Q&A: Natasha Wallace on why Jellyfish has launched an AI-driven in-housing media platform 

Jellyfish, part of The Brandtech Group, has unveiled a first-of-its-kind AI-driven media platform for clients and inhousing. Built on the company’s automated marketing system, the platform is a unified framework that taps into a range of proprietary AI agents and tools, including Jellyfish’s recently released Media Ops Agent. 

The launch of the new in-housing media platform is the last piece of a 12-month AI development program, which saw the company overhaul every aspect of the traditional marketing mix from insights to SEO, assets to activation, and MMM to reporting. Highlights include Pencil Pro to scale content delivery and Share Of Model to help brands leverage SEO in the age of AI. 

New Digital Age spoke to Natasha Wallace, Global Chief Solutions Officer – Strategy Planning and AI at Jellyfish, to find out more…

What sets Pencil Pro apart from other AI-power content tools on the market?

My job is really about understanding what a client needs to do and translating that into an action plan we can deliver. And increasingly, it’s also about getting them ready for AI – because that’s topic one, two and three in nearly every conversation.

Pencil Pro is our enterprise solution for generating digital assets. The founders called it Pencil because they saw it as an aid, not a replacement to human designers and decision-makers. It works just as well for an in-house studio team as for a creative agency, and it creates an open space for collaboration.

Historically, if a client didn’t like the first draft, you’d lose weeks. Now it’s days. We can get a concept out quickly, get feedback, and iterate. That makes the creative process much faster and more collaborative. The goal is to create more advertising and digital assets that perform better, stay on brand, and connect more closely with consumers, whether that’s through cultural relevance, language, or format.

One of the big advantages is reducing costs on media that isn’t working. We don’t want to waste money on steps that don’t generate revenue for clients. We want to put spend into growth. Pencil helps us to do that.

Why is AI such a talking point right now in relation to media impact?

At the end of the day, clients want to be the very best in their category at driving growth, without blowing out costs. That means producing better outcomes, faster and more efficiently, while still being innovative and distinct.

We’re building an end-to-end intelligent system. Pencil Pro is a huge part of that, but we’re also looking at how AI agents can help us deploy media campaigns, extract insights, and connect creative to activation. The aim is fewer hand-offs, fewer errors, and more confidence that what we produce will actually perform in the world.

What kind of support are your customers asking for in relation to the rapidly evolving AI landscape?

Right now, brands are worried about two big things: search traffic is dropping as AI changes the way people retrieve information, and they need to grow without spending more. They’re asking, ‘Am I even discoverable anymore?’ and ‘How do I do more, better, without raising costs?’

That’s driving a rethink of team structures. Clients realise they need different skills, tighter collaboration across media, creative, and retail teams, and in some cases a whole new approach to how marketing is organised.

The most ambitious clients are already asking about agentic journeys—how to optimise not just for consumers, but for the agents acting on their behalf. We’re about to launch a first-to-market audit of an agentic path to purchase, layering it over the consumer journey. It will show us what domains an agent visits, what content it consumes, and how we can win every step of that journey.

What does success look like for Jellyfish over the next couple of years?

Our core ambition is to be the best AI-enabled marketing service provider in the world. That means building an agency around agentic capabilities—our product suite, our tools, and our people’s literacy in AI. 

We want to be the most innovative, but not for innovation’s sake. Everything we invent should be useful, meaningful, and have a material impact. That’s what we’ve already shown with Share a Model, with Social Agents, and now with our agentic media platform.

It’s not about reducing headcount or becoming an automated machine. It’s about better work, better partnerships with clients, and building a team skilled for the future. We want to be the agency that invents things, does cutting-edge work today, and stays cutting-edge tomorrow.

Also published in: New Digital Age