Dive Brief:

• Interpublic Group announced a strategic partnership with technology company Aaru to integrate the company’s artifical intelligence-powered human simulations into campaign planning, creative testing, audience targeting and more, per a press release.
• For IPG, the partnership will grow Acxiom’s identity resolution and audience management capabilities and bolster its Interact platform with more data-driven tools. The ad-holding group previously worked with Aaru on projects for clients in the financial services, healthcare and CPG sectors.  
• IPG noted that Aaru’s “ethics-first approach,” such as exclusively training its models on licensed data, was critical to the deal. To further foster collaboration, Jayna Kothary, IPG’s chief solutions officer, will join Aaru’s strategic advisory board.

Dive Insight:

By simulating how target audiences might react, IPG is hoping to take some of the guesswork out of marketing. Aaru’s proprietary technology uses AI to emulate human behavior and forecast audience sentiment toward various initiatives, including brand platforms, creative assets, live events and corporate communications. In leveraging these tools, IPG and its agencies might be able to better gauge campaign effectiveness before a final product is sent out into the world and adjust its efforts on the fly.

“Combined with our exceptional Acxiom data asset and Interact platform, our partnership with Aaru will provide Interpublic and our clients with a distinct competitive advantage, enabling us to forecast campaign effectiveness and optimize creative executions with unprecedented speed and precision,” said IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky in a statement.

As the partnership develops, the two companies plan to demonstrate to key clients how they work together through a Simulation Studio. These demos will add a tangible, client-facing layer to what can otherwise feel like an abstract technology pitch. If they deliver, IPG expects predictive simulations to become a more common fixture in agency-client workflows — not just to validate ideas, but also to accelerate them across markets and platforms.

Earlier this summer, WPP Media launched Open Intelligence, an AI-powered tool that it claimed was the industry’s first large marketing model (LMM) to predict audience behavior and market performance. Like Aaru’s tools, Open Intelligence was designed to provide information and insights to marketers about how consumers engage with brands, products, content and other touchpoints.

IPG recently moved one step closer to its combination with Omnicom, gaining approval of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. The deal is expected by executives to realize $750 million in cost savings while creating the world’s largest agency.