Interpublic Group is betting on a one-year-old AI startup to speed up marketing’s slowest step—understanding audience response. The advertising and marketing agency is partnering with Aaru to embed its real-time human behavior simulation tech directly into IPG’s end-to-end marketing platform Interact.
Financial details of the partnership were not disclosed.
Aaru’s technology can simulate how a brand’s target audiences will react to a campaign, product innovation, or media plans within hours, said Jayna Kothary, IPG’s chief solutions officer,
“We do not have the luxury anymore of long-term surveys and waiting for six months. We need to be able to real-time inform our campaign design, our workflows, and our customer strategies,” she said.
Kothary, who sits on Aaru’s board of directors, said IPG is co-developing technology with Aaru that would enable brands to build AI versions of their target audiences, test the efficacy of campaigns before launch, and then fine-tune them based on feedback. The new product would use Aaru’s AI tools alongside commerce data from IPG’s Interact platform, Kothary said.
For IPG, success will be reflected in whether the new AI tools will help brands drive growth.
“Startups and the innovators in this space are where we’re going to be able to bring differentiation, speed and distinction to our clients,” Kothary said.
AI saves survey fatigue
Brands and their agencies are increasingly using AI-generated audiences to simulate conversations with potential customers.
Aaru CEO Cameron Fink said the startup uses 20,000 agents, digital profiles packed with hundreds of demographic and psychographic data points, to replicate audiences. It’s become harder to learn directly from audiences, Fink said, as they’ve become less likely to respond to surveys.
“If you phone [a person] and you say ‘Hey, how do you feel about this brand?’ they’re going to assume it’s a scam call and put the phone down,” Fink said, adding that the technology to run these simulations at scale matured in the last six months.
The partnership comes on the heels of IPG’s latest earnings, which saw a 3.5% year-over-year decline in revenue. The marketing giant emphasized its AI initiatives and said it planned to embed AI across its workflows as it nears a planned merger with Omnicom Group.
“If we close this deal with Omnicom in Q4, we will have Omni and Interact as a very strong platform, taking Aaru to more clients at more scale,” Kothary said.
