Artificial intelligence might be disrupting how marketers do their jobs, but the robots aren’t taking over anytime soon.
For agencies and brands alike, AI must be a partnership—a collaboration between people and technology that lends power and insight to existing programs. Many of the challenges advertisers currently face, from ad effectiveness and consumer engagement to brand safety and cross-device targeting, look less daunting through the lens of AI’s potential.
Let’s consider what that means in the context of specific roles, from media buyer to creative director.
The AI Media Buyer
TV audiences are spread across traditional linear TV, over-the-top, on-demand platforms and digital and social channels. This makes planning on the publisher’s schedule —that is, buying time when a show airs—less effective. But multiplatform and digital buys that are not aware of each other risk sending the same ad to the same consumer on different devices.
The incredible number of data points today’s AI can process in real time—things like weather, location, purchase history, social media usage, etc.—makes it possible to pinpoint when and where a consumer may be most receptive to an ad. And because AI systems learn over time, they predict behavior into the future, further informing media buys and overall marketing strategy.
“Ultimately, the marketer is becoming smarter with AI, and can use their smarts and expertise in various active and leveraged ways to help campaigns do better,” says Mark Torrance, CTO of Rocket Fuel, whose predictive marketing platform leverages real-time data and AI.
The AI Creative Director
AI can improve ad targeting, but what about the message? Don’t expect technology to come up with an award-winning campaign just yet. It is, however, likely to be powering the creative brief that drives the program. “It’s going to be a long time before AI is actually designing the ads, posing models and composing English sentences that are catchy taglines,” says Torrance. “A lot of the insight AI does give us comes from looking at the content of ads to understand better what’s in them, what kinds of things cause a reaction in which people and who is buying and when.”
Technology is also cutting down on the time previously spent on number crunching and analysis—getting to the insights that can determine things like the pacing and cadence of messages. According to Mark Zagorski, EVP of Nielsen Marketing Cloud, “In the same way that programmatic technologies took out the friction between buyers and sellers, AI can take out a lot of the analytics and analysis that people [now] have to do.”
The AI UX Analyst
AI allows people to interact with their devices in a more personal way by powering natural language processing and image recognition. And as AI advances, more data and more powerful machine learning will be able to understand subtleties and personalize the customer experience.
For example, AI-powered chatbots are working toward providing product recommendations like a well-informed sales associate. “In the future,” explains Beck Kloss, senior director ads and merchandising at eBay, “we can instantly know the person, steer them to the right part of the store, surprise them with something they didn’t even know they would love.”
The AI Recruiter
There are still many areas where AI needs help to be real and effective. Not surprisingly, the most significant talent gap may be where marketing meets engineering. “The biggest challenge with applying AI is that those with domain expertise are unaware of what the technology is capable of,” says Mariya Yao, head of research & design at AI advisory firm TopBots. “And those with the technical aptitude are not intimately aware of the data and domain they’re dealing with.”
Aptitude aside, marketers still have a role. “Marketers have a fear that they might lose control with AI,” says Lung Huang, head of strategic partnerships at 84.51˚. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. It takes a different subset of people to really learn where that human interaction rules base needs to happen. AI can definitely learn, but it can’t empathize and it can’t be creative.”
There’s plenty of work for everyone, machines included. Besides, AI isn’t going to solve the challenges of digital advertising all by itself.
About the Sponsor
Rocket Fuel’s been using AI in marketing for over 8 years. Explore the magic of predictive marketing at RocketFuel.com.
Stuart Feil is custom publishing director of Adweek.
