By Michael Bürgi  •  April 21, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

“At Jellyfish we can go from insights to creation to activation with a seamless AI approach,” said David Jones, Brandtech Group’s CEO in an email. “It’s humans and agents working together to create a new world. Clients no longer need the old studios, people-heavy production or lumbering research companies. We have reimagined the creative, tech and media departments into a new world of real-time creativity, immediate activation and continuous measurement and adaptation.”

Jones said he believes Brandtech is acting on rather than saying its intentions. “We have a simple mantra that ‘case studies beat press releases and demos’.”

Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester, credits Brandtech and Jellyfish for the progress it’s made, but he also sees it as keeping up with the, er, Joneses, rather than getting ahead of them. What Brandtech is doing “is on trend, and it’s at parity with a lot of what I’m seeing across the the industry,” he said.  

Still, for an anti-holding company — Jones and Jellyfish CEO Nick Emery are both holdco refugees and strive to act differently than those experiences taught them — Brandtech has built out multiple tools and products in the last year, most of which have benefited Jellyfish, and most of them steeped in use of machine learning and generative AI. They include: 

• Share of Model, which aims to rebuild SEO to be harnessed and recognized by agentic means, using a variety of AI systems including Chat GPT-4 and Llama 2;
• One Search, which clients like Swarovski have used to update its search offerings and results with a goal to achieve results while spending less;
• Now-Next-Soon, a forecasting and budget-allocation platform that tries to speed up the marketing mix model process;
• Switchboard, an AI-powered reporting suite that fuses performance ad and audience data, along with creative insights for clients to improve campaign performance;
• Pencil’s integration of Google’s Veo 2 tech to significantly cut down production time and costs, as evidenced by recent work for Japan Airlines.  

Pattisall remains impressed but not overly wowed by Brandtech’s focus on search and SEO. “It’s a hot area right now because it’s one of the more directly impacted areas of marketing because of the drop in traffic, he said. “But it’s something that all the providers are talking about and looking for ways to actively address using their stacks and their services.”

“A billion questions are being asked of LLMs for brand preference every day, and that we now have an SEO for LLMs — brands are hungry for that because it’s a competitive edge,” said Jeff Matisoff, partner at Jellyfish and head of U.S. operations.

John Dawson, Jellyfish’s vp of strategy, added that despite Share of Model’s agentic aspirations, “We don’t believe that agents will make human consumer journeys redundant. They will enhance and expand the types of journeys that your human audiences go on. We’re thinking about both/and, not either/or,” he said. 

Matisoff said that he’s been most surprised by Switchboard’s use by clients — many of whom don’t invest enough into generating those kinds of insights. “Many major advertisers don’t have a single source of truth reporting dashboard that they own and can customize and feel great about,” he said. “That they trust what their agency, what different partners are looking at together to be able to have that single source of truth … So every time we’re winning an account, Switchboard is a huge piece of it.”

To that end, a case study Brandtech provided Digiday showed that a major CPG client the company declined to identify reduced hours spent building reports by 80%, while increasing the number of recommendations by four times. 

“When you have all your data in one place and you can look across channel and audiences and creative messages, you can really start to build a holistic, full funnel, cross channel testing strategy and share learnings across all of your teams,” added Jess Nachtigall, Jellyfish’s evp of global investment analytics.

When it comes to Now-Next-Soon, Nachtigall said “we can make sure that we’re hitting the [client’s] overarching goals, but also make sure we’re hitting individual channel teams’ goals with the budgets that we’re sending through MMM, And that allows there to be more open and honest conversations between the c-suite who are looking at revenue numbers, and the marketing leads who are looking at platform numbers and engagements — and coming to a common language, which is incrementality.”

Another case study based on Now-Next-Soon’s work on an unidentified retail client showed a 30% reduction in model building time. 

CEO Jones summed up the company’s efforts: “You only create a tool if it is going to help someone do their job better faster and cheaper . Going back to our founding mantra: you don’t need technology solutions to problems people don’t have.”

Color by numbers

The IAB put out its annual report on U.S. advertising revenues in 2024, produced by PwC, showing an unexpectedly high growth year for digital advertising, said IAB CEO David Cohen. Of course, with tariffs and recession on the horizon, 2025 may look very different. “​​Our general view is that overall spend might come down, but digital could have a disproportionate share of growth depending on where the industry is going,” Cohen told Digiday. —Sam Bradley

Some highlights from the report:

• Search still accounts for the lion’s share of digital ad revenue, with $102.9 billion spent on the channel accounting for almost 40% of the overall $258.6 billion spend by brands last year. 
• But digital video continues to speed up; spending on video grew 19.2% last year to $62.1 billion, almost a quarter of total US digital ad spend.
• Retail media keeps growing. By the IAB’s count, the sector swallowed up $53.9 billion last year, up 23% on the previous 12 months.
• Industry consolidation, unsurprisingly, continues. Over 80% of all digital ad revenue is now concentrated among just 10 companies, owing to a recently squeeze among “long tail” providers (that is, everybody outside the largest 25 firms).

Takeoff & landing

• Two agency holding companies reported Q1 earnings last week. Publicis Groupe reported a 9.4% rise in total revenue, while organic revenue grew 4.9% (take a look at Seb Joseph’s take on the news). Meanwhile, Omnicom Q1 results were more muted, with revenue growth at a flat 1.6% and 3.4% organic growth. 
• Just weeks after Crossmedia partnered with gaming-oriented production firm Vertiqal Studios, the latter has formally joined Dawn, a collective of agencies (which includes Crossmedia).
• Account moves: Stagwell’s full service agency Doner landed media AOR duties for jewelry firm Ross-Simons … Independent agency Net Conversion landed media AOR duties for Southeastern Grocers, which owns the Harveys and Winn-Dixie supermarket chains.   
• Personnel moves: David Dweck has joined GoFish (part of a collection of agencies under private equity ownership) its general manager, coming over from Wpromote where he was svp of paid media … Starcom named Kate DuBois its chief client officer, marking a return to the agency … Doner hired LisaAnn Rocha to take on the newly created role of evp, head of media growth and integration … Brian Wieser’s Madison and Wall business hired Greg McLelland to be gm of Canada, CRO and advisory practice lead.

Direct quote

“I expect that investment in streaming, particularly those who have a highly differentiated offering, will be up this year. And I think investment in the overall TV marketplace will be flat or down.”

— Mike Dean, president of TV ad firm Ampersand, on his expectations for the upfront marketplace. 

Speed reading

• Seb Joseph, Ronan Shields and Marty Swant together covered the implications of and fallout from the verdict in Google’s trial, with 
• Seb Joseph and Krystal Scanlon also looked at how Apple’s more serious efforts to get into the full-on ad business. 
• Once again, Seb Joseph teamed with Ronan Shields to look more deeply into WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum. 

https://digiday.com/?p=576070