It is 2022, and AI and ML no longer have the reputation of being the futuristic SciFi technologies they were thought to be. AI and ML are very much here and are disrupting business as we know it. From sentient and super-intelligent digital assistants to image recognition, from self-driving cars (Thanks, Elon!) to global superstar Shah Rukh advertising your neighborhood grocery store. Pick any aspect of your life and work, literally. And you’ll notice elements of AI and ML transforming your experience.
Why should advertising and marketing stay bereft of the phenomena that are changing the world? They haven’t, in fact. Beyond that one AI-based Cadbury ad that got all the print space and attention, AI and ML are transforming advertising and marketing in unprecedented ways.
The impact of AI and ML in advertising & marketing in general and digital advertising specifically
There’s no better way to understand the impact than to see what the numbers say.
McKinsey finds that AI and ML will generate $1.4 Trillion to $2.6 Trillion in value in just three years by solving marketing and advertising problems alone.
Marketers’ use of AI went from a minuscule 29% in 2018 to a staggering 84% in 2020. Do you know what that means? A mind-boggling 186% increase in adoption. Indeed, this growth is not without reason.
Drift’s 2021 Marketing Leadership Benchmark Report states that AI and ML promise to have the most significant impact on the future of marketing, along with voice assistants and martech.
But we asked why marketers and advertisers were in love with AI and ML. The answer is in data and time-cost. Marketers and advertisers have always aspired to be truly data-driven in their decisions, campaigns, and measurement. And AI and ML enable this. Also, with marketing usually being a cost center in most organizations, they operate on lean teams, with many skilled marketers doing repetitive tasks like data entry, analysis, campaign setup, and copywriting. All of this and more, often in tight timelines.
AI and ML can genuinely transform how effectively and efficiently advertisers and marketers perform – that makes all the difference!
AI & ML applications in digital advertising and marketing
AI & Ml implementation in digital advertising and marketing provides marketers more control. They empower them with tools to enhance customer experience, hyper-target consumer cohorts, automate CX and creative optimization, and much more.
Some of the most compelling AI and ML use cases in digital advertising include:
- Sentient chatbots, or chatbots that learn from continuous customer engagement to deliver hyper-personalized product recommendations and relevant content. Baby Dove, a global baby products brand, successfully implemented sentient chatbots for community building, parenting advice, and product recommendations.
- Customer retention, by consistently measuring customer engagement, identifying at-risk customers and helping marketers engage and retain them with creative techniques.
- Automated content production, including copywriting, measuring content resonance, and training your AI and ML tools on producing content based on learned best practices.
- Personalization, from messaging and creatives to newsletters that include AI-identified “most loved products.
- Customer segmentation and hyper-targeting, with machine learning and continuous measurement. Customer data can help segment your customers into specific cohorts based on behavioral and demographic insights.
Make the most of your customer data with a custom CDP that delivers on your unique data use cases
AI & ML in future of digital marketing
AI and ML don’t just promise to transform how marketing operates but also how marketers work. Let’s see the three key areas where marketers will make use of AI and ML in digital advertising in the coming years –
- Smarter and more effective implementation of AR and VR in product-led marketing
AI is already facilitating AR and VR in several ways. In the coming years, we foresee the combination of these technologies improving digital advertising by enabling enhanced, lifelike experiences. Think dress trial options and virtual test drives that feel genuinely frictionless. AI and ML will help marketers incorporate the actual product into their advertising strategies. First-hand, real-world experience over trusting the ad copy – what do you think will significantly impact your customers?
- Incorporating voice search into advertising strategy and measurement
With Google Home and Alexa making waves in the world of immersive experiences, we expect that AI, ML, and NLP will together transform search to incorporate voice and intent. We find that customers using voice searches often have a more substantial purchase intent. This aspect can benefit any consumer-facing business’ SEO strategy. The sooner marketers find effective ways to optimize their SEO to incorporate voice search, the faster they will be prepared for the AI and ML-led future of digital advertising.
- Acquiring new skill sets and new ways of working in marketing and advertising
With the increased adoption of AI and ML in the marketing lifecycle, the Mad Men era of advertising will well and truly be over. With AI and ML models and using and generating more data than ever, it will be a common expectation that marketers learn to read data and the stories it tells. As a result, advertising and marketing teams will have to discard their traditional playbooks and disrupt how they plan, execute, and measure their campaigns. They will need to stay open and curious, challenge conventional ways of thinking and working, and be truly agile. That is the only way marketers will exceed the new expectations that will come with their organizations’ investments in AI and ML technologies.
And now, you don’t have to do it alone
These are times of change and flux for entire marketing organizations. But, specifically for digital marketers, the evolution shows no signs of slowing.
Change can be intimidating, but you now have help at hand. Born in the post-4th Industrial revolution era, ReBid truly understands how technologies like AI and ML are changing the digital landscape. Our AI and ML experts have a great handle on the future potential of these technologies. This is why our product suite is visionary and future-proof.
ReBid Buy integrates AI and ML into media planning and buying to help you activate, analyze, and optimize your campaigns effectively and in real-time.
ReBid Insights incorporates AI and ML with your first-party data to empower you with future-proof data ingestion, single customer view, and data activation.
