Media.Monks’ Lewis Smithingham on Enhancing Media and Marketing With AI - Ep. 222

0:10Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. Earlier this year, a robot named Wormhole made a splash at the CES show in Las Vegas, catching showgoers' attention with its edgy humor and alien likeness right out of the Men in Black movies. Wormhole was created in part to show off Monks Flow, an AI-powered platform for marketers created by an agency called Media Monks. And both Wormhole and some of the humans at Media Monks are here at GTC, talking about the power of generative AI in media, marketing, and beyond. Here to break it all down for us is Louis Smithingham, SVP of Innovation and Special Ops at Media Monks.

0:47Louis is presenting a session here at GTC entitled Revolutionizing Fan Engagement, Unleashing the Power of AI in Software-Defined Production. And he's been kind enough to stop by the podcast as well, so let's get right to it. Louis, welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. Thanks so much for stopping by. Hey, Noah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. One thing I will caveat, so while you know how crabs evolved convergently five separate times, like crustaceans evolved that way, worm-like characters can evolve separately outside of properties that may or may not be owned by Universal Pictures as well.

1:22I had full faith that it was going somewhere, but I didn't – when you said crabs, I was like – I'm in a current, like my current meme collection is exclusively crab memes about the fact that crabs evolve separately five different times, which says like, I don't know what that says about my algorithm. I want to ask you about that, but I'm going to do that when we're done talking about Wormhole. How about that? Yeah, absolutely. Excellent. So first off, MediaMonks, what is MediaMonks? Somebody asked me that a second ago and I said, what isn't MediaMonks? MediaMonks are a 7 ,700 person company. That's a global company that solves, creates solutions for media, for entertainment, for advertising, for large-scale tech companies.

2:03We're a combination of advertising. We're a combination of technical services, data services, heavy-duty technical solutions. We're a use case engine founded in 2001 by Wesley Tahar and Victor Knopp in a basement in Hilversum, Radio City Hilversum. Where's Hilversum? Hilversum is like southeast of Amsterdam. It's an industrial town that was where during the Second World War radio signal towers came out of. And so all radios in the UK, my parents are British and all radios in the UK have the word Hilversum on them as like a place where antennas were. And so anyway, so later on in 2018, Sir Martin Sorrell acquired us.

2:45And we've since then merged with, I think, upwards of 26 other different businesses to create one holistic group. One of the things that's really exciting about the presence we have here at GTC is I think there's no more than like two people from any one of the original merge companies. I was in a meeting earlier today and like they were like, well, who do you guys work for? And all of us were from different mergers. But we're all working together on one team to create one thing over one P &L. And it creates really cool opportunities where I can go talk to a team that does massive scaled campaigns for cars or for shoes and then walk over to a team that builds heavy-duty CDNs for video production systems.

3:26And so, yeah, the answer to MediaMonks, MediaMonks are a massive global – or not massive. We're a global company that works to create solutions for our clients across a wide range of services, whether it is marketing, technical services, or innovation spaces as well. Very cool. And so I assume a lot of the work you do is in the digital realm, but also you at least build one alien robot, right? Well, I mean, that is one differentiating thing. I think a lot of the other folks in our industry are focused on physical services or services that aren't digital. We're digital focused. And so as a part of that, we build things with all with the purpose of driving more digital innovation, digital content.

4:05And we do have a robotics team down in Latin America that do some in Brazil that you go down there and it's like it's wild. They had flying cars at one point. I mean, we did a show, my third job with Media Monks. I used to direct for them, and we were doing this Old Spice commercial. I don't know if commercial is the right word for it. It actually did turn into a commercial that was aired during the Super Bowl, but it was for Old Spice Foam Zone. It's Wes's favorite project. And it was insane. It was a 16-hour game show that they built these, and I made these crazy. The thing that was great about Media Monks as a director is you could pair up with them and the dumbest, craziest ideas you pitched would actually happen.

4:50It would happen, right. And you're like, dude, I like, is that safe? Like, are we sure we want to do that? And like, yeah, we did. And like, we built this like 26, I think it was 36 foot tall, like stairs that you climb and trip down. And so the team in Latin America and Brazil has, it's called the shop.monks, shop.monks. And they have a robotics team. Yeah. And they're an in-house robotics team. And Wormhole came out of a project that the robotics team, because they're all geniuses, geniuses get bored really quickly. And so they started spinning out tooling and they started figuring out how they could experiment more with animatronics.

5:24And like, I think one of the dreams of that team are to start building things for parks. And so we're like, well, let's just build something and see what happens with it. And the guys down there sent me a text with it. And we're like, yo, do you think we could like, could you show this to people? Are you kidding? And like, it's a great thing because it's like no context. And we went, we showed up at reInvent with it. This is the first time it was in public and we didn't have a space for it. So we just like wheeled it into a hallway and we're like, yeah, you want to talk to this robot? You know, it's funny you say that because earlier, not to interrupt you, but I was walking from, you know, to get lunch or something.

6:00And one of the Boston Dynamics robots was just kind of scoobying it up down the hall. Yeah, I mean, that's the way to get attention is you run it in a hall. And so then, again, what's great about Monks is there was another team in the Experience.Monks group, and they were experimenting with conversational systems. And they're like, whoa, why don't we run bedrock on this? Why don't we figure out a way where we can use this to, like, actually talk to you? Yeah. So let's break it down. Describe for the listener. It's, you know, we're old school. It's audio only, no visuals. Describe Wormhole. I'm not going to do this ASMR, but I will lean into what he looks like.

6:35So Wormhole looks like somebody that got kicked out of a casting session for a late 90s Jim Henson picture. So he's like three feet tall. He sits on this crate. He would be great to have at your theme park talking to guests as they walk through the lines, perhaps. And he is a worm. He's like pinkish blue. He likes, really likes coffee. and he uses conversational AI to have conversations with you, running on Bedrock and a number of other large language models. He also runs on some EC2 instances as well. And what I think is really exciting about him is his small footprint. He sits on a crate and we use cloud-based systems and we use GPU to really empower how he talks to folks, which is fun.

7:23And just looking at part of what I get excited about Wormhole as well is I have a lot of thoughts about the Uncanny Valley and I think humanoid systems and metahumans are absolutely outstanding. We have one on the floor right now that has conversationally is absolutely incredible. But because of the deeply ingrained evolutionary systems we have around the uncanny valley, there's still stuff that feels off when you talk to a humanoid character. I even think like humanoid robots are still a little bit off. But when you have a cartoonish looking worm thing, like it's not weird at all. And you're like, cool, I'll talk to this worm, whatever.

8:02That's cool. And it means that you get past so many of the barriers that you would in an AI piece when you're working with something that's non-humanoid. Right. And is that kind of the reaction that you observe from folks when they encounter wormhole at reInvent? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing that's funny about this wormhole, the original wormhole had a cup of coffee and the engineers had the amazing idea to put actual coffee in it at one point. And so original wormhole is just like flinging coffee around the room. And we have changed that. So it's not ruining people's shirts anymore. Yeah.

8:33I was in a meeting with that guy about six years ago. Yeah. He's just like this. Why are you doing that? But the reaction tends to be like people want to interact. People want to talk to him. It's weird. It's cool. It's fun. It's whimsical. And then like you start thinking immediately about use cases and you start getting into these systems where, and I think a lot of what MediaMonks does is as a case study engine, we use the fact that we have thousands of clients across different sectors where we produce thousands of projects a year where, and literally some teams produce millions of assets a year.

9:09That means you can try out a lot of stuff. And then you start getting to a point where like, you know, does Wormhole like actually function well as somebody in a medical setting that talks to people? Have you tried that? I mean, like I saw somebody in the keynote yesterday, like who were doing that. And I think I would much rather get my diagnoses from a wormhole than somebody else. Than from like a just slightly off looking doctor's humanoid robot. Yeah. I'd much rather have a wormhole be like, well, you know, you do actually need to get a colonoscopy this year versus some like humanoid robot thing.

9:39Like I think that's more fun. And I think that that's entertaining and that feels oddly more personal, but that's in part because of like sort of the kawaiification of the way we engage with stuff. Has MediaMonks built robots for clients, conversational robots, I should say? We have. We have absolutely built them. We've built several pretty large-scale conversational robots for movie properties. And there's a couple TV shows down in Latin America we have built those characters for. There's like Wormhole 2.0 is coming up soon. I think we'll be walking and talking, which terrifies me to a certain degree.

10:13And I'm concerned about like how they're going to do the walking physics with him, but it should be fun. Right, right. It might be too early for this, but are there learnings you've taken away? I mean, other than I'd rather hear about my colonoscopy from an alien worm than an uncanny humanoid. Yeah, I mean, that is a major learning. I think the other learnings that we've had are around latency, around how he speaks. I'd love to look at using directional audio with him. Right. I'd love to look at other languages as well. Yeah. Is he English only? Oh, I think he actually speaks Portuguese. Oh, Portuguese.

10:46Yeah. Nice. Yeah. He does know my name, which was weird. Is that terrifying? Yeah, it was like, oh, what's up, dude? I think somebody, there's another project going on. I saw one of my team members who was annoyed I wasn't joining calls this week had sent in a request this morning to synthesize my voice. Right. And apparently it got approved, which was like, got this like docusign from legal being like, hey, Media Monks now reserves the right to clone your voice. And I was like, oh, okay, sounds great. Does that mean I don't have to go to that meeting? Right. But I think the other learnings we've learned about it is, A, it works.

11:23It's fun. And that leans into, like, I have a life philosophy around, like, whimsy and the idea that, like, most things you need to ask yourself when you create things. Like, would I like this? Yeah. Does this suck? And then also, like, is this something we want to bring into the world? And, like, I think wormhole and things like wormhole is. And where I get really excited is the idea of as you get to spaces where, you know, connectivity does get better over time and we start looking at some of the advances that were even made overnight, the idea of having these conversational robots is really exciting.

11:57Yeah. And fascinating. And particularly if they look like wormhole. Right. It's going to be even more fun. Cool. So let's talk about Monk's Flow. I'm going to read from your website here because that's what I put in my notes. It's an AI-centric managed service that streamlines how humans and machines work together. What does that mean? Yeah. Is it a platform? Well, so what Monksflow does, Monksflow is a node-based pipeline system. I sort of think of it, I come from VFX originally, so I think about it a lot like Nuke. Or like we're looking at different nodes. And when you look at, and this was great, in the keynote yesterday, they talked.

12:31I was sitting next to our founder and Jensen goes into like this microservices portion. And I'm like hitting him with my elbow being like, see, see, see, this is what's going on. And so what it does is it takes all the services we provide and it breaks them down into microservice-based systems and individualized nodes flow together completely as a flow, as a pipeline within that space. And so it does function as a managed service, but it also functions with a level of automation and it runs on its own levels of learning. And so whether it has your transcription, background generation, foreground generation, texture generation, and then what's really exciting about Monks and what we've been doing at Monks is the fact that we have teams.

13:17We're a glass-to-glass organization. So we have teams. We have on-staff camera operators and literally people. Oh, glass-to-glass, like camera-to-screen? Camera-to-screen, yeah. And so we have, you know, people who shoot film with cameras and then we have people who design the systems and design the performance systems that those run on. Right. And so we have the opportunity to take performance data for our clients, feed that back in all the way back to the origin. That's part of the stuff we're working on with Holoscan for Media as well with the idea that, you know, and I come from TV and films.

13:49And in that space, you never knew what your audience was thinking. and like being able to figure out how you create that content because, you know, there's so much, such an opportunity to really personalize with that. And that's where what Monks Flow does is it just, it takes that opportunity, effectively marketing and content creation services, technical services, builds them into an entire pipeline, breaks them out into microservices with the idea that we think our industry's model historically has been around selling hours, human being hours so this human being can sit at the desk for 40 hours a week legally and you know that's it right and we think that we should be selling based on outputs and the quality of those outputs and also on the quantity of those outputs and so it gives us the opportunity and we see ai as this massive opportunity to just scale output of individual creators and and to really lean into that.

14:45And so Flow enables that from end to end. And so, I mean, you asked if it was a platform. It is a platform. I think it's less a platform and more a pipeline. Right. Right. No, that makes sense. And so the outputs from Flow are video? Wide, wide, wide ranging outputs. So it could be everything from a data set. So individual text-based data sets. It could be my voice being synthesized. It could be video assets. It could be real-time assets, it could be stills. We've worked on a pipeline to build all of that. I mean, arguably, or not arguably, wormhole is a portion of flow as well. It's a conversational system in flow.

15:25And so you're using that performance system, the learnings across those systems, to be able to use it for a use case like an avatar that talks to you, an avatar that does translation. All those different opportunities come together and we think of them as part of an overall ecosystem. And we work with partners like NVIDIA, like Adobe, like AWS, like all sorts of different spaces where, I mean, I tend to think that, and I've made my career off of building pipelines using the tools that people offer in the sense that like, I would imagine that NVIDIA's R &D budget is probably the size of our overall company.

16:02And so why not let them do the R &D and then use that to run our own pipelines where we can empower our creatives, which are some of the absolute best in the world, to be able to use those tools to scale that information. So how do the creatives, and I don't know how long folks have been monks, been at monks, with monks. I've been a monk for five years, depending upon how you do the math, five years officially, eight years unofficially. I was waiting for a third tier, like 12 years metaphysically. Yeah, I mean, probably psychologically at least 12 years. People aren't in the room with me, but I can see that.

16:38I've been a Westite for that long, for sure. So I would imagine you've got folks who, you know, are younger and have been, you know, maybe more tech adventurous and been trying out tools. And then maybe folks who are a little older, been in the business longer and are used to doing things, you know, a different way. What's the response been like with the creatives trying out, adapting to maybe rejecting, maybe being coerced into using AI? What's the vibe around the creatives using it? We do not coerce anybody to do anything. Certainly do not use robots to do that coercion. With that said, with our creatives, and I will very specifically caveat that with our creatives, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

17:21Why? So, I mean, media monks think differently. And I know that that's a very, like, cliched thing for any company to say. But part of what our founder, Wesley Tar, came out right at the gates in this wave. And we were like, I remember the first meetings around this during the beginnings of the wave. But we were working with ChatGPT as far back. I mean, I remember like projects going on with GPT-1. But we've been building in these spaces for a very long time. And as a part of that, Wes had this slide early on where it's about Kasparov being beaten by Deep Blue. And if you think that your job is smarter than a robot that can do chess, your creative idea, like that's pretty cool, dude.

18:07But like maybe check yourself a little bit there. And so we think, and this is a bad metaphor that I came up with when I had a fever at another conference. But like we sort of think about it like – and in creatives, there's a great movie, Pacific Rim. You should check it out if you haven't seen it. Excellent film. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. Excellent film. And it's about people that sync their minds with gigantic robots to fight monsters. Right, right. And we use AI. It's cliched to think of it that way. But we use AI as a way to empower our creatives and a way to scale our creatives. And, you know, it's – I think I'm not worried at all about jobs going away for that sort of stuff.

18:45I'm worried about, like, I think the big idea, which is a thing that is banded about in advertising and in films for a long time, I don't think that is a thing that's going to last very long. I don't think it has. And I think it's arguably dead already in the sense that, like, in the way that singular commercials on television used to create a monoculture moment across our systems, we don't have monoculture anymore. Right. But also, like, we don't have a singular zeitgeist moment with the level of frequency that we used to other than perhaps, like, literally Taylor Swift. But with that said, like, our belief is that this will come with great scale.

19:25And great scale will require curation. Great scale will require usage. Great scale will require tooling. And all those sort of things are where human beings will be involved. And somebody else has said this, but like there's advertising around like Microsoft Excel coming out in the 90s. And like it's all these ads about like fire your accountant. Accountants are all going to die. And like the growth of the accounting business sector has been exponential since then. Yeah. So like if we think that like this is going to come and destroy anything, if we can learn absolutely anything from history with proliferation becomes a need for more.

20:05And so, you know, you're going to go from doing six things a year to 600 ,000 to 6 million and being able to manage and operate those systems and engage and then honestly interact with that data. Right. Is where our creatives see this is a massive opportunity to do more. And that's, it's really exciting for us across the company. And I, we have, I think our, our AI Slack channel, AI collective is the name of the channel is like nearly the whole company at this point. Right. Sure. and like it's not censored and like it's like it there's nobody having that negativity that i would expect and i have seen it's more just like hey this is a tool let's use this tool let's do stuff that's really exciting and i think if anything we're excited about the fact that uh you know it democratizes access to tooling in the same way i think about mini dv in the 90s and 2000s i haven't thought about mini dv i think about it far too far i'm sure you do my second mini dv conversation of the day for the record.

21:06Nice. That's why you come to a tech conference in 2024. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've done work with marketing departments at different types of companies and agencies and such. And recently, so I feel like I know enough to be worried I'm going to say something that's incredibly wrong, but I'm saying anyway. I keep hearing that one of the holy grails with AI and marketing and advertising is being able to deliver hyper personalized content. And I see you nodding. Is that where we think things are headed? I've heard things about, well, the web is going to look totally different because of generative AI and other things that are popping up around it.

21:44And we'll go from me actively searching for something to a hyper-personalized version of a web page being delivered to me de facto. Is that something you see happening? Is that something that advertisers and marketers are, you know, sort of pining for? Is that kind of the model that floats around in your head when you think about the future of things like the internet? Are we there already? I don't know. What are the top three meme types that you get on your reels? Mine is lots of scuba diving stuff, a lot of stuff about fossils, jokes about battleships. And right now, it's a lot of memes about crabs, uh, converging, evolving convergently.

22:28So, so we're there, we're there already. And like, I think the thing is, is that we're all individuals and this isn't me like trying to make some Joe Strummer paraphrase sort of thing, but like, we are unique people. We're intersectional people. We have our own identities and marketers, advertisers, brands, leagues, sports, IP holders need to start realizing that we are that. And we expect that. And we want that differently. And so when you start looking at the fact that we get into spaces where we have, not we, media monks, but a platform may have upwards of 3 ,500 individual data points on you, there's a thing, and this is part of that uncanny valley moment where when you get out of being, it stops being creepy when it starts being meaningful and it starts being something you want.

23:17Right. Yeah. I don't want to give away my data until you give me something back. Yeah. And like, if you're giving me something back, like memes about crabs convergently of all things and like, or Taylor Swift being a World War II battleship that just happens to be my favorite type of camouflage, dazzle camo, because I was searching for dazzle camo socks. Like that gets really meaningful and that's exciting. And that's where you get out of creepiness and you get into utility and you get into meaning. And so like, I think the problem with the advertising industry, and I'll clarify, we're not an agency.

23:50We're a services firm. We work with agencies, but we also work with brands directly. We do, we work with IP holders as well. We need to start thinking about people as those intersectional identities and serving those systems because if we don't, and I'm talking about sports highlights here as well, and I'm a massive NHL fan, go Canes, and part of that is like, when I watch a broadcast right now, I have a choice that's home fans and away fans. What else? What other identity is that binary? Like we have to start realizing that there's all sorts of different systems that we can build on because we're living in this space where tools are digitized or at least most industries are moving into that space.

24:37The opportunity to personalize is massive. And so we do have teams that produce 1.5 million assets a year for a single piece of IP. With the idea that as you get into that, you can get more and more performant, you can get more and more personalized, and you produce meaningful content. Let me go back for a second and ask you to break it down. Home fans, away fans, what's the in-between? What are some of the things you're talking about that exist in between them? So like my identity, like you just heard, I'm a scuba diver. I'm super into punk music and heavy metal. I think that's probably a cornerstone of my identity.

25:11I like things that are move fast and are exciting. And so the idea of watching a broadcast that's tailored to that viewership base and is engaging with that, because when you think about what other media today do you watch that isn't personalized, you know, and so looking at how like a sports broadcast, for example, could start using a system. And I think one of the things that if anybody took anything away from this conference, other than the fact that like Jensen may be coming out with a jacuzzi product, which I will be buying if that is available. NVIDIA branded jacuzzis sound amazing. And there are data centers, by the way, like he made a joke about that.

25:49I'm sorry for those that missed this joke. The new giant processors take in their liquid cooled and they take in, believe it was at room temperature and they output at about 45, the temperature of a jacuzzi. Okay. Two liters. I believe it was two liters per second or per minute. And it's a jacuzzi. He made a joke that, yeah, we're going to have a jacuzzi peripheral. Buy a data center and get a jacuzzi. What's amazing, though, is there are data centers in the UK where they're built next door to council estate pools. And they heat swimming pools. And they heat them, yeah. But before I tangent on more things, like what RAG is, is a system retrieval augmented generation system.