From the BW Online Bureau
2018 will be remembered as the year when Artificial intelligence (AI) moved away from hype and predictions surrounding it to actual adoption and implementation. The year brought AI into the mainstream where numerous businesses warmed up to it, embraced it and reaped handsome results. Digital Marketing, being immensely data driven, has been one of the early adopters of AI and witnessed tremendous impact.
Digital Marketing is all about harnessing the power of data to create campaigns that are personalized to fit the desires and interests of the customers. Interacting with the customers at the right time on the right platform with the right message is critical to a campaign’s success. The competitive edge for a marketer is based on how quickly one can analyze the incoming data and recalibrate a campaign to outmaneuver the competition. But the biggest challenge is posed by the amount of data itself.
Making sense of the data
With an increased digital consumption the world is creating massive amounts of data on a daily basis. According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 5.0 report, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes (1 million terabytes) of data created each day! And it is estimated that a staggering 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth by 2020. Who imagined while using floppy disc drives of 1.44MB at one point, right? It is no less than a nightmare for human teams to crunch such humongous amount of data into actionable insights and tweak the ad strategies on multiple platforms simultaneously in real time. As a result, marketers without the power of AI limit their campaigns to a few common platforms and end up burning more budgets with less qualified leads to show. However, a ‘well trained’ AI can accomplish all this and much more at the same time on the fly.
Automated media buying
Here is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly taking over human teams in digital marketing. AI can process colossal amounts of data in a fraction of time which otherwise would take a human team to accomplish in days or months. It has taken over the digital media buying role in its entirety from planning, to buying and to optimizing ad campaigns. AI can quickly analyze customer data and can decide the platforms to target for better conversions. It can also transfer budget to the best performing platform and optimize it to ensure maximum Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Fighting ad fraud
Another important and very critical battle that AI is fighting on behalf of advertisers is tackling Ad fraud menace that has marred the digital advertising industry across the world. Ad fraud, as the name suggests, is a scam carried out to generate revenue by creating fake traffic. This is generally achieved by employing bots that mimic human clicks and impressions in order to dupe the advertiser of ad money. Ad fraud is so rampant that nearly 30% of the ad budget lay waste owing to such fraudulent activities. Seemingly impossible for humans, AI can keep an eye on the bots in real time to find fraudulent patterns. It can then tweak the ad delivery strategy quickly to curb such activities and help advertisers get the maximum bang for their buck.
AI has also started dabbling with ad creatives. Though these are early days and there is still a long way to go before AI can come up with full-fledged ads all by itself. However, it has started auto-generating multiple copies with varied tonalities for human teams to pick and choose from for different ad sets.
AI is the new normal
The changes that AI has brought and will bring in digital marketing are huge. The AI market in digital marketing is set to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of around 30% globally to reach USD 40.09 billion by 2025, according to estimates by Markets&Markets. This growth will be fuelled by Asian giants such as China, India, Japan, and South Korea. Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing is here to stay and is at the cusp of becoming the new normal. It has started reducing a lot of mundane and time-consuming tasks and thus enabling to focus more on increasing the value proposition. For the sheer value AI brings to the table it will rapidly become an indispensable ‘team member’ of the digital marketing teams globally.
