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The disruptions brought over the past few years have revolutionized the way we work, shop and consume data. Even education institutions, restaurants and retail businesses that had a strong offline presence have quickly made the switch to digital. To sum it up in an overly simplified context, brands have gone digital and so should their approach to reaching out to customers.
AI has been the frontier solution to aid this transition. In fact, according to the McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2022, Applied AI received the highest score for innovation.
So what does all this mean to marketers? How do we identify the opportunities and navigate the challenges of tech-enabled marketing?
Neel Pandya, CEO for MENA and JAPAC at Pixis, shares his thoughts on the subject.
Leveraging The Strengths of AI
From automating tasks to achieving creative scale and predicting consumer behavior, AI helps achieve it all. In today's digital age, an average human-being is exposed to about 4000 ads per day. This number is only set to increase manifold every year.
This means that marketers and agencies need to focus on understanding consumer behavior to provide each and every one of their target audiences with tailored communication. No more bombarding the masses with a generic message or ad copy.
This is exactly where the collaborative intelligence of ‘humans’ and ‘AI’ will help address the challenge of personalisation at scale. The different departments in a branding ecosystem will greatly benefit from Generative AI’s capabilities to self analyze large chunks of data to churn out effective text, relevant images and videos for ads. The creative teams will also be able to strategize and ideate more, instead of whiling away time on rote execution tasks.
Marketers will additionally be able to tap into the gray-matter capabilities of AI that enables it to scan thorough historical data sets and offer newer and better techniques at an incredible pace. From automating test campaigns, concurrently running it with existing ones, to assessing if they can go live to a wider audience, AI can do it all.
Opportunities Galore
To understand the scale and relevance of AI-led marketing, for a moment, we will need to drop our marketing hats and understand the industry through the lens of how businesses have begun to operate.
Industry Angle
FMCG companies have been implementing digital innovations through e-retail stores, manufacturing companies are leaning towards AI to automate and monitor key functions while corporates have begun to use AI in their copywriting efforts to achieve the tonality of a human. With such large-scale adoption of technology in business, the residue in the backend is a humongous amount of data for marketers to leverage.
Features such as Performance AI, Creative AI and Targeting AI will be implemented at a much greater scale across social platforms to achieve intelligent monitoring and customized targeting.
Data & Privacy Angle
The data depreciation that will be brought about by Google’s planned elimination of third-party cookies in Chrome browsers coupled with the rise of digital audiences will see more marketers leveraging AI to achieve desired results. Customers in the cookieless world will still expect personalized offerings and messaging from brands, but without their privacy being compromised.
This means brands will have to shift away from demographic advertising and approach contextual messaging intelligently. So marketing teams will do well this year if, instead of utilizing cookies to track their audience, they employ artificial intelligence to analyze content and determine precisely what their audience is reading in real-time.
Brands can also use the campaign-related information to inform other initiatives, which would enable them to improve on tried-and-true techniques like SEO and first-party data. So instead of seeing 8 different ads, consumers will be aligned to ad-messages that are actually relevant to them.
The Achilles Heel
Finally, given that a lot is spoken from a tech angle, the immediate challenge that comes to mind is a lack of tech talent in the marketing ecosystem. However, with companies offering ‘no-code’ solutions to brand managers, that is a hurdle easily bypassed.
Another commonly observed challenge was the inability of AI solutions to integrate seamlessly into all marketing platforms, creating a friction in monitoring campaign effectiveness parallelly.
Cross-channel AI infrastructures that break down data silos are quickly filling this gap.
It’s now up to brands to get adoptive with the marketing trends to achieve their desired results.
