If Google search was the steam engine of democratizing information in the early 2000s, the rise of AI agents heralds a new industrial revolution. With a simple prompt, anyone can now get answers to questions large and small — across any domain of human curiosity.
As the CEO of a leading measurement company in an industry undergoing seismic change, this moment of opportunity and challenge triggers serious reflection. Focusing on our customers’ fundamental needs and industry’s value led my team to a major strategic conclusion – we should give away some of our great tech and data to accelerate the realization of our collective potential.
Just as industrial-age innovations enabled people to meet their basic needs and spend more time seeking love, recognition, and self-actualization, the democratization of answers in the AI era is making it possible for all of us to focus on delivering higher-order value to our partners and stakeholders.
Rather than automating data hunting-and-gathering to focus on higher-order challenges like optimization and scale, we’re all wading through dashboards and spreadsheets, cherry-picking data points and wishing there was a less manual and scattershot way to meet this quarter’s KPIs.
Starting with this Upfront season, we’ve decided to give away our ad intelligence to any ad agency through ChatEDO, our Ad EnGage platform’s new agentic AI solution. This means agencies can instantly query our comprehensive ad database covering every national TV airing in the past decade, saving many hours and dollars.
My thinking about this moment for our industry has been heavily influenced by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Just as Maslow’s now-famous pyramid outlines the bare necessities, social needs, and idealized goals of human motivation, our clients in the ad measurement industry have their own hierarchy — and AI is only making it easier to get to the top.
The bottom layers of the pyramid are table stakes, while the true differentiators in a highly complex marketplace live at the top. Our industry’s leaders are thinking about these levels in terms of outcomes and optimization, and mapping them to the different value-generating and game-changing solutions available.
At the bottom of the hierarchy of values sits the mere observations of ad intelligence. It’s the data exhaust flowing out of the TV industry – straightforward and necessary, yet costly and time-consuming to gather – so we’ve decided agencies should have it for free at a time when they’re under immense pressure to deliver the higher-order solutions that set their clients apart.
Further up the measurement pyramid is proprietary data of audience and outcome measurement that ultimately power optimization at the pinnacle. For a company like EDO, this is our flagship mid-funnel predictive outcome metrics. We match our comprehensive syndicated data sets with a proprietary formula for calculating ad effectiveness — based on the proven ad-driven consumer behaviors like web searches and site visits that predict future sales.
Why is optimization at the top of the hierarchy of customer needs? Simply, it’s the Easy Button that TV has needed so desperately and that search and social walled-gardens have used so effectively to soak up so much of advertising’s global growth (often at the expense of agencies, open platforms, and media companies). It’s this Easy Button that automates near-guaranteed ROI because it’s optimizing for outcomes from the right audience.
The real world is too multi-dimensional for spreadsheets and human brains and hands to do that. Agentic AI is perfectly suited for handling the complexity and speed of optimization. Think: not just identifying optimal reach frequency, but implementing the right frequency caps across all dimensions of audience, media, and creatives for a brand’s convergent TV campaigns and creating a near real-time feedback system that automatically updates as campaigns and actual consumer behaviors evolve.
As the Upfront season approaches, we're clearing the grunt work so agency teams can bring their human ingenuity and focus to the work of moving their brand clients up to the top of the pyramid.
Our new AI era requires new rules. Truly understanding our value pyramids and reimagining how AI unlocks our full potential are core to how tech and data leaders need to change how they do business in this new era. Just as the industrial revolution enabled us to stop wasting energy clearing our streets of literal manure, companies should be identifying and minimizing the lowest-order exhaust in their industries while focusing on products that deliver higher-order value through the new capabilities of AI tools.
And to mix my historical metaphors, perhaps that just might usher in a new age of enlightenment.
Kevin Krim is president and CEO at EDO, the TV outcomes company, a leading platform measuring predictive behaviors driven by convergent TV advertising. EDO works with modern marketers to align advertising investments to business results—with detailed competitive, category, and historical intelligence fueled by vertical AI.