human creativity?
Adam Tucker (27:22):
There's a real potential right now, just with the tools that we have today, if you don't have custom tools, to enhance idea development, and for AI to play a role in generating and working with a creative team and creative director, to create a lot of ideas. And think about some of those ideas you might use, some of those ideas you might build on. So it should be an opportunity to enhance the ideas and creativity, as long as we're not using the models and the tools, literally to just draw on and pick the ideas that come out. You have taste, vision, creative choice making is quite critical to this, to drive creative in the future.
Charles (28:13):
I want to thank you for coming back on the show and for reaching out on this particular topic. I think it's so valuable when we create these kinds of conversations around topics that are this important. I think we both agree there isn't any, there is no topic that is more important than this one at the moment. And your email to me, and your willingness to come on so quickly at the last minute, I think is going to stimulate a lot more understanding and awareness of where we are and where we need to be as an industry. So thanks so much for reaching out and for coming on.
Adam Tucker (28:38):
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for having me. I think what you're doing is quite important because we're all experimenting and we're all learning as we go through this. And I think the more we can have conversations and the more we can listen to others' experiences as we go through this, the better we'll be. And especially as your podcast is all about creativity and creative leadership, that's critical to the development of Gen AI in the future. So thanks for having me.
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