For Aurore Domont, president of Média Figaro, AI is profoundly transforming the agency’s activity. But humans and the uniqueness of premium content must remain masters of the game.
JDN. Media buying is gradually moving towards the agentic path. How do you position yourself?
Aurore Domont. Media Figaro is currently developing a sales agent, a “seller agent”, so that it can respond to requests from buy side agents. Please note that each agentic transaction with us will always be approved by an account manager: I do not entrust the keys to the house to the AI.
On the other hand, this agentic revolution must not reduce our premium sites to a few lines of code or inventory lost in a heterogeneous open web. We must be able to inject new KPIs into this new media planning process that allow agents to identify the value we create for brands (trust, reputation, influence, etc.). And all the more so as media buying is experiencing a very rapid process of offshoring and therefore diluting knowledge of the local impact of our media.
At a time when clients and their agencies are centralizing purchasing decisions for campaigns around the world, it is becoming urgent for us to reaffirm the importance of a local approach. Reputation is nourished by cultural trusted third parties anchored in “our” French media landscape. The entire market must come together to make this consideration of our uniqueness and our value viable and, above all, the enormous benefit that this represents for brands and their agencies.
Media Figaro has also significantly improved its media planning tool in collaboration with Google.
If we had to summarize, Ad Planning Intelligence (API), a tool based on Gemini that we developed with the support of Google for two and a half years, allows us to become real audience activation strategists at home thanks to a very detailed vision of campaign results over two years of history and an ability to draw structuring lessons for brands. This is thanks to the cross-referencing of considerable volumes of data relating to campaigns on all KPIs, formats, sectors, editorial contexts, economic elements, etc.
Today, all campaign reports are carried out at Media Figaro by AI via API, under the control of our account managers. These analyzes are no longer limited to describing in detail the results of what happened: they prescribe the best strategy to deploy in the future. API is intelligent and augmented media planning. We are going to evolve its use to produce more barometers and studies and even to produce more advice relating to advertising creation. We are in particular in discussions with an institute to integrate data on the impact of advertising creation into API.
How does 14H regulate the use of AI in content creation?
Media Figaro sets red lines that must not be exceeded because, as with our editorial staff, we believe that humans are at the heart of the contract of trust that exists between us, our audiences and our clients. We are not here to aggregate the creation of robots, that is not our mission. On the other hand, AI is very useful for the variation of formats (social, short video, etc.) in near real time in order to strengthen multi-platform distribution. AI also allows us to push our creative realization capabilities further in record time, it is a creative partner and we have achieved very good things with Gucci, Galeries Lafayette or Audemars… But be careful: at 14H we do not authorize the use of AI for the recommendation of the creative idea, otherwise we would lose our singularity and this side step sometimes which makes our signature and engages our audiences. We collaborate with artists specializing in artificial intelligence, like Neïla Romeyssa for a creation for Tiffany, who allow us to explore new aesthetic territories.
Media Figaro launched a GEO offer last October. How many campaigns are you in today and for what results?
We are still at the very beginning of the adventure, with a significant number of campaigns sold in the luxury, banking, insurance, beauty, distribution and automobile sectors. To bring concrete and significant results, this type of system must be implemented over the long term. Not all GEO offerings on the market are created equal. A good GEO partner must be able to have massive audience levels on the advertiser’s theme, a high level of trust with its audiences and work with trusted third parties for brand auditing.
Do you offer agent features to your customers or do you have plans to do so?
We are in fact considering the possibility of providing some of our clients with direct access to our knowledge using AI agents. We are already internally testing ways to report all of our insights and studies. The projects can be infinite: the difficulty of the task consists in arbitrating in favor of the projects which produce the most benefits for our clients.
Ultimately, what is the most ambitious project at Media Figaro in the field of AI today?
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the transformation and change of Media Figaro’s very model. This profound change requires clear governance. Karine Rielland, our delegated digital director of operations & innovation, is in charge of these subjects. It relies on a college of 17 professionals representing all management professions. From an advertising agency marketing touch points to advertisers in very premium press environments, we are transforming into a house of value-added content and experiences based on trust, attention and reputation. Ultimately, our objective is to become a reputation platform with high added value thanks to the increased skills of our salespeople, who have become consultants augmented by AI. Thanks to AI and human dialogue, we are able to deepen and refine the knowledge of our advertising clients and their needs as well as that of our audiences in order to recommend the best ways to reach the right audiences with the most relevant content. AI allows us to provide tailor-made advice of very high quality.
Concretely, what have you put in place to strengthen the capacity of your salespeople?
We want to fulfill a dual objective: increase our customer knowledge in order to better advise them and increase the knowledge of our audiences and their interactions with brands. We carried out a POC with Salesforce to develop a tool summarizing, for each client, all the data from our meetings, but also their visuals and latest speeches, competitive analyses, Médiamétrie, Kantar data, etc. and this with a history of three years. Media Figaro, there are 10,000 sales meetings each year. Enough to allow our salespeople to produce information in real time that strengthens their productivity and improves customer relations. AI makes it possible to ask our sales force to make more highly qualified appointments.
AI also helps our salespeople conquer the long tail. Today in France there are 60,000 multimedia advertisers. Media Figaro has 2,000 advertising clients, including 910 who have been inactive for more than two years. We have developed AI models to contact them, particularly in the regions, in order to reestablish the relationship and make an appointment with them. This is starting to bear fruit. These systems are deployed across the entire administration. AI allows our salespeople to save a lot of time and relevance.
