Advertising Week New York brought brand marketers together to explain how artificial intelligence has transformed talent discovery into an exact enterprise science. Goodwipes marketing chief Meredith Diehn laid out the new frontier of algorithmic precision with admirable candor.
"I'm going to find a creator who is a girl with IBS who lives in Nashville," Diehn said, explaining how the brand uses discovery software called Modash to cut down on manual vetting.
Enterprise talent hunting has arrived at its logical destination. Brands license discovery stacks to run boolean queries against human digestive systems and municipal zip codes, filtering the creator pool until software serves up someone with abdominal pain in Davidson County. Once located, the creator gets a box of flushable wipes.
Downstream, the agencies running these campaigns have their own algorithms to prove the spend worked. Billion Dollar Boy Group built an internal tool called Companion, which agency FiveTwoNine used for Adobe to calculate estimated earned media value generated by attendees at its events. Alicia Latoya Richardson, head of community and partnerships at FiveTwoNine, explained the upside: "AI has definitely elevated the way we report to clients on value."
Reporting on value is carrying real weight in that sentence. Earned media value remains an agency staple that translates likes into what the same impressions would have cost on a paid ad buy. Running that math through an algorithm does not make the synthetic dollar figure real. It just delivers a cleaner spreadsheet for a brand manager to hand procurement to justify the software seat that found the girl in Tennessee.
Meanwhile, the brand that ran the biggest creator commerce trade of the decade skipped the enterprise filtering entirely. Stanley 1913 chief brand officer Kate Ridley stood in front of the same room and admitted the water bottle empire has no systematic way to identify creators. "We don't have a formula, and if I'm being really candid, frequently feel lost in it," Ridley said.
The discovery platforms sell enterprise contracts on the promise that audience resonance is an indexed database of medical conditions and regional demos. Stanley moved hundreds of millions of dollars of stainless steel cups by accepting that nobody in the marketing department actually knows who the feed will pick next.