TV (incremental reach among light TV
users) means that it will be easier for
agencies and advertisers to work with
large publishers/players. All this power
will further increase demand for greater
accountability, and walled gardens will
need to demonstrate their value (through
third party measurement) around the ROI
that these platforms deliver and, most
importantly, their contribution/synergies
to the overall brand spend.
Tips for Marketers: Marketers should
embrace walled gardens as an opportunity
to deliver validated audiences, but should
also extend demands for accountability
beyond basic elements (like view-ability
or safety) and into true branded impact
of these platforms in the context of their
total marketing spend.
Marketing will evolve from
algorithms to AI
The last decade of digital marketing has
been ruled by the companies with the
most compelling algorithms. However,
we’re starting to turn the corner on
the development of machine learning
technology such that software is now
making smart outcome-based decisions.
We’re getting our first glimpse of
functional artificial intelligence being
applied to marketing challenges in new
and interesting ways. These machine
learning approaches don’t apply specific
algorithms to all campaigns but custom
tune campaigns by taking in a myriad of
unstructured data, making sense of it, and
converting it into programmatic media
decisions.
While machine learning will dominate
in the foreseeable future, we’ll start to
see applications of all kinds of AI-driven
tech such as natural language processing,
computer vision and autonomous virtual
agents and chatbots. While marketing
might not necessarily be the first
application of AI tech, it’ll be an easy
opportunity many will seek to exploit.
This isn’t the omniscient AI from science
fiction but the impact it has will be
substantial. This kind of functional AI
will put a marketer’s advertising campaign
on autopilot. We will likely be less reliant
on marketing “wizards” to drive results;
instead the edge in AI-driven marketing
will go to those who invest in creating,
curating and acquiring the data to feed
their AI solutions.
The question that remains to be answered
in the field of marketing AI will be one
of privacy and control. Will consumers be
happier that an anonymous AI is making
decisions from their data or will this
deepen the concerns over personal data
privacy? With GDPR on the horizon,
we’re sure to find out sooner rather than
later.
Tips for Marketers: Start playing with
machine learning tools in the marketing
space; they’re more abundant than you
may be aware. However, due diligence is
more important than ever, and you should
be cautious of companies AI-washing
their solutions.
Measurement follows media
over-the-top
The mainstream growth in consumer
adoption of “Over-The-Top” (OTT)
streaming is challenging the status-quo
in every quarter of the advertising supply
chain. Scale and new data capture streams
will usher TV and cross-platform video
measurement into the OTT era.
Predictions of fragmentation and cord-
cutting that were waiting in the wings
just a few years ago now seem well-worn
standards on the modern media stage. As