In a landmark announcement recently made at Google Cloud Next, WPP and Google Cloud unveiled a transformative collaboration set to redefine the landscape of marketing. This groundbreaking partnership integrates Google’s cutting-edge Gemini models with WPP Open, WPP’s AI-powered marketing operating system utilized by over 35,000 professionals and esteemed clients such as The Coca-Cola Company, L’Oréal, and Nestlé.Combining Google's unparalleled expertise in data analytics, generative AI technology, and cybersecurity with WPP's comprehensive marketing capabilities and global creative prowess, this alliance aims to usher in a new era of marketing efficiency and effectiveness.Central to this collaboration is the utilization of Google Cloud's advanced gen AI tools alongside WPP's proprietary marketing and advertising data. This integration empowers WPP’s clients to craft brand- and product-specific content utilizing gen AI, gain profound insights into target audiences, accurately forecast content effectiveness, and optimize campaigns through ongoing adaptive processes.Drawing from WPP’s extensive experience in serving enterprise clients, WPP Open seamlessly integrates with any client, partner, or technology vendor to deliver optimized and automated marketing capabilities.The inaugural phase of this dynamic partnership focuses on developing four innovative use cases:• Enhanced Creativity with WPP Open Creative Studio: Integrating Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro technology into Creative Studio enables the development of richer and more dynamic user interfaces. By leveraging a brand's content and guidelines, including color palette, fonts, voice, and past campaigns, this integration facilitates the creation of highly creative and on-brand content.• Smarter Content Optimization: Upgrades to WPP's AI Performance Brain™, powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, enhance the system's ability to predict content performance even before campaign activation. This advancement delivers faster and more accurate predictions, offering superior recommendations to improve content and potentially freeing up substantial resources for reinvestment.• AI Narration: Pioneering real-time streaming capabilities for video description and narration, WPP utilizes Gemini 1.5 Pro to automate customizable video narration scripts, enhancing video creation efficiency and personalization.• Hyper-Realistic Product Representation: Leveraging gen AI, WPP revolutionizes product representation by creating detailed 3D product images that adhere to brand guidelines and incorporate product design elements, ideal for marketing and advertising.Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP, said: "This collaboration marks a pivotal moment in marketing innovation. Our integration of Gemini 1.5 Pro into WPP Open has significantly accelerated our gen AI innovation and enables us to do things we could only dream of a few months ago. With Gemini models, we're not only able to enhance traditional marketing tasks but also to integrate the end-to-end marketing process for continuous, adaptive optimisation. I believe this will be a game-changer for our clients and the marketing industry at large.”Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said: “AI has the potential to unlock new levels of effectiveness for marketers, whether it is optimising campaigns, automating repetitive tasks like brand descriptions, or sparking entirely new ideas. This partnership brings the power of Google Cloud’s gen AI capabilities together with WPP’s marketing domain expertise to help our mutual customers create better campaigns that resonate with consumers in a deeper way.”The move forms part of WPP’s ongoing annual investment of £250 million in AI, data and technology, and its strategy to capitalise on its lead in the space by partnering with AI experts like Google.

Following the successful partnership on various brands and projects in the region over the past three years, Acquisit is expanding its collaboration with global beauty leader L’Oréal in the GCC, Levant and Morocco across a spectrum of DtoC brands. This underscores Acquisit’s prowess in driving impactful growth for digital industry leaders on a global scale."We are thrilled to once again be chosen as L'Oréal Middle East's preferred partner for their digital marketing requirements," said Edouard Daou, Co-founder of Acquisit. "This affirms our commitment to excellence and our ability to foster transformative growth through innovative marketing strategies."L'Oréal Middle East was in search of a marketing partner who could not only meet but exceed expectations. Acquisit's proven record of success and its profound understanding of the beauty and cosmetics industry reaffirmed their position, as the ideal choice, once again."We are thrilled to continue expanding our collaboration with Acquisit," said Olfa Messaoudi, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer at L'Oréal Middle East. "This partnership strengthens our shared commitment to excellence, creativity, and unlocking unparalleled dimensions of success in the dynamic landscape of the beauty industry. We look forward to Acquisit’s support in propelling our brands to new heights.”

Valtech, the experience innovation company, has entered a new era as it repositions its brand to reflect its ambition, growth, and evolution in today’s experience-driven world. This comes as the agency doubled its revenue and headcount over the last five years, helping leading brands like Dolby, P&G, L’Oreal, Mars, Audi, and Volkswagen transform as digital enterprises. Valtech’s new brand positioning is driven by the growing business and consumer need for experience innovation — the only way for brands to leap ahead of their competition and maintain market leadership. From its business transformation work with global brands over the last decade, it has seen experience innovation overtake digital transformation as the solution to accelerate its clients ahead and overcome parity — and as the catalyst behind its own growth.“Digital acceleration and increased digital maturity are changing the reality for brands across all industries. Now many leading enterprises are well underway with their digitalisation, the ability to leap ahead isn’t easy,” said Olivier Padiou, CEO at Valtech. “With greater access to advanced cloud-based technology and global talent, digital transformation is now available to everyone. This has levelled the playing field, turning what was once ‘the best’ into ‘best practices.” “Experience innovation is about going beyond today’s definition of ‘the best’ to aim for future-back category leadership. It’s about outsmarting the competition, setting new standards, and unlocking value in a rapidly changing and connected world. This is where we’re primed to deliver.”According to Salesforce, 88% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. Valtech is well-positioned to help brands go beyond the best when delivering experiences to not only keep pace with shifts in customer expectations, but to also ensure profitability under current market conditions. Olivier added, “Our unique approach to experience innovation allows brands to better respond to shifts in business, industry, geopolitics, culture, and technology. We’ve seen the value it brings when driving demand and delight for customers and in turn, how it converts to business performance and revenue.”Valtech’s unique, collaborative culture is at the core of its new brand positioning. It’s because of this that it can combine different disciplines, cultures, industries, and perspectives to create surprising breakthroughs for clients. By daring to blend creativity with commerce, wellness with mobility, retail with b2b, and many more uncommon combinations, it creates solutions that achieve the exceptional. This proven pathway to experience innovation — made possible by its ability to adjust its client engagement model to the client’s specific needs — has allowed major brands in Valtech’s roster, including L’Oreal, Mars, and Audi, to break through silos, exceed expectations, disrupt categories, redefine success, and deliver exponential value. “We’re a borderless company that’s locally responsive and globally diverse,” said Suzanne Schroder, chief collaboration officer at Valtech. “This rich culture enables us to combine uncommon combinations of expertise and disciplines in ways other organisations can’t, due to siloes and competing cultures. As these combinations cross over, they spark ideas and breakthroughs that drive huge value for our growth, and our clients’ growth. Our ways of working, acquisition strategy, partnerships, and client servicing model empower and protect that.”"Our experience innovation strategy is the driving force behind our commitment in supporting the ambitious regional transformational agendas of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the neighbouring GCC countries. In a region where disruption and transformational leaps are the norm, we understand that in today's experience-driven economy, brands must go beyond conventional boundaries to excel. We are here to empower them to outperform, redefine standards, and thrive in a dynamically changing and interconnected landscape. It is an exciting journey where we lead the charge in experience innovation and set the bar for customer experiences that ultimately drive measurable business results," said Adam Cukrowski, Regional Managing Director at Valtech MENA.As part of its new brand positioning, Valtech has not only got a new visual identity to match, but has also identified core offerings that unlock the value of experience innovation — spanning commerce acceleration, data evolution, enterprise transformation, experience elevation, and marketing creativity and performance.   

Socio-political polarization, the potential of generative AI, masculinity in crisis, "sportswashing", and community-based sustainability are five key trends that have reached an inflection point and will shape global marketing strategies in 2024, as revealed in WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2024 released today.Now in its 13th year, The Marketer’s Toolkit 2024 provides marketers with strategic support for planning and decision-making to help navigate the challenges and benefit from the opportunities in the coming year.The trend identification for the report is based on WARC’s new proprietary GEISTE methodology(Government, Economy, Industry, Society, Technology, Environment). It further incorporates a global survey of 1,400+ marketing executives, one-to-one interviews with CMOs, industry commentary, and analysis, data and insights from WARC’s global team of experts.Aditya Kishore, Insight Director, WARC, says: “Marketers globally continue to be concerned about the economic picture with 64% of survey respondents seeing it as the biggest factor in 2024 planning. But a majority (61%) of firms expect improved business performance next year, up 10% from last year. WARC forecasts global adspend to grow 8.2% in 2024, topping $1 trillion for the first time.“As consumer insights become ever more critical to aid success, The Marketer’s Toolkit runs through some of the emerging threats and opportunities marketers will face as they look for sources of growth.”The top five trends outlined in WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2024 are: Unlocking the potential of Gen AI: Nearly three-quarters (70%) of marketers plan to unlock the potential of AI in their marketing Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has crossed the threshold from promise to practical deployment, overhauling media strategies and audience targeting. 2024 will see brands look to capitalise on the emergence of accessible Gen AI tools to experiment with creative development. Nearly three-quarters (70%) of respondents to the Marketer’s Toolkit survey plan to unlock the potential of AI in their marketing, 12% of which will look to adopt the technology wherever they can and over half (58%) describe themselves as “cautiously progressive”, actively testing and evaluating Gen AI in marketing.However, such opportunities come with potential risks including brand safety, copyright, sustainability and agency remuneration.Jonathan Halvorson, Global SVP, Consumer Experience & Digital Commerce, MondelÄ“z, comments: “The question is, how do you build [AI] into a scaled organizational competency? That is the obsession of every single day, every single week for the next 18 months. Because it’s a race you have to win.”Preparing for the age of polarisation: 13% of marketers said the best strategy is to “drop all ‘purpose’ driven strategies and political positions”Political ideologies have become increasingly entrenched in marketing. However, with high-profile brands caught in the polarization crossfire, there are signs of increased timidity regarding social causes. While 76% of Marketer’s Toolkit respondents advise standing ground in the face of controversy, 13% pursue the path of least risk saying that the best strategy is to “drop all ‘purpose’ driven strategies and political positions.” When addressing polarizing issues, brands should examine their audience through cultural and demographic lenses, and scenario-plan against any potential fallout. Speaking at the recent ANA Masters of Marketing conference, Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble, said: “We serve diverse consumers. That requires precision to serve in ways that are relevant and better for each person, so we can unlock the potential. Inclusion to serve all people and each person matters for market growth.”Masculinity in crisis: Almost two out of three marketers (63%) agree that the way they communicate with young men needs to change Around the world, young men are increasingly being marginalised both socially and economically and struggling with their mental health. In their search for a contemporary identity, some are being drawn to toxic role models online. Almost two out of three marketers (63%) agree that they need to shift their advertising and influencer selection strategies to reflect emerging models of masculinity that offer positive and helpful messages to young men.While there will be mounting pressure to eliminate stereotypical male depictions in advertising, there will also be those who will attack the brand for being too “woke” if they do so.During Advertising Week last month, Stephanie Jacoby, SVP/Brand marketing, Diageo, said: “As an alcohol advertiser, we’ve certainly contributed to this culture, (...but) we are starting to make the change that we need to see. It’s really time now that we open the aperture (...) which broadens how men are depicted beyond, and so replaces a single, undifferentiated idea of masculinity with a multi-faceted view of what this term can encompass.”“Sportswashing” is a growing concern: 61% of marketers concur that it is “very important” for sports organisers and owners to avoid being politically divisive.In a fragmented media landscape, sports remain a natural passion point for brands to leverage. It delivers mass real-time audiences, yielding a growing competition for media rights, fresh content and sponsorship opportunities. Critics allege this is resulting in the rise of “sportswashing” whereby entities accused of a poor human rights track record invest in sports to bolster their reputation. 61% of Marketer’s Toolkit respondents concur that it is “very important” for sports organisers and owners to avoid being politically divisive. Opportunities for marketers include developing new content formats, engaging with growing sports and different communities, and data-driven insights to track performance and fan attitudes.James Williams, Investor/Advisor, Nobody Studios, says: “There’s a danger with the term “sportswashing”, because it becomes one of those words that's now thrown around all over the place for when people don't like something, especially in the world of sport."Sustainability should be locally relevant: Nearly two-fifths (38%) of marketers are investing in local communitiesWhile sustainability marketing will become more interconnected to other functions, marketers and agency leaders must double down on changing what they solely control. Investing in local communities was cited by nearly two-fifths of survey respondents (38%), followed by advertising production (26%) and media decarbonisation (21%).Marketers should pivot to smaller, local and community-based sustainability initiatives to power their green agenda and help their brands build credible consumer trust. <img src='https://erp.adgully.me/artical_image\9abbbf0d0b54602fe74c9f86623ed4e1.png' class='content_image'>Janet Neo, Chief Sustainability Officer, North Asia & China, L’Oréal , comments: “We adopt a personalized approach at L’Oréal, emphasizing a ‘Glocalization Strategy.’ While the strategy’s framework is global, we consider local specificities when implementing it. We engage with local communities because we believe in respecting local culture and insights. [...] We believe that the local cultural context can help us define the priorities or the key areas we should focus on.”A complimentary sample of The Marketer’s Toolkit 2024 is available to read here. The Marketer’s Toolkit 2024 is part of WARC Strategy’s The Evolution of Marketing program, offering a series of practical reports designed to help marketers address major industry shifts to drive marketing effectiveness in the coming year.A series of podcasts and a webinar will follow on The Marketer’s Toolkit 2024.  Complementing the Marketer’s Toolkit, other reports from the Evolution of Marketing program include the GEISTE report, and the upcoming The Voice of the Marketer and The Future of Media.