WPP expands AI capabilities to boost brand performance with Sightly partnership

Both tools employ AI tools to help do the requisite digging on behalf of brands to evaluate gaps and harness opportunities in their campaign work.

Sightly has evolved since its launch a few years ago as a YouTube rep firm of sorts, and developed the Brand Mentality platform as a means for brands to align with social and news content that parallel their brand identity. The deal with WPP represents a boost in Sightly’s fortunes as it’s the first holding company to sign up. But publishers can also use the Brand Mentality platform to attract potential advertisers to their content as well. 

Adam Katz, CEO and founder of Sightly, described the Brand Mentality offering as a means for a brand to input all its own characteristics to establish a very thorough brand profile.

“We’re coming in with cultural real-time data that can be personalized to a brand, can be personalized to a category, and moves at the speed of today’s information,” said Katz. “When you marry what a consumer believes — that deep rooted understanding — with our cultural trends and information, you can create magic. No agency or brand anymore wants an insight that can’t be taken to action.”

What makes this different is the speed with which it can be done, as well as the use of an MCP server — model context protocol, which lets two AI agents talk to each other, in simplest terms.

WPP’s interest is to inject Brand Mentality into the “cultural reflex system” that the holdco has built, under the auspices of David Roth, a WPP exec with many titles, including CEO of The Store — WPP, Europe, Middle East, Africa & Asia, chairman of BrandZ and the BAV Group. The BAV Group is a storied survey platform in WPP that, with Sightly’s ability to navigate the social and news spheres with detailed brand knowledge, has made for what Roth calls a first of its kind solution. “This isn’t a technology story, but it is the world’s first MCP integration of brand analytics and social data at scale,” he said.

“I was always on the lookout to be able to fuse brand data with what’s going on in the social arena, and to be able to put those two things together,” said Roth. “To be able to say, ‘OK, so this is what brand looks like from a brand analytics perspective, and this is what’s happening on TikTok on YouTube, right in this moment.’”

Janet Levine, head of invention at Mindshare and global strategy lead for the agency’s clients, said she was drawn to Sightly’s offering because it’s the only solution in the marketplace that can put all these elements together. “To have it all in one place is invaluable,” said Levine, whose clients include Unilever. “Instead of just pulling at a few levers, we have a whole suite which is much more compelling and competitive. Fusing the BAV, because when you have it together, that is the actual difference maker, so that we can see what is happening from a social perspective, but linking it to the brand attitudes and brand health, all of the key dimensions of growth.”

Albert Thompson, head of digital innovation at Walton Isaacson, was an early advocate of Sightly, having used its knowledge of YouTube to invest appropriately for clients including Lexus. Although the agency doesn’t yet use Brand Mentality, he’s familiar with it and believes it takes marketing past its roots into business-building. “Even though it feeds marketing as a discipline inherently and probably can supercharge advertising, it’s a business tool,” he said. “There’s a lot of power in brand mentality, but not everyone understands that, because planning is like, well, fill in some gaps in my thinking, because I’m in planning mode.”

Speaking of business building, Zambezi is applying AI to its new proprietary Zambezi Brand Performance Gap tool. The platform aims to put together a holistic brand health score — across product, business, media, culture, and consumer — for client brands against their top competitors, with the ultimate goal to help them reach a $1 billion business threshold. It’s being applied to clients including Traeger Grills, TaylorMade and others, as well as a new business tool in attracting new clients, said Jean Freeman, Zambezi’s founder and CEO.

“We help high-growth companies reach that next billion dollar status, and the marketing mix really changes from that standpoint as well,” said Freeman. “They move from not only acquisition, or a performance mindset and ROAs being the true barometer of marketing health to more of building a brand, building that relationship with with your consumer. We help them really tell a story of why you’re [poised] for that next phase of growth, for that company evolution.”

Although the Brand Performance Gap isn’t yet actively being used, Zambezi is rolling it out now and applying it to new business pitches to secure new business.