AI has been around for many years now, but with the likes of ChatGPT and Bard making headlines, there’s been a resurgence in public interest. Many are worried that AI will take their jobs, marketers included, but those of us who have been working with AI for years know that people shouldn’t be afraid of it. Technology is designed to supplement human creativity and increase productivity; it isn’t going to replace the role of marketers, but enhance it.
Modern marketing often relies on checking data and processing information from several different platforms. Optimisation, or continuous learning, is necessary in programmatic advertising. AI is built for these processes and can do them at a pace which is impossible for humans and, because AI is outcome-based, it removes a lot of complexity. This allows for increased productivity, a boost in output, and work getting done quicker, freeing marketers up for creativity, strategic direction, bringing on more clients, and increasing profitability and measurable outcomes – the holy grail for any marketer.
Here’s a few things AI leveraged for programmatic does really well: AI allows marketers to understand their audiences in real time. With more data available than ever before, AI is the engine to engage audiences based on their real life interests, even as consumer behaviour shifts. Marketers are then able to adjust their creative outputs to match with these changing interests.
Another area in which AI can be massively useful is optimising towards KPIs. When you point machine learning at a problem, it continually optimises towards it, whether it is ROAS (return on ad sales), CPA (cost per action/conversion), brand safety (ROAS (or return on ad spend) or a combination thereof. AI-powered platforms allow you to stop manually pulling levers and simply set campaigns right from the start.
Last, AI can be leveraged to deliver measurable outcomes. The huge amount of data that AI can process not only allows you to understand audiences but also measure all of your efforts effectively. Today’s landscape puts more pressure than ever on marketer’s budgets, so performance-based measurable outcomes have become essential to maximise efficiency.
It is imperative for marketers to engage with AI to supercharge their programmatic advertising and help them gain a more accurate picture of consumers and how best to engage them. Rather than getting bogged down in data, AI allows marketers to focus on building creative and messaging that resonates with target audiences, enabling campaigns to hit the mark every time.
The era of assumption and guesswork for advertisers is over, as AI provides real-time actionable insights into consumer behaviour and interests, which can be transformed into meaningful campaigns. When used strategically, AI can be a superpower and marketers should be prepared to leverage and adopt it to get the best possible results.
Deb Stambaugh is CMO at Quantcast.