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Ep. 120 WPP’s Kate Scott-Dawkins on Predicting the Future of Data, AI, and Advertising’s Next Era
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- [00:00]
Market Live Announcer
Market Live is coming up March 10th and 11th in New York City. With us some, just some of the brands and agencies that have registered thus far. And don't worry, we'll be doing several of these announcements with us. Bayer, BMO, Farmers Insurance, Electronic Arts, the Hershey Company, HP, Huntington Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Kenview, L', Oreal, MasterCard, NFL, PayPal, PepsiCo, Redfin, Synchrony, T Mobile, Verizon, Workday, Ah, agencies. Want to hear which agencies are going to be joining us? Assembly, Butler, Till, Canvas Worldwide, Kara Choreograph, Kridera, Dentsu, Digitas, ipg, IPG Media Brands, Magnet, omd, PMG Publisher, Sapien, Razorfish, Wavemaker, WPP Media, and more. Can't wait to see you there. Go register now. Marketecturelive.com March 10th and 11th welcome to.
- [00:59]
Host (Tech God)
The AdTech God Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host at Tech God. Welcome to the ADTech Godpod, where we speak to the female leaders at some of the largest agencies on the planet. With me today is Kate Scott Dawkins. She's the Global President of Business Intelligence at WPP Media. I'm a huge fan of Kate's. I'm actually familiar with her work. I've seen her speak, we've interacted quite a bit. She just doesn't know it yet. She worked previously at Essence. She has been at the WPP Media or Group M family for quite some time. So I am very happy to have her with me today. Welcome to the podcast.
- [01:42]
Kate Scott Dawkins
Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.
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Host (Tech God)
Yeah, same here. Thank you and thank you for accepting my invite. I love the perspective of an agency and I think I love the perspective of intelligence and data at an agency even more. So thank you. Thank you for joining me.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
That's. Yeah, that's my little happy place. My bubble is thinking about the future of the industry and what we can learn about it by analyzing as much data as humanly possible.
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Host (Tech God)
Really, it's amazing. Like WPP Media, WPP overall has been winning so many accounts lately, I feel like all I keep seeing across the board is new accounts that are coming on board. So you guys are obviously doing something right to see that type of growth. But before we kind of dig into the industry, I would love to hear about how you reached where you're at today leading this group and what this means for. For the agency itself.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
Sure. Where to start? I left high school saying that I was going to go into international marketing one day. I Don't know how many people have a sense of that early on. I still remember very, very dorky going back a long time ago. Do you, I think, think you're west coast based? You've been on the west coast for a while maybe, but there was a, like a California Dairy Board commercial a long time ago and showed the moon and talked about how a long time ago people thought the moon was made of cheese. And then 1969, people went to the moon, discovered it was rock, they've never been back since. And it was just, it was humorous, right? It's funny and it, it tells a story and it, and you know, that's amazing that an ad can do that, right? Can convey that and you can remember it and be humorous and whatnot. So there's a very long way of saying I thought I wanted to do marketing, but took kind of a convoluted route there. Eventually did an undergrad in linguistics, very much pattern analysis, right. So similar to what I'm doing today and then a short career in professional sport, or at least competitive sport and then finally into the world of, of agencies. I've been doing that for many, many years now and looking at, and worked in Hong Kong for a short time in London and now back in San Francisco.
- [04:00]
Host (Tech God)
So, you know, you worked at essence for nearly 10 years, then group M, which is now WPP for quite some time. Usually I don't see many people that stick around that long at companies. It's usually a three, four, five year cycle and then they leave. I'd love to hear what kept you at WPP and what keeps you there now for such a long period of time.
- [04:24]
Kate Scott Dawkins
It's a good question. I think I came in initially in a sort of corporate strategy role. Thinking about ESSENCE at the time was independent. We were scaling, right. Came in and they were. The first job was kind of like open an office in Singapore, go figure out this thing, which was great, right? And getting to analyze an industry and think about the agency role within media and advertising, how best to structure our company, where to grow, how to do it, how to develop people in that world. And I just kept getting really interesting work and building on that viewpoint across years, eventually moving into more of a thought leadership role within Essence, where we first ran our study on advertising in 2030, which is looking really far out, right? Like what do we think is going to happen in the next 10 years in media and advertising? How is it going to be impacted by new technology like AI and virtual reality? How is it going to be impacted by New consumer products and services like micropayments, well, that fizzled out. But getting to think about all these things in the future and what it meant for a company has been really exciting. And I think the nice thing about sticking around is you actually get to continue to shape those things and continue to see them get implemented and then continue to influence future direction of the company. And it's been really rewarding in that sense to, to stay and continue to drive that in different roles and at different levels and now getting to bring more of that insight into very senior leadership at our clients and also across wpp.
- [06:06]
Host (Tech God)
It's funny because you, you are so ingrained in the intelligence and data aspect of the business, probably a division that may have been small during the, what I like to call the broadcast era, where, you know, you run on TV across the nation or through, you know, specific DMAs, a very different amount of data that you could utilize to target your audience better. How have you seen that change in your career and maybe how is that different than working abroad and working on these types of products?
- [06:37]
Kate Scott Dawkins
It's good, it's a good question. I, because I deal less with, at least today, the advertising data, as it were, in terms of spots and dots and viewership and logs. Remember when GDPR came out doing a project room, oh my gosh, we're, you know, we're not going to have access to these DT log level data anymore. What are we going to do? But in that sense, yes, the, the amount of data that is produced and consumed in our world has only expanded. And certainly there's a big piece of WPP that it looks at that and that incorporates all of that into WPP Open and all the intelligence that we bring to our clients across a myriad of teams and touch points and all the rest of it. My team specifically spends a lot of time synthesizing and bringing together a few very specific external data points like financial results and government data on say, consumer spending or, you know, consumer savings rates, those kinds of things. Retail sales. Right. We look at those kinds of data points and then looking at them alongside what we can see internally, proprietary data around client spending and growth of various channels or partners. And so our role, I think is to synthesize all of these things together and be able to draw the bigger picture from that and then crystallize it and explain it to others, to our clients particularly, and to the industry at large, make sense of all this and be able to tell a story around it.
- [08:18]
Host (Tech God)
So do you think a lot of it has to do with like the micro or macroeconomics, what the trends are and then how you need to address those potential end users or consumers of a brand. I'm guessing that's pretty darn complex, Kate. Like that can't be easy to look at. There's so many moving parts at one time.
- [08:38]
Kate Scott Dawkins
Yeah. I often joke that my job is to know everything about everything because every industry has to advertise every thing that happens in the world, whether it's a drought in Ecuador or a flood in Pakistan, all of that impacts consumer spending and advertising around the world. And so because we have all of that of our, our sphere of. Of interest, I'm constantly trying to pay attention and feed all of that in. And so it's, it's exhausting, but also very rewarding. And certainly political news and data, economic. Right. Social. What's happening in the world around sentiment related to social media, for instance, is something that we're paying a lot of attention to. And then the technological. Right. I think of us as basically building a big pest analysis long term, ongoing across those four key categories and understanding how each of them interact and influence advertising growth and advertisers as we go into the new era. Right. And a lot has been developing. You have these increasing consolidation amongst the media owners. Right. Where we have now the top 25 sellers of advertising, accounting for nearly three quarters of the total industry by the end of this year. And you know, one of the aspects of how we got there, you, you have to look at political and regulatory environments across the US and Asia and Europe. And so all of it plays into to what we're watching and how we're forecasting going forward.
- [10:16]
Host (Tech God)
Because those are all constantly changing and pretty dramatically changing. The sentiment can change quite a bit. Political temperament can change very quickly. We're seeing that now. We're seeing that on a global scale. I feel like every week there's something new. How quickly does that make you and the team react to be able to deliver that information to your clients? Say, hey, this is what's happening in this part of the world. This is how it may impact your brand. You should push, you should pull. Like this is how you need to work moving forward. Are you guys doing that almost in like real time? How do you work with your clients on that?
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Kate Scott Dawkins
Yeah, there's probably a couple of different levels of cadence that, that happen there. Right. So the big forecasts happen twice a year and we're inputting everything that has happened over the last six months plus everything we expect to happen over the next five years. And that gets built into the forecast. And so big pieces of work that are ongoing, but you kind of have these punctuated moments of okay, this is currently our expectation. Right. On a daily basis you are reacting to things. Right now we're in earnings season, we will be following our list is insane. More than 200 companies, right? The biggest sellers of advertising in the world. The biggest, biggest buyers of advertising in the world. What are they saying? How are they talking about the market? How are they talking about their consumers? And those, the learnings, the findings from that, the insights from that we will be supplying internally into clients on a, at least a weekly basis. And then you have sort of POVs that come out when OpenAI announces they're testing ads, when Netflix announces they're going to buy the Warner Brothers studio and streaming business. Right. You're reacting also on a very ad hoc basis for some of these things where clients want to know what we think about these events as WPP Media. And so that's another place where my team will bring our intelligence and big list and data set and all the things that we've been sitting on and researching for a long time and apply that into some of those POVs for clients as well.
- [12:28]
Host (Tech God)
Question for you, because this comes up on all the podcasts and we chatted about it prior to. But like personalization, AI speed to market speed to your clients, how much of a role is that playing? WPP Media in particular has seemed to take on a very data first approach, probably more than other agencies out there. It seems to be working. As I mentioned, you're winning a ton of business, which is great. But how is AI playing a role in helping you do your job better and delivering better value to, to your clients?
- [12:59]
Kate Scott Dawkins
I think my answer today is a lot different than my answer would have been eight months ago. Six. Eight months ago even. Right. Because the technology is evolving so quickly that it is much more useful now than it was even a short time ago. Now that said, one of the key things about large language models as they exist now are they are still mostly predictive engines. Right. So they're going to sort of guess the next word in a sequence. And that can definitely help you if you have a, a starting point. Right. We like to start from human generated insightful thinking that says something that no one has said before. Right. We want to be able to look at the marketplace and draw a new analogy or talk coin a new word or talk about a category that hasn't been defined well yet before and do that for the first time. That's actually our value add to the industry and to our clients. And so in that sense, we can't rely on large language models and AI because we want it to be net new to the world entirely. Right. Where it is helpful is in, you know, analyzing a bunch of, like I said, we track 200 something companies. So if we've missed a few of them and we need to get a deep dive on what they said in their transcripts, great, right? Summarization and helping us get through more data crunch more data to be able to apply to insights that's really useful. So that's kind of in the, the operational side of things. It is also changing where I spend most of my time thinking and analyzing and sitting down and talking with clients. And that's because it's just fundamentally transforming and set to continue to transform our entire industry. I would say, you know, we're, we're already more integrated than any other industry because things like machine learning have been built into these platforms like Performance Max and Advantage plus for decades. Right. And so we were well placed to take advantage of this moment. Again, the companies that are sort of now at the starting blocks of this AI era of advertising are some of these largest sellers of media. Alphabet and Meta and Amazon and ByteDance and Tencent and all these companies. Right. And so I'm spending a lot of time right now looking at for us as WPP and as an industry, what does that era look like? What's going to be really important in terms of the capabilities and the skill sets and the levels of transparency and control and how do we talk to clients about that? How do we prepare them for that, and how do we talk to our partners about that and how we view the future and what their plans are and roadmaps are and how those align or could align better. Right. So impacting it on all sides, as I'm sure is the case for most people.
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Host (Tech God)
I feel like I look at two data points sometimes and I get overwhelmed. I couldn't imagine, you know, I couldn't imagine looking at as much data as you look at. And data that's like consistently moving and changing for so many different reasons is, is pretty impressive, to be honest. Kate? Well, you're like, you're like, it's my job. I love it. It is what it is. I love, I love data.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
It's the most fun I've ever had at work. It's the most exhausting job I've ever had, but it's certainly the most fun, I'm sure.
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Host (Tech God)
What, what do you think are like some, some high level trends you're seeing for 2026. We're only really a month in. What are some high level trends that you could share with the listeners today in terms of trends that you're seeing from the data points that you collect from you?
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Kate Scott Dawkins
Interesting things. I guess I'll, I'll point sort of some positive things and then a couple of things that I think are worth calling out as watch outs. Maybe I don't know how well shifts coming to the industry.
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Host (Tech God)
Yeah, I'd love it.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
I think what's super interesting is when we think about AI and chatbots as this new consumer service, right. And the potential for advertising to basically subsidize that the way it has subsidized a lot of other consumer services. I was playing around with some data from US government, the LSBA data on consumer spending and what that looked like in 1984, say where you had, you know, you're paying for postage stamps, you were paying for longdistance phone calls and your movie tickets and whatever else, right. And then looking at 2024 data, we actually spend in $2024, I think more today on things like infrastructure, your cell phone bill and your home broadband bill then, then we would have paid for infrastructure 40 years ago. We paid dramatically less for the services we enjoy and we actually get more for that lower cost. Right. So instead of sending a letter and arriving three days or paying for a London's phone call, you now have things like Gmail or you can send as many emails as you want and they arrive instantaneously. You get added services like photo storage and all of these things. And there's some rough back of the napkin map. You're paying like $2,000 less a year as a US consumer for the enjoyment of all these services. Because the largest sellers of advertising are services companies and so they have this part that makes them sticky and, and that's been the trend that has I think underpinned a lot of the change that people have felt over the last couple of decades. Right. AI services like chatbots are kind of in the next phase of that. Right. Which I think is interesting. Now that introduces a couple of interesting questions for maybe shifts in trajectory where we've seen some channels growing very, very rapidly in the last several years. Say retail media is one or creators is another one where I think people have talked a lot about disruption to search. I actually think commerce and creators are potentially at even greater risk from being disrupted by AI in the advertising world because of the types of searches that are going to get probably AI treatment first. Right. Like product recommendation searches. People may end up on a chatbot instead of a second third tier retailer site viewing their on site inventory and then creators. If it's so easy to generate video and content, what's to say that and this is already quite common for there to be a mix of AI generated and human creators and influencers are in markets like Asia that we could see more of that here. And then the question is sort of who creates those, where does that money go, who benefits? And all the rest of it. Sorry, I don't know if that was what you were looking for, but sort of where my head is, I'm just.
- [20:17]
Host (Tech God)
Thinking because like the, you know, on the, on the creator front I've seen that like I think I've stumbled on plenty of accounts that are obviously AI generated. Images, videos, text or copy. There's no way around it. And the volume that they can create content at is you know, 100x what anyone else can do just because of the sheer use of technology. And there's really no limitations, there's no cap. It's really what can you push, how fast can you push it? And many times the creative aspect is, is lost in that. I agree with you that I think that there is threat to the creator economy and I think hope that it's a short lived threat until people realize that AI generated is simply that AI generated and authenticity has value to it. But it will be interesting to watch as that's utilized more and more in the creator economy because I'm, I'm definitely seeing it like I know for sure videos copy memes are all AI generated and it's pretty, pretty incredible how fast they do it.
- [21:19]
Kate Scott Dawkins
But there's a lot that would have to happen to support that. Right. You would have to know that it was AI generated probably as a person. Right. There's been enough, I think done it in detail but seen headlines around. Humans aren't always the best at gauging for themselves what is and isn't. So then you have to get to this point of industry level watermarks and disclosures and there's the cat and mouse of you know, are the disclosers winning or the, you know, those sort of producing content winning in terms of how people know and then you know, whether there's incentive to limit that. Right. Which is an open question as well whether we start seeing again we talk about the divergence in the US economy between the most affluent households spending half of, representing like half of consumer spending and the other 90% of households representing roughly half of of U.S. spending. Whether you start to get into paid tiers for human only content or something. Right. And you have this increasing divergence of who is spending attention or spending money on these various forms of content. So open question there as well.
- [22:36]
Host (Tech God)
So it's interesting because I, I picked up a pair of the, the Ray Ban glasses, the meta Ray Ban ones, and they have an app called Meta AI, which is all basically AI generated content. I'm blanking on the ChatGPT version of it.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
Sora too.
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Host (Tech God)
And I, I tried, I played around with it for sure. I spent probably a solid week just creating absolutely absurd content. And it was fun to like, you know, place friends faces on it. But it fizzled out pretty fast because I think innately within me when I'm watching that content, I just. Okay, it's just AI like this doesn't mean much, but if it's a real creator, there's just a little bit more of a personal aspect to it where I know that there's effort put into this outside of just typing a prompt, although sometimes the prompts are really good to me. I'm hoping that, yeah, maybe creating a separate economy for creators, the real ones and the non real ones, is probably the path, but it's an interesting world.
- [23:34]
Kate Scott Dawkins
You're also looking at it today, right? And think about where text was a year ago versus today and then take that and apply that sort of exponential to video from today to a year from now. So yeah, we are in this just rapidly evolving world and our industry because of how important it is to the global economy right now, because of how, you know that many of the world's largest companies by market cap exist in our industry, sell advertising, if not as their main source of revenue, then one of their sources of revenue. And because of what we've seen in the past around incentives and reward structures for new technologies and formats like social media, we have to be very invested in getting this right, I think.
- [24:31]
Host (Tech God)
So maybe we'll pivot a little bit now on the podcast. I want to talk a little bit about you in particular, being a female in the space you mentioned. Career girl. Career girls.org I'd love to hear a little bit about that and why, why you're involved there and what that means for you and the people that are a part of that.
- [24:49]
Kate Scott Dawkins
Yeah, it's a great organization that I found when I moved back to San Francisco from London. Looking at basically how do we inspire more girls and women to get into particularly steam fields. Right. So science Technology, arts, engineering, math. The founder, Linda Calhoun is now a great friend. And it's at its simplest a way to close the imagination gap for girls. We think about girls around the world and they do have, their constituents are global who might not know what a sound engineer does or what a mechanical engineer does or what a astrophysicist does because they don't have those kinds of role models potentially in their immediate family or they don't have access to those kind of people or they haven't seen someone doing that job who looks like them. Career girls is really built to erase those gaps. And so they have videos of role models. It's one of the main impacts of the organization, videos of role models. You know, women everywhere who are doing these jobs, talking about what it is, how they got into it, you know, how they started, what a day looks like, what resilience looks like to them. There's a big piece of empowerment there too. And they've also been branching out into clubs, so bringing this content and this empowerment message to schools and girls as well. And it's just really rewarding to be involved in that and make sure we get people representing all walks of life into these fields that are going to be very, very important again as we go forward for kind of studying the, the guardrails and the, and the tone and how things like AI and media and culture and commerce and tech are going to work in the future, we want to have as broad a base of, of people working in those fields as possible.
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Host (Tech God)
I mean, I'm looking, I'm looking right now. Hope you don't mind, I'm browsing. So Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Addis Ababa, you have San Francisco, Tokyo. Like this is like, no, no joke, like a total global presence helping support girls in the space who want to enter STEM industry. It's pretty incredible. So thank you for sharing it.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
Yeah.
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Host (Tech God)
Do you, I would say like donate some of your time and effort towards it? Like do you find that the conversations with the younger generation, like it helps guide them and get them more interested in things that maybe they weren't aware of.
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Kate Scott Dawkins
Yeah, my main involvement has actually been as a board member, so I'm currently an advisory board member, but I was a non exec board member and that's super rewarding being able to bring what I know about growth and company strategy into a nonprofit who maybe doesn't have access to all the same pools of talent. Right. But being able to bring that in was great. So that's been my main, main involvement with the organization. And then yeah, donating, you know, going to the walks, the fundraisers, all that's great.
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Host (Tech God)
Kate, thank you for joining me and thank you to WPP for having you here. I wish you the absolute best and looking forward to speaking with you soon.
- [28:22]
Kate Scott Dawkins
Thank you so much. This was really fun.
- [28:24]
Host (Tech God)
Thank you. Kate, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the AdTech Godpod, a podcast for the people about the people. Stay connected with me for more insights, trends and interviews in the realm of ad tech. Don't miss out on the latest updates, so follow me on X Instagram and connect with me on LinkedIn. Don't forget ATG Slack community has insights, networking opportunities and jobs. Keep the conversation going and stay at the forefront of ad tech innovation.