In the competitive world of advertising, artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a key differentiator. What was once a topic of theoretical discussion is now translating into sophisticated, results-driven tools that agencies use to secure measurable business gains. This shift is not only enhancing operational efficiency but also redefining strategies for winning new clients and maintaining a competitive edge.
A clear example of this shift is Digitas, which has built an AI-driven product to secure a strong competitive advantage. Reports indicate the agency is using its proprietary technology to great effect, particularly in winning over brands during pitch presentations.
Over the past nine months, employees of Digitas have walked into new pitches with a secret AI weapon, which scores brands based on their connection with consumers and how they stack up against competitors. This technology, known as NX Score (short for Networked Experience Score), has been capturing the interest of prospective clients and helping the agency secure new business. According to Digitas, NX Score has been a decisive factor in 80% of the agency’s pitch wins this year, the majority of which came from brand-new clients.
“With screen attention spans now less than a third of what they were 20 years ago, and competition among brands at an all-time high, marketers are under more pressure than ever to justify every dollar spent—especially in creative and brand-building efforts that are hard to measure,” said Jen Faraci, chief intelligence officer at Digitas “The NX Score closes that gap by showing how a brand’s connectedness in culture, content, and commerce directly impacts outcomes.”
NX Score is a composite index, benchmarked against a brand’s industry and competitors, and built from both proprietary and publicly available data sources. It draws on a variety of signals, such as search trends, social engagement, purchasing behaviors, and customer sentiment, which are processed through a machine learning model. The model then refines the inputs into a single, benchmarked score that can be updated in real time as new data becomes available.
NX Score then generates a value between 1 and 100 that reflects how the brand is performing with consumers belonging to four different stages of loyalty. From least loyal (barely familiar with the brand’s category) to most loyal (repeatedly buying from the brand), these types (called “nodes”) are “living,” “liking,” “loving” and “loyalty.” In other words, the NX Score shows a brand which consumers it is succeeding with and which it is not.
While the exact NX Score algorithm is proprietary, it’s designed to adapt to each industry, brand, and competitive landscape, ensuring every networked experience is evaluated within the right business and consumer context. All data is aggregated and anonymous, ensuring privacy compliance and actionable insights.
NX Score is part of a larger AI platform that Digitas, part of Publicis Groupe, launched last year, and exemplifies how the agency hopes to attract new clients, and retain existing ones, through its use of the technology. Before even meeting with a potential client, Digitas instructs NX Score to build a custom report for the brand. The tool scours numerous datasets pertaining to the brand’s search trends, social engagement, purchase behaviors and customer sentiment, all of which are sourced from either Publicis Groupe systems such as Epsilon or public sources such as Reddit.
“It’s been a game changer for us,” said Faraci, adding that the agency now introduces custom NX Score reports to prospective clients as one of its first moves in a pitch. Faraci declined to share the specific number of pitches that NX Score has helped Digitas win.
