AI Can Bring the Fun Back to Advertising
Long ago, the advertising industry lost its key ingredient — fun. With an overabundance of campaigns to optimize and oversee, marketers have no time to tap into the creativity or strategic thinking that persuaded many to pursue a career in the industry in the first place. Research indicates that 63% of marketers plan to change jobs or careers this year, making finding solutions to retain and attract talent imperative to the industry’s success.
Programmatic media buying has become increasingly tedious and difficult for marketers. Yet there is hope with exciting emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, serving as strategic tools to help address marketers’ foremost needs and challenges — helping marketers combat the tedious nature of programmatic media buying. The implementation of AI presents a unique opportunity to infuse fun and excitement back into the industry.
Technology makes it possible to truly automate media buying and optimization through deep learning, delivering more effective results at scale. More importantly, the unique algorithms integrated within these technologies give marketers insights that the human brain simply cannot so that people can better, and more happily, do their jobs.
Tackling Marketer Burnout with Automation
Marketers and agencies can no longer (and, honestly, do not want to) manually manage campaigns on their own. As people reprioritize what matters in their lives, they are quitting jobs that do not offer work-life balance in pursuit of positions that do. Churning and burning your most important resource — people — is no longer a viable business strategy.
At the same time, brands are continuing to increase their investments in digital advertising, leaving marketers scrambling to meet the growing, specific needs of the campaigns they are managing. Expectations for success are rising and key metrics are more complex, yet the time available to focus on each campaign rapidly declines.
The result? Marketers and agencies are stretched thin and stuck spending the vast majority of their time on manually optimizing, something a human brain was never meant to do. Deep learning takes away the most stressful parts of the optimization process so that marketers can focus their time planning and orchestrating more unique and creative campaigns.
How AI Enhances Advertising’s Human Element
Marketers’ true value lies in creativity rather than their ability to pull levers within the complex advertising machine. Deep learning makes it possible to shift the responsibility of the mundane tasks involved in media optimization to an automated and constantly learning system.
So, how does the new technology accomplish this? AI-powered deep learning brings a new level of insight into campaigns driven by sophisticated algorithms capable of identifying patterns and nuances at a speed the human brain cannot perceive. This allows for more specific media planning and buying based on the key factors that lead to conversion for every ad shared. As these algorithms learn more about the audiences and context in which customers convert, they adapt — becoming more intelligent and accurate over time and decreasing the need for human intervention within the optimization process. That is an excellent outcome for the industry.
Why? Because humans have never been good at guessing what tactics will and will not increase the efficacy of an advertising campaign. But AI and machine learning solutions were made for this. They provide marketers with the information, data, and insight needed to build effective campaigns at scale.
Rather than blindly orchestrating campaign ideas, marketers can strategically partner with AI to gather the information required to develop more pointed and meaningful campaigns. Data is power, and equipping marketers with more accurate and meaningful insights allows them to make informed decisions as they map out campaign concepts.
Inspiring Change and Cultivating Innovation
The advertising industry needs to return to a place of excitement and fun, using new technologies and sciences that can make fundamental differences. AI technologies have the potential to revolutionize the way marketers work. We are at a point similar to when the computer spreadsheet was developed. Accountants and financial experts were finally able to focus on strategic ideas and the meaning of the numbers instead of constantly adding and checking the arithmetic.
Marketers and agencies now have that ability with automated deep learning tools. Giving marketers their time back while reducing burnout is the recipe to boost morale and retention, empowering marketers to shift their focus to innovating in other areas of their marketing strategy rather than being forced to hyper-fixate solely on the optimization component.
Marketers and agencies are already beginning to adopt these technologies, kickstarting the industry’s transformation into a better, more exciting environment for everyone. This technology will only continue to allow people in advertising to fall back in love with their job. It will also enable marketers to lean into the very things that attracted them to the industry in the first place — excitement, innovation, and creativity — to deliver real value to their clients at scale.
Jeremy Fain is the CEO and co-founder of Cognitiv.
