How AI is changing the Advertising and Media industry

Over the past decade or so advertising has changed drastically. From the humble copywriter/editor complement, advertising today has turned into a multidimensional effort with professionals from multiple verticals pitching in to achieve the end result. This, of course, is no surprise considering the deep impact that IT has had on almost anything and everything. If a copy editor were to tell you 15 years ago that his computer will be taking care of your advertisement and its standing, you would have thrashed him with his keyboard and taken him to a mental asylum. Yet here we are at the pinnacle of IT (as far as we know) and computers are planning ad placement, bidding for keywords and updating you the status of their efforts. So the question we need to ask ourselves is how far can this be leveraged.

The use of AI and Machine learning for such processes is nothing new. As a matter of fact, the current usage of AI in advertising is still relatively primitive. But the inroads we are making through the use of this technology is substantial. However, for AI and machine learning to make any sort of assessment the most important thing is data and it needs lots of it.

What is Data Driven Advertising? 

Anything you do on the internet required the use of data and while you do it generates data as well. From a business perspective, one of the biggest reasons why organizations use the internet is for advertising. Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry with many dimensions within. Among them internet today is the most prominent and offers the most comprehensive results. So what kind of data is it that floats around the internet to help out with advertising. Well, the answer is pretty much everything, from search histories to personal information, social media updates to data pertaining to behavioral attributes, the internet is a repository for all these. Big data as we all have come to know it is what drives this process. While in the past data-driven advertising was largely based on manual analytics, the vertical today relies on automated technology.

The AI and Machine Learning Influence on Advertising     

While still in their inception stage, both machine learning and AI are being used more than we might have anticipated.

• Search History: Most of the data that is available today on the internet comes from search history. For advertisers, tools like Google AdWords offer keyword suggestions that tend to draw in more viewers based on their activity. This largely automated service provides an edge over competitors to place your ads with the right keywords. Be it product, service or information, anything you search for on the internet gets registered irrespective of the search engine. This information is then transferred to the highest bidder like in the case of Google as part of the google analytics tool. So advertisers who are registered with the tool gain access to your location, the products you were searching for, your brand preference if you have purchased anything and so on.

• Voice Recognition: Online shopping’s next frontier-voice recognition devices like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home are currently taking the entire e-commerce sector by storm. The ability of these devices to relay your requests as well as make suggestions based on your activity is truly something that will be influencing e-commerce in the years to come.

• Social Media Bots: While being the cause of much controversy recently, the use of bots in social media has made the process of gathering information lightning fast. Social media is the source for a plethora of sensitive information and since inception has been exploited by advertisers and marketing companies to plug their products.

• AI Content Creation: The use of AI for content creation particularly for social media and BuzzFeed, have truly revolutionized advertising and marketing. Several types of content on multiple platforms are being written by AI today. Still, in a primitive stage, this is a technology that will surely pick up in the years to come and who knows maybe be even replace human writers. It is predicted that by 2043 we might have the first number one best-seller authored by AI.

Conclusion

While the current state of AI does leave much to be desired for advertisers, we are not that far from perfecting it for that purpose. There are plenty of prospects to be had on the advertisements themselves as AI and machine learning develops. Machine learning, in particular, could be leveraged to design ads without any human involvement. Currently, technologies such as deep learning are being used in the imaging process in games and movies, which point to good prospects on that front.

There are many more technologies that are still in the prototype stage being tested under various scenarios to eventually integrate into the mainstream processes within advertising. So let us wait and watch as this bit of technology evolves and its story unfolds.