The Executive Lounge

Featuring

Sarah Fay
Managing Director at Glasswing Ventures

Hosted by

Michael Seidler
Founder & CEO, Madison Alley

Rishad Tobaccowala

July 6, 2022 @ 1-2 pm ET

EXECUTIVE HIGHLIGHTS

Overview of Sarah Fay

• Managing Director at Glasswing Ventures
• Chair of Ziff Davis Board of Directors
• Former CEO, Aegis North America
• 30+ years in digital media and technology
• Named among AdWeek’s Media All Stars and Women to Watch, Media Post’s Top 100 Most Influential People in Media, and Fast Company’s Fast 50

Glasswing Ventures

• AI-focused venture fund
• 13 employees
• 46 executive advisors
• 32 company portfolios

Ziff Davis

• Vertically focused digital media and internet company
• CEO Vivek Shah
• $1.4b in revenue
• 21% YoY revenue growth
• $2.8b M&A spend
• 35% EBITDA Margin
• 25% EBITDA growth
• 81 acquisitions

– Interview –

Who is Sarah Fay?

Sarah Fay is Managing Director at Glasswing Ventures, where she leads and evaluates investments in early-stage, AI-powered companies, and the Chair of Ziff Davis Board of Directors. She previously served as CEO of Aegis Media North America, a global media and digital marketing communications company.

Sarah began her career at Miller Freeman, before helping to build Freeman Associates/Carat Freeman, which was, at the time, the biggest agency for technology businesses. Over the past 30 years, she has ridden the wave of digital media through several major innovations, from computer to digital, mobile and now AI.

Having started in the industry in the late 1980s, Sarah has watched ideas become reality and taken the consumer market by storm. In her 20s, she listened to futurists predict what was to come in terms of technology and then watched as it all came to fruition before her eyes. As such, she became an expert in pattern recognition and has a knack for spotting which technologies or innovations are going to take the world by storm.

In her roles at both Glasswing Ventures and Ziff Davis, Sarah is focused on the promise and practical applications of AI technology, which she believes is poised to become as essential to business operations as the internet is today.

Investing in Artificial Intelligence

We are at a point in history when people are beginning to recognize data as a key part of any profitable business strategy. Companies across all industries are scrambling to figure out how they can acquire, use and organize data to make productive business decisions. AI is a big part of that equation. In the future, AI will be a core part of how every company operates, and how well it’s implemented will be a competitive factor for businesses across every industry.

“AI will be soon like electricity – you won’t be able to exist without it,” Rishad Tobaccowala, Former Chief Strategy & Growth Officer, Publicis Groupe said. As such, investing in AI is essential.

Applying AI in Marketing and Technology

The possibilities presented by AI are tremendous. In the marketing and advertising industry, AI can be used to quickly synthesize data, use natural-language understanding to assess what people are saying, document how people are viewing creative campaigns and optimize against that. In the ad sector, specifically, technology has helped with media targeting. It is much easier today to deliver the right message to the right person than it ever has been in the past. Sarah explained how AI can also help to automate the creation of advertising and content generation. Today, a creative job that may once have taken dozens of people several weeks can now be done in hours, and AI also enables agencies to react to the creative needs of a campaign in real time. With AI, we can better understand what’s compelling to which viewers and why.

Risks and Considerations of AI

While AI offers great benefits, every technology has unintended consequences. Glasswing is focused on three key areas of risk and consideration when it comes to AI:

1. Data quality and compliance: 40 countries have agreed to the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI put together by the European commission. These guidelines are designed to ensure that human rights are not violated by AI technology. Companies need to ensure they are following data privacy and usage rules, and that all data collected is used with integrity and that users understand the purpose of the data they’re providing.

2. Cybersecurity: Investing in this space is crucial, as it is the responsibility of companies and brands to make sure the data they collect from consumers or clients is protected. Marketers cannot look the other way. As we have seen over the past few years, data breaches can be devastating to a brand and can also have real financial implications.

3. Prohibition on Secret Profiling Facial Recognition: Glasswing recently signed a moratorium on using facial recognition and surveillance technology in crowds, as it believes that this capability could be extremely harmful in the wrong hands. The company believes that it must anticipate all potentially negative ways that innovative technologies can be used.

The Future of Media & Advertising

Any company that isn’t looking to invest in AI and automation for their business is going to be at an extreme disadvantage in the future. Current AI technology can complete tasks much faster than humans ever could, and this is only going to get better as technology evolves. AI will eventually touch every kind of business there is – from deploying capital to advertising, manufacturing and much more.

Tobaccowala noted that he sees AI technology as seeping into every corner of a business in the same way that digital technology did 20 years ago. Moderna vaccines for COVID-19 were built using AI, and translation technology has reached a point where learning new languages is optional. So, we are seeing the benefits of AI across every industry that exists – it’s everywhere you want to be!

Frontiers of Marketing

Marketers looking to apply AI to their businesses need to consider what is right for their organization. Sarah explained how to find opportunities to adopt new technology in areas employees experience frustrations. She noted the worst thing to do is nothing – “if you don’t start adopting technology in new ways to run your business, you’ll find yourself left behind.” Predictive technology is the way of the future. Rishad compared the evolution of AI seeping into all corners of our lives as the trend with digital technology emerging and combining a multitude of areas such as online, mobile, social and audio. AI is now becoming an all-encompassing technology impacting all our lives.

-Q&A-

Carl Fremont, CEO, at Quigley Simpson asks: “How should marketers separate hype from opportunity. At what point is an emerging technology, such as AI, worthy of marketing investment?”

There is a lot of hype out there, and sometimes what’s being touted as AI isn’t really AI. When considering an emerging technology, always ask the company where they get their data, how they train it, and whether they have any trained data to bear. It’s also important to know about the team structure of an AI company: What they are trying to achieve and which disciplines they are applying AI to. A good way to assess the veracity of AI claims is to make sure you have someone on your team who is well versed in data and understands AI and the industry, so they can make sure these claims are true.

Pete Armstrong, of Pete Armstrong Creative asks: “I’ve seen the phrase ‘beneficial intelligence’ used. The question we are all invested in is how can AI benefit humanity?”

We’ve talked a lot about the potential pitfalls of AI that every business needs to consider and be aware of, but for every potential threat there are a myriad of ways that AI can be used to benefit humanity. In the health sector, for example, AI can be used to create cancer cures, or to connect the right patients with the right drugs for clinical trials. Additionally, right now, we are seeing a lot of cyberattacks on Fortune 500 companies, and AI can be used to prevent those. There are also ways that AI facial recognition technology can be used to help people with Autism better recognize facial expressions or understand how people are reacting to them.