Can agencies fix the AI disconnect between the C-suite and marketing teams? Boathouse is trying to

Which explains why agencies continue to beef up their AI smarts — as a means of helping to guide their clients through the morass of knowledge, strategy and technology to implement gen AI. 

In the latest example of that, Digiday has learned that Boathouse, the independent full-service agency based in Boston, has hired its first chief strategy officer in Sonia Chung, whose mandate is to meld AI and data expertise — and where they overlap — both internally and with clients. Chung started earlier in February.

Chung, whose work experience includes stints at Google and Salesforce, most recently was vp of digital marketing at Delaware North, a Boston-based hospitality and entertainment company while also teaching digital marketing at Boston University. She’s also seen the challenges and opportunities of modern digital marketing from the client side, and the agency and mar-tech perspective 

“The strength that Boathouse already has — the brand, the paid media that’s so strong — overlaps with my passion and interest areas, which are martech, ad tech, the data pieces on the measurement side, and AI, that can be expanded and built upon the foundation that’s already built,” said Chung.

As Chung and Boathouse CEO John Connors explained, the agency aims to build a more rigorous way to connect paid, owned and earned so it can more clearly identify where incremental growth comes from and help clients act on it. 

“What Sonia’s able to do, and we’ve already seen it in the first month, is go back to [asking], what’s behind Salesforce? What’s behind Google? What’s the math behind the algorithm?” said Connors, who calls her a unicorn because of her exposure to all sides of the marketing and media equation. “The goal now is, let’s actually see what the data and the platform opportunities are to use AI in order to drive that client revenue, and then we’ll go downstream off of that really fast.”

For Chung, it’s about mapping out the broader applications to help clients get to where they want to be. “The whole point of getting the data was to drive insights. The point of the insights was to drive the action. The point of the action was to drive outcomes, right?” said Chung. “How much closer are we to getting there? … Does it have to be through an AI agent? Is it driving to the action we need to do? That’s where I’m trying to go.”

And that’s exactly what Zach Bricker, Supermetrics’ lead solutions engineer, said its research is trying to get to the bottom of. Because as it stands now, there’s a lot of lingering confusion and downward pressure from the corner office to the marketing teams to have this figured out — but there’s a gap in strategic guidance of the kind Chung is bringing to Boathouse’s clients. 

Supermetrics’ global survey of marketers at leading brands and agencies found that 80% of teams feel pressure to adopt AI, with 89% saying that push is coming directly from the C-suite and board. The problem is, limited access to clean, trusted data is holding teams back: more than half say external teams define their data strategy, and only 7% receive real-time data support, even as nearly 40% still struggle to prove ROI across channels. 

“It creates a sort of … credibility debt, or a strategy gap that says, hey, use this tool —  but [teams] aren’t getting enabled on it,” said Bricker. “They’re not learning how to use AI efficiently and they don’t have a strategy from the organization on exactly how they are to use it in order to really maximize their results and see the benefits of what AI can do for them.”

Bricker said agencies might be able to help narrow the gap between the C-suite and the marketing teams. “If you [the agency] can contextualize results, prove your results, and you’re utilizing AI in order to do that, that takes the credibility from, ‘maybe I don’t trust a new tool’ to ‘I know my expert here is using it at my agency, they’re working with a strong data foundation, their results are proven, and I can trust that they’re using it effectively.’”