Data, Creativity, and AI: JAKALA's Revolution in Marketing

For twenty years, JAKALA has pursued the mission of debunking the maxim attributed to John Wanamaker, a pioneer of marketing and inventor of the department store, who famously said: «Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half».

In a recent interview with Corriere della Sera by Francesco Bertolino, JAKALA's Global CEO Stefano Pedron elucidates how advertising will increasingly rely on data.

By collecting a vast amount of data and developing tools to analyze them, we have created a platform of services capable of indicating to companies which advertising expenses yield results and which do not. Today, we can assist them in conceiving, implementing, and monitoring targeted campaigns: and when I say targeted, I mean down to the street address

By integrating multiple sources of anonymized data, JAKALA has developed systems that describe potential consumers, statistically associating up to 80 variables with their geolocation. By combining this information with proprietary databases, companies can optimize their marketing investments.

It is easy to grasp how the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the advertising profession is disruptive:

It is said that data is the new oil. To a large extent, this is true. Unlike oil, however, data are potentially infinite: every day, people and machines' interactions with objects add new data, at an ever-increasing rate. This creates a problem that Artificial Intelligence is better equipped to handle than humans: it helps make sense of the vast amount of information in circulation, distinguishing the 'background noise' from the important signals. Artificial intelligence is the refinery of data that fuels new, more efficient productive machines. We invest heavily in building our own

Currently, JAKALA has an internal division of over 500 people dedicated to AI, which will grow to a thousand within three years through hiring and acquisitions, primarily enhancing skills in Generative AI.

Today, this technology is in the experimental stage, but we are convinced that it will revolutionize our industry: we do not want to merely endure it, waiting for others' successful cases, but we are working to be the architects of it

Generative AI undoubtedly has enormous potential in marketing: it allows designing, simulating, and testing advertising campaigns with savings that some estimates, all subject to verification, suggest could reach up to 90%. But it does not threaten the profession of creatives; rather, it makes it more efficient. AI frees up time for activities with higher added value, such as creativity, which is lateral intelligence, the ability to find original connections and analogies.

For this reason, after building an unparalleled data infrastructure in the market, JAKALA has recently decided to launch the creative agency SBAM, the result of the union between the company and a team of professionals with extensive experience in the creative world. The new agency’s positioning is based on Radical Simplicity – which sees simplicity as the most powerful form of communication – and distinguishes itself in the market for its ability to combine creative talent with the opportunities offered by Artificial Intelligence, in which JAKALA plays a primary role globally.