ORLANDO — Brands averaging 12 agencies with separate systems and priorities create organizational chaos that artificial intelligence accelerates rather than solves.
What’s needed, according to Publicis Groupe’s Linsey Loy, is proper integration through unified identity frameworks and shared operating models.
“If you think of yourself or your company like a house, if everyone has their own door and their own rules, you don’t have a home, you essentially have a hallway of locked rooms, and AI won’t fix that. It’ll just make people run faster from room to room or door to door,” Loy, head of Strategic Development and Executive Engagement at Publicis Groupe, told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the ANA Masters conference.
The solution requires what Loy calls “one front door and shared keys” — unified teams, goals, and workflows that transform collaboration from buzzword to growth engine.
Precision over broad reach
Publicis moved a CPG brand from single-message mass marketing to precision targeting by using its identity graph to narrow 240 million broad-based buyers into behavior-based subsegments, then orchestrating personalized creative across all channels.
“We moved from one message for all to precision. We’re using our identity graph and we narrowed that down to roughly 240 million broad-based buyers. We then subsegment it based upon their behavior,” Loy said.
The approach delivered a 53% increase in household basket size while reducing waste and cannibalization through contextually aware, human-adapted creative.
Math, not magic
AI delivers business impact only when wired into identity data and connected operating systems, Loy said, warning clients against distraction by “shiny prefab demos” without proof of market results.
“The truth is that the conversations always start with one simple principle, which is that AI alone doesn’t deliver business impact,” Loy said. “It’s not magic, it’s math,” Loy said. “We’re telling our clients to ask for proof, to ask for live demos, betas in market results and references.”
Clean rooms provide value only when interoperable and identity-based; otherwise they create additional silos rather than breaking them down.
Data reveals emotion
Effective data use identifies clues about consumer priorities rather than replacing human connection with transactional approaches, Loy said.
“Data doesn’t replace emotion, it reveals it,” she added. “When we use data in the right way, we don’t see numbers. We see clues about what people care about.”
She offered a recent example of how the agency imbues data with a human touch. A global QSR client shifted from transactional marketing to surprise-and-delight strategy using identity and loyalty data to personalize birthday rewards and favorite items at optimal times, driving 20% higher redemption, 21% check uplift, and 78% lower cost per store visit.
Powering identity at scale
Publicis built the world’s largest identity graph through Epsilon, enabling connections across commerce data, CRM, and influencer platforms to understand who people are, what they buy, and who influences them.
“At Publicis, we’ve actually built that foundation for some time now, and we have the world’s largest identity graph,” Loy said. “We’re able to then connect it across PESO orchestration and through modular AI agents.”
A pharmaceutical brand case study demonstrated the approach’s power: linking patient, healthcare provider, and consumer data in HIPAA-compliant ways to build micro-segments activated across paid, earned, shared, and owned channels drove seven-to-one ROI and 84% improvement in prescription efficiency.
“We’re not essentially optimizing campaigns anymore. We are redesigning growth systems,” Loy said.
You’re watching “The Future of Data Collaboration in Marketing”, a Beet.TV Leadership Series at the ANA Masters of Marketing 2025, presented by Epsilon. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
