With candor and his trademark specificity, Albert Thompson, Director, Digital Innovation at Walton Isaacson, offered an entrée size portion of takeaways in advance of his ScreenShift panel: “Rethinking Measurement for the AI Era”, taking place October 14th at City Winery. With Tameka Kee, SVP, Programming & Operations at CIMM joining the conversation, this will be a “don’t miss” session.
How should we be rethinking measurement in the face of AI?
Technology does not care about your opinions, so move beyond the bias of, say, hallucinations to refining the accuracy of the possible outputs beyond the existing frameworks.
The human limitation is we tend to not do things our friends aren’t already doing or aren’t existing habits. AI’s only limit is physics (literally). So, think in terms of time, space, distance limitations. Not willingness or irrational behaviors. AI can connect meaning between two unrelated measurement platforms to start synthesizing or establishing correlations between them.
Examples:
- Turn on CTV advertising while measuring foot traffic patterns to understand potential lift.
- Draw correlations between AI Search patterns, with drop offs in site traffic but continued sales growth.
What are the biggest challenges you see in thinking differently?
The greatest threat is still human laziness. It’s time to connect systems that are merely adjacent to each other. Make them face each other and then interlock with one another. Measurement is a continuum. People are too timid to make the connections. The marketplace has so much “noise” no one is solving anything, but AI can be what “turns down the volume” for clarity.
What strategies are usually most effective for pivoting in this AI era when it comes to measurement?
Start with an AI council to ensure proper governance and ethics. Then outline the business framework and the points of friction to fix in your measurement approach. After that,
- Deploy the type of AI solutions for measurement that match the business structure—don’t just deploy what everyone else does.
- Embrace upstart companies, the innovators, with unique solutions who aren’t buried in bureaucracy.
- Develop a framework around AI that establishes “line of sight” in understanding that is currently lacking.
And, through it all, ensure there is a feedback loop for the AI agents to get smarter around connecting dots in measurement and teaching the teams.
What is your hoped-for takeaway from this panel?
If brands, media companies, or agencies don’t start taking up “agency” or decisioning fast, the machines will, because they are going to expose all the historical excuses that were made.
