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Business Insider
9 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
As an AI entrepreneur, will.i.am says data privacy and training the next generation should be prioritized
Musician and founder of the platform spoke during Business Insider's CMO Insider breakfast at Cannes. He discussed everything from AI to data privacy. This article is part of " CMO Insider," a series on marketing leadership and innovation. Musician, producer, and entrepreneur compared AI to early video games during a discussion at Business Insider's CMO Insider breakfast at Cannes on Tuesday. "AI is in its infancy," he said. "It's Pac-Man; it ain't even Halo yet." Now a founder of the platform , was interviewed by Jamie Heller, the editor in chief of Business Insider, at the event, which had BCG as its founding sponsor. Early video games, said, required a level of imagination from the player in the absence of sophisticated graphics and a real story. This same level of imagination is needed from "the people that love AI, the folks whose imagination is doing the work as you're training it or it's learning from your imagination," he said. He said AI will not stifle creativity, but provide room to enhance it. While AI may be in its early stages, its potential impact over the next few years is undeniable. One area that will need to adjust to make way for AI is higher education. That is why, said, recently partnered with Arizona State University to provide technology to help enhance the learning experience and prepare students for the reality that awaits them upon graduation at the end of the decade. "When you go out into the world, you're not just competing with humans," he said of these students. Rather, there's an "onslaught of agents" that are replacing the jobs that students are going to school for, and there's no one trying to offset how they compete with them, he said. He said working with is going to provide a path so that students will make an agent of their own; when they graduate, so will their agent. "Humans have to be able to compete with the marketplace, and that marketplace is going to be like ghost bots that are going to be doing amazing work," he added. Like-minded partners is currently working with brands like Formula 1, Mercedes, and Qualcomm. In looking for brands to work with, said that there has to be a sense of shared values. "If the values aren't aligned, that could be a problem," he said. "For example, it'll be hard for us to work with companies that have data privacy practices that don't really gel with how we want to move in this AI space." He added that he's fearful that AI could follow the same trajectory of many social media platforms, whose data practices have been "parasitic." "There have been lots of issues with data practices and lack of regulations and governance around it," he said. "So if that is to come into this new age we are stepping into with AI, it's not a good result."
Business Insider
11 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Uber is getting advertisers to pay for your next ride
Uber has a new ad type, paid for by brands, that gives users money off their next rides. Uber execs spoke with BI at the Cannes Lions ad festival as it pitched marketers on its ad business. This article is part of " CMO Insider," a series on marketing leadership and innovation. Need a cab? This ad's got you covered. Uber this week said it's launching a new ad format that lets brands offer its users cash off their next rides. Beverage company Molson Coors is the launch advertiser for Ride Offers. Brands like Coors Light will show up with ads in the Uber app as users check their phones to see where their driver is, offering users an Uber discount. Uber also pitched its newly launched Creative Studio to advertisers attending meetings at its villa set-up in Cannes. This team works on more bespoke offerings for advertisers, like offering rides to Miami F1 Grand Prix attendees in a luxury vehicle sponsored by La Mer, packed with freebie skincare products. In another example, Uber Eats users could order Christmas carolers to their doors, sponsored by the alcohol company Diageo. "Our audience is always looking for an opportunity to drive savings and get affordable things, but also get messages that are personalized and relevant for them," Kristi Argyilan, the global head of Uber Advertising, told Business Insider at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France on Wednesday. Uber said in May of this year that its ad business, which launched in 2022, had reached a $1.5 billion revenue run rate — the number it expects to achieve by the end of 2025 — which was up 60% versus last year. The company does not break out a more specific ad revenue figure in its financial filings. It serves ads on the Uber app, on in-car screens, in emails to its users, and on car tops. Argylian said Uber is looking at ways to ramp up its ad business outside its cars and apps. It's working on letting advertisers use its data and context about how users have been recently using Uber and Uber Eats to target ads on other websites and apps. An Uber user might be viewing the app to check the arrival of their car, then flip to scrolling on TikTok once they get inside, where Uber can serve an ad specific to that user. It's a similar context to the Meta Audience Network. "Purchase-based data and the location-based data is what's really fueling the experience," said Megan Ramm, global head of sales at Uber Advertising. Paul Frampton-Calero, chief executive of the digital marketing company Goodway Group, said Uber's challenge in capturing ad budgets is that it's operating in a crowded market. It's not just fighting for attention with the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon. It's also competing with the retail media networks from supermarkets and other companies that already have long-standing brand relationships. "Uber isn't naturally somebody most brands are going to build those strong top-to-top relationships with," Frampton-Calero said. "It's hard enough building a relationship with Google, Meta, Spotify, TikTok, and then having to work out where to put Google in that mix." Still, he added, Uber's advantage is its mix of data. "Uber knows a lot about the type of people that like Mexican food who spend time at a particular part of town and visit the airport four times a quarter," Frampton-Calero said. "Then you can make some assumptions about what a high net income audience looks like and how to market to them."
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Nextdoor's CEO explains the 'ideological' reason he won't cut licensing deals with AI companies
Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia said data scraping gives AI companies an advantage over content owners. Tolia spoke with BI at the Cannes Lions ad festival as Nextdoor prepares to unveil a big redesign. This article is part of " CMO Insider," a series on marketing leadership and innovation. Partner, sue, or block? Those tend to be the three available options for publishers when it comes to dealing with artificial intelligence companies scraping their content to train large language models. Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social network, is emphatically choosing the blocking path. "If you spread your content far and wide, there's a very good chance that one of these better funded, larger operating companies — like a ChatGPT, or Microsoft, or whomever — is going to take all that content, train its models, and then consumers will never have to come to you," Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor's CEO, told BI in an interview at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France on Monday. Tolia said his stance is "ideological," and it comes after he learned the hard way about the perils of relying too heavily on Big Tech platforms. During the dot-com boom, Tolia was an executive at a site that helped shoppers track price drops on products they were looking to buy. Tolia said around 80% of its traffic came from Google searches. The company went public in 2004, but its share price crashed not long after, following a change in Google's algorithm that decimated its traffic. ( sold to eBay in 2005.) "When I was starting Nextdoor with my cofounders, we said it's much more difficult to grow without the benefit of Google, but we want to do everything not to be reliant because we can't sleep well at night," Tolia said. "We've never allowed our content to be scraped, to be distributed — we aren't crawled by any of the search engines," he added. It's an unusual approach. Many website owners are laser-focused on how their brands show up on search pages and frequently optimize their sites for Google's crawlers. That approach is also why you won't see Nextdoor cutting a licensing deal like Reddit's partnership with Google. The search giant has said the deal — which Reuters reported was worth about $60 million a year to Reddit — will not only train its AI models but surface more information derived from Reddit in its search results. Tolia questioned the long-term viability of these sorts of deals, even if they're additive to the bottom line in the short term. (Disclosure: OpenAI has a licensing partnership with BI parent company Axel Springer.) Tolia said that if users decide to go to Google to get data derived from Reddit, Google could, over time, drive down the cost of its licensing agreement. "Those consumers aren't even going to know it's Reddit information," Tolia said. Google has previously said that its AI Overviews send "higher quality" visits to some websites when users click on source citation links for more information. However, separate analyses from independent researchers suggest that AI overviews can hurt click-through rates. Nextdoor is preparing for its next era Tolia's stance on licensing doesn't mean Nextdoor doesn't have AI ambitions. Tolia wants every neighborhood on Nextdoor to have an AI agent, so consumers can ask its chatbot, "What's the best place to go to in Marylebone for a great Tikka Masala?" Nextdoor's agent would then trawl 14 years of users' posts and recommendations to surface an answer. "It's incumbent on us at Nextdoor to make it just as easy as ChatGPT," Tolia said. Nextdoor's trip to Cannes Lions comes as it prepares to launch a new redesign with the intention of creating a more structured feed and more timely notifications about events happening in users' neighborhoods, layering in information from sources like city councils and local news outlets. The company's goal is to become more of a daily habit. Nextdoor said during its earnings call last month that while it has 100 million verified users, only around a quarter of them are active on the platform. Nextdoor is also sharpening its pitch to advertisers. Once the new redesign launches, it plans to roll out more ad formats and other ad services later in the year. Tolia said Nextdoor is emphasizing its hyper-local roots and the authentic conversations that happen on the platform, which are rooted around events in the real, not online, world. "I think marketers want authenticity, and so if you think about this idea of verified neighbors in real neighborhoods, in a private ecosystem — that's very different than a place like Instagram, for example," where much of the content is from influencers, Tolia said.
Business Insider
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Farewell to the 'Mad Men' era: Advertising's biggest bash of the year will showcase the industry's seismic changes
The ad industry is making its annual jaunt to France this week for the Cannes Lions ad festival. Big topics of discussion include agency consolidation and the departure of high-profile execs. This article is part of " CMO Insider," a series on marketing leadership and innovation. Advertising executives descending on the French Riviera this week for the annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity will raise their glasses of rosé to toast the twilight of Madison Avenue's glory days. Tom Denford, CEO of the agency search consultancy ID Comms, told me this year's Cannes Lions would be "like a requiem" for the traditional agency business. But that doesn't mean there won't be action. What began as an awards event in the 1950s to celebrate the best ads of the year — affectionately known as "The Work" — has morphed into a sprawling showcase of tech, entertainment, influencers, and every intermediary you can imagine. In recent years, Cannes has featured huge beach takeovers and custom-made event structures from the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta. The agencies and marketers in attendance are grappling with multiple tectonic shifts all happening at once — from the rise of artificial intelligence to the decline of linear TV, and seemingly never-ending economic uncertainty that makes marketers nervous about long-term budget planning. WPP Media recently cut its 2025 global ad spending growth forecast to 6% from 7.7%, citing "disruptions to global trade and continued deglobalization." While Agencyland's creative class may be nostalgic for the era of showstopping Don Draper-esque pitches, and when cinematic ads won the biggest awards, the industry has shifted its offerings to service clients' changing needs. Retail media isn't the sexy pursuit many executive creative directors dreamed about breaking into the industry for, but it's having a moment. According to the World Advertising Research Center, spending on commerce websites, apps, and in-store displays is projected to overtake linear TV ad spending by 2026. Cannes Lions has introduced a dedicated subcategory for retail media in both its Media and Creative Commerce Lions awards this year. Albertsons is among the companies making its festival debut this week. The supermarket chain is bringing a grocery store activation to the beach and a team of seven people from its Media Collection retail media division. Jen Saenz, Albertsons' EVP and chief commercial officer, said the aim is to showcase what's unique about the grocer's offering for advertisers: "Not just transactions, but brand stories." The traditional agency business is at a crossroads There have been multiple changes of the guard at the largest ad agency holding companies. Omnicom and IPG are awaiting the closing of their gigantic merger that would create the world's largest advertising agency company by revenue, usurping Publicis, which had only recently toppled WPP's crown. Two of the industry's most high-profile execs — Mark Read, CEO of WPP, and famed ad man David Droga, from Accenture Song — have announced their coming departures. Layoffs have been a sad constant for the rank and file as agencies consolidate. When I asked one ad agency veteran how they envisaged the scene at Cannes this year, they responded: "Type into ChatGPT: Agency exec sitting on corner of the Croisette with cardboard sign around neck saying: Will do creative or plan media for food.'" New independent agencies and big consulting firms are gaining on the traditional holding companies. Industry analyst Brian Wieser recently estimated that the "big six" agency holding companies now have a 30% share of the total US ad agency industry, down from a peak of around 40% in 2015. It's a trend that will be on full display at Cannes Lions next week. Stagwell, the agency group led by former Microsoft strategist and advisor to the Clintons, Mark Penn, is back again with its huge "Sports Beach" activation. It will feature sessions from famed athletes like former world tennis No. 1 Billie Jean King and former NBA legend Carmelo Anthony, as well as activities like a swim club and pickleball tournaments. Accenture Song has a catamaran docked in the harbor to host meetings and has execs speaking onstage at the Palais, where the main conference takes place. The agency world is adapting to its new data-driven, AI reality Brian Morrissey, the former editor in chief of marketing and media trade publication Digiday, who now writes the media newsletter The Rebooting, has invented a new parlor game for Cannes. He's going to ask everyone he meets to name their favorite ad campaign of the past 12 months. His guess is that most attendees will struggle to instantly conjure one up, despite the fact that advertising is their profession. Morrissey said it's a reflection of the fading relevance in culture of mass media and the 30-second ad spot, as consumer media habits evolve and marketing budgets shift to precision-targeting and performance-marketing. "All the action has moved to the data side of advertising," Morrissey said. (Disclosure: I previously worked for Morrissey at Digiday.) Cannes will remain a decadent affair in 2025, much to the chagrin of the many colleagues back at home who didn't get a golden ticket. (The most expensive pass stretches to more than $12,000 this year — and that's before factoring in travel and accommodation.) Set on the iconic Croisette promenade with its opulent hotels and stunning sea views, some lucky VIPs will be treated to yacht excursions and performances from musical acts including Cardi B, Ludacris, Lola Young, and Diplo. The real A-Listers at Cannes Lions, though, are the chief marketing officers with budgets to spend. Cannes Lions CEO Simon Cook said that more than 350 brands attended last year, and that's expected to rise this year. David Jones, CEO of the Brandtech Group, has some handy advice for marketers who will undoubtedly receive numerous AI sales pitches this coming week. "When someone shows you something great, ask for a login; ask if you can make content and produce it and publish it now to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube," Jones said. "If you can, they have a platform, and if you can't, they have a demo."
Business Insider
04-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
CMO Insider: A destination for marketing leadership and innovation
CMO Insider presents profiles, case studies, research, and personal perspectives, to inspire and inform CMOs and their teams as they build and grow their brands. This year, Business Insider will host its third-annual CMO Insider Breakfast at this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The event — titled "The Age of Convergence: Is Your Brand Built to Win?" — will explore how brands need to be especially bold to stand out in this period of rapid transformation. The invite-only event will convene chief marketing officers from a wide range of companies Browse the full archive of CMO articles and interviews Series editors: Julia Hood
