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The Best Ads Feature Tomorrow’s Trends

By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 exabytes of consumer data will be generated every day through social media, emails, photos and connected devices.

Inside all these bits and bytes lies a wealth of insight into consumer trends, preferences, behaviors and even predictions on what everyone will be talking about next week. Imagine being able to rely on this data to predict the hottest trends three days before they peak.

The media side of the advertising business has always been good at using data and AI. On the creative side, delivering an emotionally engaging message at the right time has traditionally been left to instinct.

All that is changing. With AI, creatives now have the ability to use real-time insights to inspire and inform their work. These insights can help them tap into the wants, needs and desires of their audience and channel their energy into dynamic content.

This content can then be delivered to consumers wherever they are—be it on mobile apps, web browsers or streaming platforms. The right message, delivered at the right time, allows brands to truly connect with their customers and elevate the human experience.

Tomorrow’s news

Brand content that’s based on near real-time insight is a marketer’s dream. Leveraging AI and machine learning, we recently introduced a patented algorithm that makes it possible to capture, aggregate and analyze 100 million posts per day from each of 50,000 social, news and blog sources.

Every half hour the algorithm executes a million multi-dimensional predictions to identify the trends and keywords necessary to enable real-time content generation, create predictive media keyword targeting and provide insights to SEO engines and marketing creatives.

The technology was originally developed to help organizations detect cybersecurity risks and allow government entities to identify potential compromises to public safety. We quickly recognized that the same algorithms could help predict social trends and preferences and provide brands a look into the future.

The algorithm predicts trends with 70 percent accuracy three days in advance  That accuracy jumps to 90 percent within 24 hours.

This gives creative teams a wide window to develop culturally and contextually relevant content. Imagine how much more effective your creative brainstorming sessions would be if you knew what news would be making headlines the next day.

But then again, it’s important to realize that even when presented with AI-derived insights, humans are ultimately in charge. It’s up to the marketers and agency partners to place bets on which trending topics are relevant and relatable to their target audience and create content around that.

Currently trending

Some of our clients are already putting predictive technologies into action.

For example, a major shoe retailer was looking to reach new audiences for digital targeting and retargeting. They set an aggressive goal—30 percent net new audience within 30 days. Predictive technology was used to analyze social media data and predict trending keywords and topics among a target audience of sneakerheads.  The music, entertainment and sports trends that the predictive AI uncovered were then used to inspire our creative.

The result? During a nationally televised basketball game, a young fan reached out to touch a basketball player during the game. Fans thought it was a great teachable moment and conversations on social blew up. The AI predicted that the conversation was going to increase 4x within 72 hours.

Using this insight—and the power of surprise—we created an ad featuring a toddler’s hand reaching out to touch a shoe with the headline, “Don’t touch the merchandise.”

The ad was a win. Engagement rates on Facebook and Instagram increased tenfold, and clickthrough rates on display advertising more than doubled. We surpassed our target goal for expanding market reach too, bringing in 96 percent net new audience in 30 days.

By using AI to inform creative marketers can develop and deliver messages that resonate with customers and connect on a more human level. And the brands that are successful at improving the human experience are able to build loyalty and establish lasting relationships.