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WPP Media Choreograph’s Rich Astley on accelerating programmatic performance with AI
Rich Astley: Welcome to Innovators Unscripted, a series where we share unfiltered insights from some of the most disruptive voices in today’s advertising ecosystem. Rich Astley, chief product officer at Choreograph, joins for a conversation about how AI, automation, and a unified data strategy can accelerate programmatic performance and simplify complexity to create a smarter, faster path to results.
The video transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.
Programmatic is constantly evolving—what role has Choreograph played in the changing landscape over the past few years?
RA: There are a couple of things. First, we’ve been working hard over the last couple of years to bring together a lot of the innovations and product development across WPP into one place. That’s all with a view to creating one platform with one data capability for all of our clients to really simplify how we go to market.
The other area for us is data. We’ve been thinking long and hard about our data strategy and how we’re going to drive an advantage for our clients. Where we’ve landed is what we released a couple of weeks ago, which is called Open Intelligence, which we’re super excited about.
We think it is going to carve a path for the future around how we think about data collaboration—both with our clients and partners, but also the data that we own and operate as WPP—and doing that in a totally decentralised, federated way where we bring the model to the data rather than bringing the data to the model.
Choreograph has been at the forefront of AI and building custom algorithms. Can you share specific examples of how AI-driven advertising creates an advantage for your clients?
RA: There are probably two areas that we really drill into where we’re seeing tangible, real-life examples today. The first area is around creative analytics and generation.
“We’re able to harness creative performance data and use that to build predictive models around how assets will perform on different platforms and formats.”
Then we use that to inform dynamic generation of content assets, and increasingly doing that on the fly as well—so how we dynamically serve those assets into environments.
And then the other area is media optimisation. If you think about the life of a media investment manager or trader, in the past, they’ve been setting up lots of line items and managing those line items. It’s a lot of manual, heavy-lift work that needs to be done day by day, platform by platform.
We’ve been seeing really interesting results where we’re doing cross-platform optimisation that is AI-informed. AI is setting up thousands of line items daily and constantly optimising those line items to drive optimal programmatic performance. Not only does that create valuable people hours to do more valuable things, it also drives great performance.
What kind of opportunities does activating and training your custom algorithms on the sell side unlock?
RA: How we work with the sell side is becoming more and more interesting right now. As agencies, we obviously have a duty to our clients to try and find the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective path to activation for our campaigns.
Clearly, over the last 10 or 15 years of programmatic, there’s been a proliferation of intermediaries of advertising technology.
“What we’re seeing now is that the supply side is building more technology for the demand side to be able to directly plug in, have direct inventory relationships with media owners, and manage that with permissions and controls at the campaign level.”
That’s opened up a new world of opportunity.
Index is a great example of that. We’ve done some early-stage testing with you around setting up audiences on the supply side where we can, with minimal signal loss, identify and activate audiences at scale, which is exactly what we’re interested in.
What’s a common myth about AI that you’d like to debunk once and for all?
RA: I think the most common myth that we deal with in an agency services business is that it’s going to eradicate all of our jobs in 18 months’ time. The industry loves to talk about that.
There’s going to be clearly a huge efficiency play with AI. It’s going to automate a lot of menial tasks. It’s going to free people up. But that human guidance and strategy is going to continue to be important.
I do think it’s going to take longer than a lot of people expect it to. There are a lot of doomsday scenarios about what the world will look like in a year’s time or 18 months’ time. The world is more complicated than sometimes we assume AI can take over control of.
So, it’s the time with which these changes are going to take place.
How has partnering with Index and building on Index Marketplaces helped you innovate for your clients?
RA: I think we have a very similar view of the world. You look at how you manage suppliers’ infrastructure, and you’ve built out your own technology and your own compute capability on the supply side.
“That creates a lot of efficiency in terms of the way that you operate.”
We think the same way. This is about marginal gains in the world of a lot of competition in programmatic, and how do we find a unique advantage?
Our relationship with Index has been innovative, and we’ve got a lot of interesting workstreams together. Index is a very open partner and we love working with you.
What’s one advancement that you see coming for the industry and how do sell-side decisioning and AI fit into that?
RA: I’d be interested to see the other interviews in the space and see what they’re all saying, but I would imagine that there’d be one or two mentions of agentic AI and what that means. You have to talk about it. It’s a foundational new chapter in technology in the way that we think about not only how we develop products for the future, but the way that we integrate products.
“Agentic is really stretching our thinking around what the future user experience looks like.”
Today, the typical user experience is: go into a UI, set things up, manage things with dropdowns, and put data into user interfaces. The future will be prompting and asking questions, where the hard work is done by an agent that’s implementing actions into platforms.
We are just starting to scratch the surface of that today. We’re seeing what the potential could be. I think we’ll be having a very different conversation in a year’s time when a whole bunch more experimentation has happened and we see it becoming very, very real.
What are you most optimistic about when it comes to digital advertising?
RA: For our industry, we are natural innovators and we love creating things. Every year there’s something new.
“That’s a big part of why I think a lot of us are still in this industry—it’s constantly reinventing itself and finding the next chapter of innovation.”
Sometimes those chapters are long chapters. They take a while for things to really gain scale and momentum. But that’s the industry we’re in. It’s like a constant cycle of change where we’re always looking for the next thing that’s going to change our world, and that’s an exciting thing to be part of.
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