How Digitas is navigating search’s shift to the AI era

At Digiday’s Programmatic Marketing Summit in Palm Springs, California, Elena MacGurn, svp of search at Digitas, broke down how the agency is adapting its search marketing strategy for clients amid the AI boom. Live from Palm Springs, Tim Peterson, Digiday’s executive editor of video and audio, and senior marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy caught up with MacGurn for this episode of the Digiday Podcast.

Also in this episode: Google searches are falling in Safari for the first time ever, likely thanks to AI-powered search; why OpenAI is poaching Instacart’s CEO; and what Netflix’s new home screen means for product recommendations and, ultimately, ad personalization.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation with MacGurn, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Competition with AI

Any large content publisher that is reliant on site traffic has seen major losses in the past year. Depending on the vertical we’re seeing anywhere from 25% to 75% of reduction in site traffic. That changes the game. They’re no longer competing with other publishers, other large websites, they’re competing with AI itself. So the question that we are asking ourselves as an agency is not so much anymore, “How do we help our clients be found?” It’s, “How do we help our clients become the answer — that trusted source of information that AI draws from?”

Search as brand or performance?

We definitely want to be looking at that from both the brand perspective as well as the product perspective. Where I like to start is the end result. Ultimately, what is it that we’re trying to achieve? If you’re looking at selling more products, if you’re looking for your Amazon links to start showing up more prominently in those AI search results, you have to start building that inspiration in the commerce space with the content that gets surfaced in that context.

Mining the data

We have so much third-party data from search platforms directly that tell us the types of questions that are being asked, the volume of interest, the trends around that to a point where we can now predict similar types of conversations around the trend, and also use that data to inform media activations, content production, marketing.

We can see that data but one of the cool competitive advantages that brands now have is actually providing our information directly to AI platforms, again, via either direct API, the public facing API, AI platform-specific APIs or partner-specific APIs.