How Ogilvy uses AI to unlock scale, protect rights for brand talent shoots

Ogilvy on Monday announced the launch of Echo, a proprietary artificial intelligence platform that allows advertisers to generate additional assets from a single production shoot, per details shared with Marketing Dive. Echo builds on a strategic partnership between Ogilvy parent WPP and Creative Artists Agency and operationalizes The CAA Vault, the talent agency’s system for capturing, storing and licensing digital likenesses of its clients.

Echo looks to solve for marketer needs around content creation while protecting talent rights and intellectual property. Traditional productions of advertising featuring celebrities and athletes — a $25 billion-dollar annual global market, per Ogilvy — increasingly do not meet the needs of always-on, digital-first campaigns. At the same time, brands and their ambassadors are working to meet consumer demands around trust in an ecosystem heavy with deepfakes and other unauthorized artificial intelligence-generated content.

“Clients want more content, and [talent agencies] have high quality assets. How do we bridge those things together?” said Carol Reed, global chief innovation officer at Ogilvy. “It’s not about creating new software to sell to people. It is more about how you solve the question around human AI likeness and making it scalable and repeatable for wide-scale use.” 

Echo, commercially available across the WPP network this month, is powered by WPP Open, the holding company’s AI-powered operating system that is at the heart of its modernized offering. The workflow begins with capturing voice and video as part of the CAA Vault process. Ogilvy then takes those models and creates storyboard elements and creative assets that are turned into ads, all with approval from client and talent.

The system allows for an asset shoot to generate 30 to 50 media-ready assets, rather than the eight to 10 yielded by traditional productions, reducing average cost-per-asset by an estimated 65% to 75%. But beyond cost effectiveness, investment optimization, contextual relevance and personalization, Reed wants clients to use Echo to think bigger, especially as creatives get more comfortable with AI tools.

“I don’t want people to feel like we’re cutting corners. It’s about ideally unlocking impossible things,” she said. “Being able to have more ideas come out of it and not just variations is really exciting to me… We can land more creative ideas in impossible situations.”

Meeting consumers around AI

Echo is designed to meet the needs of marketers, agencies and talent, but Ogilvy also validated the technology with consumers, surveying more than 1,200 respondents in the U.S., UK and India through a mix of intuitive association research methods and traditional survey methodology.

More than 80% of global respondents recognized talent-approved messaging as a cue of talent-approved AI usage — approval that strengthened ad appeal among more than 76% of global respondents. Even consumers generally skeptical of AI reported that explicit talent sign-off increased trust, credibility and reassurance.

“Trust in advertising has always come from two things: someone you believe and an idea worth believing. AI has challenged both,” David Raichman, executive creative director and global AI creative lead for The Ogilvy Group, said in a statement. “Echo puts them back together: the talent’s consent on every asset, and a creative idea strong enough to deserve it.”

Trust is built into Echo in several ways. Generated assets are automatically checked against machine-readable talent usage terms and brand safety guidelines, with assets unable to be released without final sign-off through an approval portal. AI models are trained only from CAA Vault data, and all cleared consumer-facing assets have a visible watermark in the format: “[Talent Name] Approved | Recreated with AI.”

“I actually didn’t know what was going to come out of that research. I was a little nervous, to be honest with you, but I think trust is the main theme,” Reed said. “We’re at a point now where people aren’t afraid of AI. You see it in your feeds, and I think people are getting to the point where they appreciate disclosure and transparency.”