AI driven advertising is growing in popularity. 47% of marketing professionals now trust AI to target ads.
This growth in popularity and trust is helping ad platforms grow which, in an industry that is being hit hard by a decline in spend, is positive. As Richard Wilson, CEO of Clickon puts it, AI is allowing advertising processes to become “more efficient, effective, and impactful”.
In this blog post we discuss four ways AI driven advertising is changing the sector and helping to fuel advertising at scale.
Programmatic advertising relies heavily on AI for the management of the real-time-bidding (RTB) process, which involves advertisers bidding for ad space over real-time auctions. Ad platforms use predictive machine learning models to algorithmically adjust ad placements and predict campaign outcomes based on predetermined performance indicators.
These machine learning models process billions of data points to identify data patterns, prime ad inventory, ad space, and ad formats. As Suraj Nambiar, National Media head of Tonic Worldwide explains, “AI/ML algorithms can analyze large amounts of data and make data-driven decisions faster and more accurately than humans.” Capabilities that make both audience segmentation and the media buying process vastly more efficient.
AdLudio recently raised $2.5 million towards advancements in AI and data science on its platform. “With this additional investment from Mercia, the next stage of our AI-led platform, offering fully-automated capabilities, will provide brands and agencies the chance to translate user attention into profit”, comments Paul Coggins, CEO of AdLudio.
Personalized advertising uses insights into customer preferences and demographics to improve advertising relevance. Machine learning in advertising makes personalization achievable at scale by working through vast data sets to analyze the type of content that is most likely to attract the attention of an advertiser’s target audience.
In February 2023, Clinch (a platform offering omnichannel personalization) announced a certification with Samsung Ads to deliver a new automated personalisation solution to the Samsung Ads platform. The partnership between Clinch and Samsung means advertisers can make use of Samsung Ads’ automatic content recognition first party data set, making it easier to personalize and scale campaigns under a single workflow.
Meta has also made efforts to adjust its advertising technology in response to privacy changes made by Apple (which forced apps to get permission to serve personalized ads to tracked users). Meta’s Advantage+ platform uses advertising AI to automatically generate, test, and run ads according to specific advertiser objectives. And despite some vocal concerns around the level of control companies must hand over to Meta, many advertisers have found the tool to significantly boost advertising campaign performance.
With third-party data under attack, and pressure from consumers for improved personal security standards, ad platforms must find ways to achieve audience segmentation and personalization without cookies. AI and machine learning in advertising is helping bridge the gap by delivering privacy-compliant targeting, using contextual data in place of third-party data.
Advertising AI allows publishers to serve ads that align with the content on a particular page that matches with the interests of their target customers. And by analyzing text, video, and image content across pages, advertising AI can also help to optimize ad placement and achieve high-impact campaigns.
Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence technology that creates original content in response to prompts. That could be content in the form of text, images, video, and/or audio. It’s a hot topic on everyone’s lips right now thanks to the likes of ChatGPT, and DALL- E2; generative AI tools that create text and image-based content respectively.
According to Levi Matkins, CEO of programmatic marketing platform, LifeStreet, generative AI technology will be a gamechanger for businesses with “app marketers using generative AI to enhance and scale the creative asset development process”.
Earlier this year, global advertising platform MGID announced the introduction of generative artificial intelligence within its intelligent solutions stack. The product, still undergoing beta testing, will use DALL- E2 to generate digital images from text-based cues and headlines based on historical data to enhance the performance of MGID’s ads.
AI marketing firm Instreamatic has also launched a new contextual audio advertising solution which allows advertisers to generate fully-customized creative audio content using generative AI. Unlike traditional audio ad recordings (using a voice actor to record a handful of variations on an ad script), generative AI can automatically generate thousands of ad variations across a single campaign.
“Starting from a single original audio ad, our advanced generative voice AI capabilities can create unlimited new creatives to address each listener as an individual'', comments Stas Tushinskiy, CEO of Instreamatic.
The advertising sector is fully embracing AI and AI driven advertising is fast becoming the norm.
Mark Read, Chief Executive of WPP has declared advertising AI technology as “fundamental” to the company’s future.
And despite concerns from some - namely an open letter signed by Elon Musk urging “all AI labs to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT- 4” - the enthusiasm for AI and machine learning in advertising is clear to see.
AI and machine learning in advertising are fast becoming the bread and butter of the sector. AI for advertising is already the rocket-fuel behind programmatic offerings. And it looks like further developments in advertising AI and machine learning in advertising could be the key to a successful transition to first-party data once the cookie finally crumbles.
The future of AI in advertising is truly exciting.
And there’s no doubt that there’s more innovation in sight.
For more information about our work with companies in the adtech space, take a look at our industry page.
