VCCP and AI
Bringing a challenger’s perspective to new technologies
Our approach to AI is led by one defining belief. That AI, used responsibly, is an accelerator of human creativity and imagination.
One of our founding tenets was to challenge the bad behaviours of our industry, and we apply this same approach to AI. Many organisations are using AI applications to reduce the amount of effort needed to create, focussing on producing things faster and for less money. Our approach at VCCP is one grounded AI in service to better - ensuring we maintain a high level of quality in our work, with the knowledge that the tools are only as good as the expertise of the creative and strategic talent using them.
Gen AI within VCCP
AI has long been used within the halls of VCCP. In our media, data and UX/UI divisions, AI technologies are in use for tasks such as optimising SEO and targeted advertising, and in content scoring aided by image recognition and natural language processing.
Exploring Gen AI - artificial intelligence that can create original content in response to a prompt or request - and the opportunities it presents, was a logical next step for an agency that’s always challenged convention.
While we will always strive to embrace innovation, we believe it is the power of human creativity, working with AI, that will enable us to create distinctive and enduring brand and creative platforms for our clients, helping them unlock value in their businesses.
This means that while we are committed to exploring Gen AI as an enabler, we are clear-eyed about the technology: Gen AI innovation is moving fast, but it is not a magic button. It is a tool that is only powerful when built into a real workflow requiring human intervention.
Our approach is designed to enable experts, our people, who know how to deliver world-class work, to use Gen AI where it simplifies or enhances their output, rather than as a replacement for thinking. A human must still agree on the inputs, set the parameters, and, crucially, judge the quality of the output.
“We believe that Gen AI will be an unparalleled accelerator of human creativity and imagination and that AI will have a positive impact on all creative industries, including our own.“
Building faith in AI
Three years ago, we launched faith, our global Generative AI creative agency, to produce work for new and existing clients and to act as an explorative R&D hub.
Our ambition was to explore AI’s creative applications, accelerate our collective learning and share it quickly with our clients. We launched with a collective of practitioners made up of creatives, technologists, prompt engineers, strategists, data analysts and makers - who share knowledge rapidly across VCCP globally.
Today, 25 of the VCCP team sit within faith and we use AI to enhance how we add value across strategy, experience, engineering, innovation, content and assets, and training. faith enabled outputs have won the industry's most significant awards.
"Daisy," the AI-powered grandmother developed for telecommunications brand, O2, to combat phone scammers can count among her achievements winning over 100 creative awards, including a gold Cannes Lions, while also saving the UK public an estimated £3 million per year in potential fraud.
Outside of faith, our teams in Bernadette, VCCP Media, VCCP CE & Loyalty and Girl&Bear are using Gen AI to solve real client problems, implementing the technology across asset creation and delivery, building AI agents and fueling actionable insights for some of our most complex clients.
Guiding our clients on through their AI journey
We work with some of the biggest and best brands in the world. Launching Gen AI into their workflows and creative executions isn’t something done lightly. Gen AI must add value to our clients and any outputs must meet the quality standards we set for our award-winning work.
Across all use cases, we believe AI should be used only for good. We operate under a rigorous Generative AI policy built on five core principles which ensure the transparent, compliant, agile and ethical use of AI with clients. We are ‘technologically agnostic’ as we know that the best tool of today may not be the best tool of tomorrow.
Our expertise also enables us to support our clients in determining where and how Gen AI can work for them, and we help our client partners navigate the legal, ethical and regulatory complexities which arise when seeking to innovate.
Helping our Industry
With great power comes great responsibility, and with expertise comes the duty to help our industry decide and define its approach to Gen AI tools and usage. We actively work with the Advertising Association, The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers to share how we use AI and what we’ve learnt on our journey so far. We’re also founding members of the AA’s AI taskforce, which we chair alongside Google.
Beyond our client work, we share how we’re testing and implementing Gen AI with Governmental bodies such as Creative UK, with the aim of helping the Advertising industry explore economic and innovation opportunities. We’ve debated AI at Parliamentary dinners, contributed to books on the use of AI in Advertising and regularly partner with academics and teach at universities to advise on course design, share our insights, and showcase our application of AI.
Exploring what’s next
If you talk to anyone within faith, you’ll hear about where in the AI journey they sit. They are our astronauts - venturing into the unknown boldly and bravely to research, test and find new galaxies of opportunity.
This exploration, enabled and supported by the challenger mindset which fuels VCCP, helps us maintain our position as innovators and ensures we’re able to brief and guide our clients on not just what’s now, but also what’s next.
We anticipate Gen AI, in partnership with the best of human expertise and creativity, to change the shape of our industry. We’re thrilled to be exploring this space.