Digiday is in Miami to bring you the latest news from the event. More from the series:
AI did not dominate the conversation at Possible as some expected, but when it did, the tone changed: marketers are no more starry-eyed. They’re focused now on what AI can do, not someday.
Some asked specifically how it could be applied to ease challenges advertisers face because of the fragmented landscape.
Google announced last week that they would continue to allow third-party cookies, which makes Chrome an outlier when compared to Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. This is without mentioning the (already cookie-free) CTV or mobile device environments.
Ravi Patel is the CEO of SWYM a startup which uses AI to help advertisers overcome fragmentation. He told Digiday that many advertisers are using AI to map and segment.
“A number of brands are starting to think about how they can use AI and better methodologies to optimize their desired outcomes, instead of buying audiences blindly,” Patel explained. Anyone who has glanced over the conference agenda will not be surprised by any of this. AI was everywhere, whether it was front and center in panel titles or bubbling naturally across the mainstage.
For example, take Monday’s panel moderated by Tyler Romasco. He is the svp for global publisher development at OpenX. The discussion with executives from CVS Media Exchange (CME), ANA (ANA) and TAG (TAG) centered around inventory quality, but AI was still brought up. It was mentioned as a tool that could help combat fraud, detect bot traffic, and flag harmful content. Less flashy, more practical.
Romasco said, “What we observed at Possible this past week was that people were thinking about AI in two different ways. “The first is efficiency, and operations. I heard a lot about leveraging AI to improve efficiency and service for customers. People are excited by the opportunity to spend more time on strategic innovation.
For Jon Halvorson svp, global consumer experience, at Mondelez the value of generative AI is in content and conversion. “We’re interested in how we can use AI to enhance the quality of our content and how we can use AI to improve e-commerce,” he said to Digiday at the Digiday Studio, a conference media partner. “We can take the quality of our content to a new level, reducing the cost to zero. In AI for commerce, even our most storied brands like Ritz and Oreo don’t convert half of the people who visit our product pages to a sale. What a huge benefit for the business.”
This is a reflection of the broader shift in advertising: The promise of AI is real, but so is the demand for more transparency about how and why the tech is used.
The conversation [at Possible] was centered around more immediate concerns, such as platform volatility, data security, measurement, curation, and keeping up with the ever-evolving strategies of creators. Digital Envoy, IP intelligence company. “The excitement and uncertainty about AI are real. For now, people are watching, waiting, rather than diving headfirst into the AI world.”
This is true to a certain degree. Despite all the hype, marketers are still at the beginning of the AI era. They are closer to the base camp than they are the summit. This is why many of the discussions at the conference were superficial. The industry isn’t ready to move forward with this topic, not because it lacks depth. There’s a long way to go before AI can deliver on the bold promises that clutter LinkedIn feeds.
Jason Downie is the global chief revenue officer of RAISING, the tech division of marketing consulting firm Making Science. “One example of this was looking at how hyper-personalization of creative leads to better performance in search, programmatic, and so on.”
To the degree it’s been developed, agentic AI is also finding its footing among marketers and tech firms. Rob Emrich, Chairman and Founder of Infillion, explained how agentic can help a tech company that offers multiple products with workflow issues. Emrich said that the first step for companies like Infillion is to separate and make each of the products, services, and underlying products – whether it is our creative product, our targeting product, or our logic in our bid – usable by agents. “We’re in the middle of this process right now, essentially upgrading the protocols that our APIs are using in order to make these usable by a more complex agentic AI,” said Emrich.
Creativity was another flashpoint that recurred. Matt Barash, chief business officer at AI advertising platform Nova, noted that a lot AI talk was still wrapped in buzzwords, and made overpromises.
Barash said that the buzz around AI in the past few months had catapulted creative opportunities to the top of industry agendas. “Many attendees were trying to appear progressive and leaning into their AI offerings, but often mistakenly — this is really automation or machine-learning. The devil lies in the details, and the conversations were often superficial.
In this sense, Possible became a less hypefest and a more reality check. Who’s ready to put AI into action and who’s still in pitch deck mode.
“Unlike previous years, AI felt like a buzzword that was thrown around in all conversations, without anyone having a clear idea of its potential,” Wilfried Schobeiri said, chief technology officer at advertising tech vendor Ogury. “The dialogue seems to be more organic now.” The industry isn’t just talking about AI anymore, it’s actively utilizing it and has a clear sense of what it can do — especially from a productivity perspective.”
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