AI is a buzzword that we’ve heard about a lot and rightly so. It has infiltrated all facets of modern business and has the power to be transformational.

SwissCognitive According to Joanna O’Connell however, buzzwords without real understanding can be problematic, if not downright dangerous.

Evolving consumer behaviours – multi-device usage, decreased brand loyalty – mean that brands and their marketing teams need to be more agile to succeed. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are powerful tools that can make everything, from ad creative to media buying and planning, more effective.

Today, AI has infiltrated:

Media planning

The media planning process has traditionally been highly manual. Marketers can now use AI in the form of lookalike modelling to determine who and where their most valuable prospects are and make budget allocation decisions accordingly.

Media performance measurement

Programmatic platforms have been running decisioning logic for years to power automated digital media buying. Now machine learning algorithms, the most common application of AI in advertising, learn to predict the probability of media buy outcomes based on past user behaviour, market dynamics and marketer historical data, along with target KPIs to make real-time buying and pricing decisions across billions of available ad impressions. This is something a human simply could not do.

Media performance measurement

The speed of media buying and optimisation that’s become necessary to keep up with modern consumer demands means marketers must move faster from buying to measurable results to thoughtful action. Forms of AI are increasingly penetrating advertising measurement, including deeper pattern recognition to untangle complex customer behaviour and faster insights that are increasingly capable of pushing recommendations directly into media buying platforms.

Creative development, optimisation and insights

Ad creative is demonstrably critical in driving consumer behaviour. But the traditional creative process, which is highly manual, unidirectional and lengthy, doesn’t match the speed or nuance needed in today’s real-time, audience-driven advertising world. A new crop of creative advertising technologies has emerged to make the process more streamlined – while also vastly increasing creative output – to better match ad creative to a multiplicity of target audiences and/or media scenarios. The leading platforms in this sector offer a variety of AI-powered features, such as computer vision to analyse creative objects; pattern recognition to understand buyer behaviour, machine learning to optimise products, features or creatives shown; and natural language generation to create textual content.[…]

This article originally appeared in The Madtech Brief, Marketing‘s second print issue for 2019.