Christian Pierre was recently promoted to global chief intelligence officer for GUT. In this role he becomes part of the agency network’s leadership team and will work across the 10 offices it maintains worldwide, heading up all technology efforts both internally and with clients–including artificial intelligence, data and emerging tech initiatives.
Pierre started his career in 2018 at GUT’s Buenos Aires office where he led regional and global digital campaigns for brands such as Coca-Cola, Sprite, Mercado Libre, Stella Artois, NotCo and Michelob Ultra, among others. Throughout his tenure he has been instrumental in driving new business as well as organic growth and facilitating the network’s global expansion. Prior to GUT, he led the data and marketing sciences departments at Wunderman and R/GA, and worked on multiple brands including Disney, Nike, Metlife, Western Digital, Patagonia beer and Falabella.
Pierre has been based in GUT Miami, the agency’s global headquarters, since 2022 and will lead the data and technology teams across the network’s offices worldwide–Miami, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Toronto, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Madrid, New York, and Singapore.
The GUT Network has won assorted accolades at varied competitions, including Cannes Lions 2023, where it garnered three Grand Prix and 35 Lions, and became #1 Independent Network of the Year, LATAM Regional Network of the Year, and its GUT Buenos Aires office became both Independent Agency of the Year and Agency of the Year–a first for Argentina.
GUT is part of Globant, a digital-native company focused on reinventing businesses through innovative technological solutions.
SHOOT posed several questions to Pierre who shared his observations on an ever evolving marketplace–and how it’s being impacted by AI and tech initiatives.
SHOOT: You have practical experience in AI and we would like to tap into that experience–including GUT Unprompt and GUT AI Personas. Could you outline each initiative and reflect on what have been your biggest takeaways or lessons learned from your AI experience thus far?
Pierre: Our AI initiatives are aimed to elevate and support the work of our creative teams. GUT Unprompt is an endless feed of AI curated data points to spark creative ideation. Think of GUT Unprompt as an AI Agent that is browsing the internet looking for public research papers, summarizing them into single sentences and serving them to our creatives, so they can connect the dots between the data and the brands we work for.
AI Personas are a synthetic version of our clients’ consumer personas. We create each AI Persona using real consumer data and third party tools to come up with a holistic view of the target. Then, by connecting them to the internet we make sure their responses are always up-to-date. The goal is to create a direct line with the consumers to be able to validate our thinking with them.
The biggest lesson is that we never stop experimenting. We are constantly trying and developing AI tools. A key learning is to identify the talent within our teams that has the appetite to be at the forefront of this exploration, and allow them to test and learn. Once we identify the tools that add more value, we roll them out and bring the rest of the teams on board.
SHOOT: Much has been said and written about AI’s positive potential as well as possible perils. What’s your view of how AI can and will impact brands, marketing and advertising?
Pierre: We are living an insanely fast race towards innovation. Big tech companies are outpacing each other on a daily basis. For our industry, this is not a sprint, it is a marathon. It’s not about getting there first, it’s about taking the time to train and transform our teams to be able to make it in the long run and to adapt our ways of working along the way as we pave new paths.
Ultimately, if in a near future the best craft is just a prompt away, ideas will not be judged by the effort to generate the outcome, but for the message they are delivering.
SHOOT: What are your priorities in your new expanded role as global chief intelligence officer at GUT?
Pierre: Part of my job is to connect with our amazing creative teams across our 10 offices and pick their brains on how they are using AI, but more importantly, what they would like AI to do, that has not been created yet.
Having Globant behind us, with their AI expertise, allows our teams to think without boundaries. My job is to identify the strongest ideas, bring them down to Earth, and coordinate our efforts to make them a reality.
SHOOT: Relative to AI’s promise and pitfalls, what’s your take on a new version of ChatGPT which lets user transform popular internet memes or personal photos into the distinct animation style of Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki? (Editor’s note: Click here for more on that story.)
Pierre: I think that this wave has become so big that it will be hard to stop it with lawsuits.
I think there is no going back to what it was before Gen AI. This is a disruption very similar to what happened to the music industry when Napster was released. There will be new rules and new players that will potentially allow creators to monetize on their style, like Spotify did with music artists. Probably the most famous creators will be impacted, but it will also allow smaller creators to share what they do, and if someone wants to use their style to create something unique, the creator will get compensated for it.
