INSIGHT
MEET THE NEW AD MEN
Artificial intelligence has been hyped by some as the next big thing in marketing . Adclouds . io ’ s Alok Alström explains what needs to happen for it to reach its true potential .
THE ADVERTISING INDUSTRY has long been driven by the ideas of creative people , and in many companies the process of designing ads is virtually unchanged since the 1960s Mad Men era .
Apart from rudimentary A / B testing on top of some Photoshop files in a folder on someone ’ s computer , advertising agencies and marketing departments typically do
not use any more sophisticated digital tools than this in their creative process to maximise their return on advertising investments .
Digitisation has so far improved the advertising industry ’ s reliance on humans by bringing in mathematics and science to improve audience targeting and channel selection . But these improvements have to a large degree plateaued .
Some explain this as coming down to the lack of science in the creative process , asserting that creative professionals are not sufficiently interested in mathematical algorithms and therefore lack the patience to spend hours crunching through data . But perhaps the main reason is rather that only recently have developers built comprehensive tools that creative professionals can rely on to do this for them .
Affiliates , in particular , are motivated by different aims than the ad men of days gone past . For many affiliate marketers , advertising and marketing is not the job , but merely one part of it , and any way to streamline the process and improve their ROI would be very welcome . Perhaps it ’ s time to bring the ad creative process into the future through the use of instruments that are simple to use but that
“ For many affiliate marketers , advertising and marketing is not the job , but merely one part of it and any way to streamline the process and improve their ROI would be very welcome ” conceal artificial intelligence ( AI ) and the crunching of large amounts of data under the hood .
Start-ups around the world are now taking on the challenge of making the creative production more automated and data-driven . Most of them have focused on building managed products , although one or two have created comprehensive cloudbased tools which enable everyone involved in the design of ads to create , manage and improve their designs using powerful algorithms to better capture the interest of their audience , ultimately rendering the advertising process faster , cheaper and more precise .
To understand the extent of the improvement that the future holds , one must start by understanding the limitations of the present . First , the current process for creating ads is ineffective , because individuals are deciding what to do based on guesswork or intuition rather than
mining the rich data universe out there . It ’ s also highly manual , with a lot of repetitive manual production work by creative professionals . Finally , it ’ s fragmented , with different solutions , people and functions involved . Often the images , brand fonts , messages , etc , that are used to produce ads are spread across many different personal computers , Dropboxes and people ’ s minds , with the ads themselves spread over different networks that make it almost impossible to get the consolidated view required to garner the insights necessary to improve performance by monitoring data and performance .
So , when we take a step back to look at the broader marketing landscape , it ’ s clear that we as an industry could be using data far more efficiently in the advertising value chain , rather than just relying on creatives . In today ’ s marketing landscape , best practice marketing dictates the use of :
●●Programmatic data for intelligent media buying ;
●●Landing-page optimisers to continuously evolve landing pages ;
●●Retargeting to track your audience while maximising ad exposure ; and
●●Funnel optimisers to evolve sales funnels and increase the value of each customer relationship .
However , ad design is still largely based on human intuition , past experience and guesswork . No one really knows beforehand if a creative is good or bad or how a really strong creative design could have improved conversion and ROI of a campaign .
“ Ad design is still largely based on human intuition , experience and guesswork . No one really knows beforehand if a creative is good or bad or how a strong creative design could have improved conversion and ROI ”
However , this could all be able to change with the application of AI to ad creation , and in the online gambling industry , where the cost of acquisition and marketing spend are incredibly high , this could have a significant impact on revenues for both operators and affiliates .
AI-based solutions allow users to
54 iGB Affiliate Issue 62 APR / MAY 2017