SXSW London: How AI is taking over advertising, beyond the hype

To understand how fast AI is changing how the industry makes, values and buys advertising, compare the tone at SXSW Austin three months ago with the conversations at the inaugural SXSW London.

In Austin, industry leaders made predictions that AI would become a standard part of marketers’ workflows by next year. That forecast is already coming true. From Meta to WPP, some of the biggest players in advertising are going all in on AI.

Midway through SXSW London, WPP launched Open Intelligence, its new AI-powered marketing platform. CEO Mark Read introduced it onstage, describing it as a “large marketing model (LLM)” designed to improve campaign planning via AI-powered audience segmentation, creative development and media buying.

“Every TV ad in the future … there’s no reason why we won’t be using AI,” Read said.

He also revealed that WPP is creating LLM agents equipped with specific knowledge — such as a virtual Unilever market researcher — that can operate as “additional workers” inside the company.

Just days earlier, The Wall Street Journal scooped the news that Meta is reportedly preparing to enable fully automated ad creation by the end of next year.

From the impact on search to challenging regulators to unlocking new opportunities for brand-building, here’s how AI is transforming advertising, according to experts at SXSW London.

AI and media channels

So far, the media channel most visibly affected by AI is search. Even Google admits that traffic loss from AI chatbots is inevitable.

Read agrees: “Questions people ask on search will diminish and those on LLMs will increase,” he said.

The trend poses a threat to publishers reliant on search-driven traffic. But not all are vulnerable: Time, for instance, has invested in producing high quality ad-supported content, or “capital ‘j’ journalism,” as Time CEO Jessica Sibley put it during a panel.

“We’re not in the low value, low calorie, commodity content space,” she said. “We’re much less reliant on the platform changes we’ve seen with Meta, Google and even AI.”

That strategy is attracting “big checks from huge, global blue-chip companies.”

For a glimpse of the future at the intersection of premium media, advertising and AI, look at LLM search optimization. “We’ve already started to do it, and it will become a discipline of its own,” according to Read.

AI and antitrust regulation

The fact that we’re already talking about answer engine optimization (AEO) highlights an opportunity: AI could help businesses and regulators rewrite the relationship between internet users and gatekeepers — perhaps for the better.

“We haven’t seen fragmentation of search like this in 20 years,” said Christian J. Ward, chief data officer at Yext. “It’s a real opportunity not just for businesses, but also for regulators to attack a very different problem.”

“We are seeing complete disruption between the legal and regulatory timeline and the tech timeline,” concorded Stéphanie Vérilhac Marzin, executive director of EU affairs at Siinda, during a panel on the Digital Markets Act’s impact on Google Search.

AI and brand-building

Brands are already putting AI to work. Diageo CMO Cristina Diezhandino said the company is using AI for media buying, content creation and insights. “The necessity for much more content in many platforms has only increased,” she noted.

AI could ultimately help marketers deliver more with less — a critical advantage as CMOs seek to maintain brand-building budgets in the face of economic uncertainty.

“Brand-building carries a lot of value, and it is highly valued across the finance community because they know that it brings value to the company,” Diezhandino said.

But making that value felt across the entire organization is essential, said Leandro Barreto, CMO of beauty and well-being at Unilever, during a panel. “It is the responsibility not only of the marketing function … it’s a transformation of the whole business.”

Barreto said close integration with supply chain teams is particularly important, especially in the age of social media virality. Three out of five recent product launches within his division sold out within a month. “Obviously, that would collapse any supply chain that isn’t ready for that.”