Tango and Cache want to help advertisers buddy up with AI
Three former VML department heads and an Accenture Song AI specialist walk into a bar. Or was it a Zoom meeting?
At any rate, Ross Weythman, Craig Page, Rhys Turner, and Patrick Rabier decided to form a business that operates both as an agency and an AI software company.
Tango and Cache — a punny buddy cop name from the 1989 movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell — neatly ties together a proprietary AI operating system and the company’s overriding mission: to blend human creativity with AI.
Following the buddy cop theme, Tango is the old-style advertising creative fighting to remain in the driver’s seat, and Cache (the AI OS) is the rookie upstart, determined to disrupt the industry.
“The agencies at the moment are using AI to do their existing process faster and more efficiently, and help them speed things up a bit,” Craig Page tells Mumbrella.
“Tango and Cache is a total re-imagining of what the agency process should be”.
“We’ve been thinking through each step of the process, understanding which elements are necessary for effectiveness and which elements are more designed for humans, and where we can make it better by taking constraints away, and making the creative decisions as strong as possible.”
The company is currently in beta mode, working with a handful of clients to test the tools and fine-tune the operating model. Part of this is figuring out what they will monetise.
“We’re researching different cost models,” Page says.
“We’re definitely exploring subscription-type systems and how we do that, whether it’s a credit-based thing, depending on the services you use. We’re exploring all of that at the moment. That’s to be defined.”
Ross Weythman tells Mumbrella the ultimate goal will be to sell Cache, the operating system, to in-house advertising agencies, who would then “slot into the ‘Tango’ role”, that of the traditional agency creative, working with the new AI kid on the beat.
This model is, of course, infinitely scalable.
“We’ve discovered through using AI that no model in the world is as good as the system you build around it,” Patrick Rabier, the team’s AI specialist, tells Mumbrella. He has been building Cache since late March.
“I think that’s what we’re trying to do here: We’re trying to find an AI system, which we’re trying to build now, which works for us and hopefully for our clients later.
“Where we draw the lines between ‘a model does everything’ and the human stakeholder is the area we’re playing in. And so it’s not fully automated. It’s not fully manual. It’s a crossover. And there’s going to be a lot of experimentation around that area, which is where I come in.
“Ross and Craig, all their insights can feed into my technical expertise. And then hopefully we’re going to build something that’s going to be incredibly efficient for what we need.”
The biggest hurdle the team foresees at the moment is, “the mindset shift that’s required to work in this way”, as Page puts it.
“We’re at the beginning of that journey, but it’s really going to change how people work.” He predicts those with creative mindsets will be more open-minded to different ways of working.
“I think that’s a requirement. I think a lot … particularly the more experienced end, are quite set in some ways that might be hard to shift. We’re going to need a lot of innovative early adopter type people to come and help kind of forge that path with us.”
Weythman wants to stress that Tango and Cache is “very focused on maintaining the human element in the creative part of advertising.” They aren’t interested in replacing humans.
“We know it’s so controversial. I mean, we read the news every day too, and we’re kind of like, ‘Are we all going to be replaced?'”
He calls Tango and Cache “an earnest effort” to steer the industry towards a better future. “That will hopefully maintain human creativity within whatever AI wave is crashing around us.”
Page said he knows they will be pitted against traditional agency models.
“We’re representing modernisation and transformation, but compared to the AI tools that are coming out there, we’re trying to retain humanity and craft – and push against the slop.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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