The Future of Marketing Briefing: Epsilon’s quiet bet against the LLM goldrush

No one AI model class will do the best advertising for marketers without the skills of others. The future, according to Publicis Group-owned Epsilon, will be a carefully orchestrated ecosystem – a team of specialists not a single genius. 

Steve Nowlan, svp of decision sciences at Epsilon whose PhD is from Carnegie Mellon and whose thesis advisor was Geoffrey Hinton – the so-called godfather of neural networks and a Nobel Prize winner – has a favorite way of illustrating the mismatch. Imagine a college senior who has read everything on the internet. Every research paper, every Wikipedia entry, every forum thread. They walk into a room and seem, by almost any measure, extraordinarily smart. Now put them to work inside one of the most complex, fastest-moving financial markets in the world and watch what happens.

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How brands are measuring value across the entire customer journey

Advertisers face a challenge: while brand building is essential for growth, measuring its impact remains frustratingly elusive.

According to Boston Consulting Group, 46% of B2C marketing leaders are balancing their efforts between short-term revenue and long-term growth. And while brand advertising drives sales, the gap between an upper-funnel awareness campaign and final purchase makes accurate measurement through traditional means difficult. In this environment, only 53% of marketers express confidence in their ability to measure the ROI of their total spending. 

“There are measures like brand lift, reach, frequency analysis and other KPIs that advertisers use to ground the success of brand-building campaigns,” said Lily Tong, director of brand and cross-channel measurement at Amazon Ads. “But one limitation of these KPIs is translating them into monetary value — it can be difficult for advertisers to understand how these campaigns impact future sales.”

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