Like many other
industries, the advertising and media worlds are experiencing major disruptions
caused by artificial intelligence (AI). While there remain many challenges when
it comes to advertising with AI, there are also many benefits to this emerging
tool. Using research and data on current trends, we highlight five essential
ways AI can harness consumer data, engagement tools, and employee skills to
help transform how the advertising world informs and reaches consumers.
When people hear
the phrase “artificial intelligence,” consumers and advertisers alike have a
variety of reactions to it. Some people envision robots taking over the world,
or at least much of the workforce, which means forfeiting some jobs. Some
advertisers may picture hackers and disruptors working on fake ads. The reality
is that although there are definitely challenges to integrating and working
with AI, advertisers are already using it to their advantage and will only
continue to further integrate AI applications to more effectively reach a
target audience in an increasingly fragmented consumer space. For those
advertisers who are still wary of using AI, there are lots of benefits.
In 2019, most
people are aware of the controversy surrounding Facebook, when it was
discovered the tech company has been sharing user data to allow other companies
to target users in very specific ways, often through utilizing AI. We have all
seen the ads that pop up in our Instagram feeds for things we were thinking
about buying and wondered - “how did they know?”, or gotten emails from Netflix
suggesting shows we knew we wanted to watch, but just hadn’t gotten around to
doing so. While sometimes this form of advertising can feel invasive, it makes
it easier to find products, services, and entertainment tailored to your needs
and interests thanks to AI. Facebook’s methods of sharing information with
advertisers may be a bit extreme, but it led to the type of advertising that’s
becoming more and more common today.
Through
analyzing massive, almost inconceivable, amounts of data, AI can track your
habits and guess at what you might want to watch, buy, or read. Surveys of media buyers and
advertisers show
that a majority of marketers are incorporating AI research into their creative
planning and marketing strategies; even more are planning to add it into their
methods in 2019. The advertising industry is gathering and harnessing user data
and then turning that information into smarter ways to reach consumers. The
following five areas highlight some of the innovations in the use of AI; most
advertisers believe this is only the beginning.
Data Science
The $100 billion ad industry has always done its best to reach you
where you want to be reached, such as advertising clothing in a fashion
magazine because they know their target audience is likely reading those magazines.
The challenge for advertisers is that consumers have more choices than ever
before. Another challenge is that even though breaking down user data means
advertisers can make smart, data-driven decisions, the amount of data across
different systems can be hard to process. AI technology makes gathering this
data and analyzing it for trends more accurate and less expensive than
previously seen in advertising, allowing advertisers to more efficiently use
this data. AI can also tackle the data across all available platforms to create
better marketing analytics.
As finely tuned
AI capabilities are further integrated into marketing data collection, the
worry that staff will have to become more technically educated, or even that
humans could possibly be phased out of the process altogether, isn’t the case.
AI technology serves advertisers, saving them time and effort, but it still
needs a human eye to decode and apply it to various tasks. The efficiency that
AI provides creates more time for creative thought, direct consumer relations,
and decision-making that could benefit the entire advertising cycle.
Machine
Learning
The systemic
integration of AI into digital marketing strategies means that consumers may
not even realize decisions are being made based on their preferences and usage
of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. For example, if you click on and
buy clothing shown to you on Instagram, an algorithm very
likely chose it.
Consumers, while still wary of sharing too much with companies or of big tech
being too invasive in their lives, are becoming more comfortable with AI’s
ability to learn from them and serve up content that fits their needs.
The greater
audience understanding that marketers garner from experience-based
self-learning algorithms can help business strategy, marketing choices, and
content creation be more tailored, cost-effective, and achieve a better return
on investment. Connecting with consumers where they want to be met means
consumer response is generally positive, since using these models ensures the
content they want is what they get.
These AI
capabilities are projected to grow quickly and include futuristic initiatives
such as machine vision, the ability to take a photo of a product and have your
phone or computer find it for you, and interactive programming, which then
changes outcomes based on your known preferences when it comes to the
advertisements you see.
Targeted
Advertising
The average click-thru rate for advertisements is often so small
that it's leading to limited ROI for many advertisers. Consumers respond to
personalized advertising for the content of their choice, which means highly
targeted ads help consumers get more information about what speaks to them and
the response rate is much higher for businesses.
The data
analyzed to help advertisers choose where to place their spots can even predict
demand or problems in content supply in real time as consumers click on what
they want to look at or buy.
Advertisers have
learned that context and content are everything. There is even a movement to
tie ads and messaging to a particular moment, so companies don’t appear to be
ad blind, or not in touch with what is happening at any given time. You wouldn’t
want to run a bubbly spot showcasing positive interactions during coverage of a
tragic event, for example. Utilizing AI to identify when is or isn’t an
appropriate time to run a certain ad can help companies avoid embarrassing
situations.
Next Generation
Automation
As AI continues
to advance, the things we are already growing used to will evolve and add
capabilities that once seemed the stuff of science fiction. Speech recognition
already means that your Alexa device can order pizza, paper towels, or even
play a song like the ones you’ve already listened to; voice commands will
continue to be used in more applications. Image recognition and speech-to-text
transcription lead to even closer direct consumer relationships across channels
and interactive entertainment; these developments are on their way to our daily
lives.
Social media is
where a lot of innovative technologies first appear and go through consumer
tests. Facebook is still the source of most data that advertisers utilize and
which then often influences what you see on other social media platforms, such
as Instagram. Twitter already crops photos to be most appealing based on
eye-tracking, pinpointing where a person will look first. Companies that do the
best on social media are those that use data science to analyze and act upon
findings to change messaging or products as needed. AI can help with this
quickly and cheaply.
Other products
already being used, but with increased development and applications, are
chatbots and dynamic pricing. Chatbots appear on sites and can handle routine
customer questions and issues, dynamic pricing analyses pricing across the web,
and make sure a company’s pricing of products is relevant.
Content
Curation and Creation
While a real
person wrote this article, you’ve probably read one that was written by a
computer. Clearly most things still need human oversight, but AI “writers” are
growing more intelligent about the pieces they can put together. At Forbes, for
example, staff members use Bertie - kind of a “writer’s companion” that studies
what a writer most often writes about, how they write, and then makes
suggestions about stories, areas of interest, and writing styles.
AI can also
suggest headlines based on what works best for SEO purposes. If you’ve ever
been drawn in by a headline such as “Top 10 Places to Go on Spring Break,” it
may have been written by AI. AI is even used to analyze behavior and see what
you might want to do next and make suggestions. Eventually, it’s likely AI will
be involved in content creation and immersive content experiences, studying and
then suggesting what content viewers are most likely to watch. This direct
consumer relationship is possible through the use of AI.
The keys to
successful advertising in the AI age are to know your brand, invest in
understanding context and content, and then use that targeted content across
channels to develop messaging that has a human touch. Because no matter how
much data you have, you still need to disrupt the massive amounts of information
each consumer interacts with each day to strike a nerve and capture or change
behavior in order to draw attention to your product or service.
