Looking at the impact of AI on the ad tech industry

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed many industries. Its impact on the ad tech space has been profound, changing how quickly, accurately, and effectively marketers can reach their audiences.

By leveraging the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and understand mass amounts of complex data, businesses can now gain deeper insights into their specific audiences, understand how to better optimize their marketing campaigns, and deliver personalized experiences, helping to deliver greater ROAS (return on ad spend) and nurture life-long customer relationships with repeat purchases.

With the help of AI, many of the manual, time intensive tasks involved in campaign planning, activation, and reporting are being automated, resulting in more streamlined workflows.

This has, in turn, affected how companies allocate resources. Though currently there is a heightened cost involved with investing in tech and training, AI will begin to reduce the resources needed for task driven areas and enable businesses to focus more on strategy to drive the business forward.

Here are five areas where AI is having an impact on ad-tech, and how businesses connect with their customers.

1. Creating personalized connections to their customers

AI can make sense of incredibly complex data and provide marketers with deeper insights on key audiences. This enables them to strategize more effectively and tailor messages to their unique audiences.

AI’s ability to review and summarize complicated data gives marketers customized insights that can significantly impact the buying journey. Granular customization is now possible at each touchpoint resulting in a stronger connection between the consumer and the brand.

Gaining a better understanding of buyer preferences, history, and online behavior helps shape the relevancy and customization of ads for the audience. Messages will feel more individualized vs a generic message that may only resonate with a small percentage of the intended audience.

Insights such as cultural nuances, language preferences, and regional trends are now widely available and can be used to deliver the right messages to the right audiences.

This level of data analysis and comprehension provides new opportunities for growth by expanding campaign messages to more audiences improving human decision making. These additional insights will positively impact the touchpoints in the consumer journey.

2. Rapid adjustments to the evolving needs of customers and marketplaces

AI algorithms can identify the unique challenges and pain points faced by businesses in the same industry.

Using this information, businesses can develop relevant marketing campaigns to proactively address consumers' needs, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

Businesses can also use AI algorithms to analyze and predict industry-specific data and identify the unique challenges and pain points faced across a range of sectors.

3. Automating the creative process

Large-scale content creation is now a critical part of the digital advertising process, and marketers are paying more attention to this space than ever before. AI has proven its worth across a range of content creation processes, including:

• Automating long-standing manual tasks.
• Using it to help build creative assets.
• Reporting and optimization enabling marketers to measure, adjust and optimize campaigns in real-time.
• Reducing the time and effort needed to test the effectiveness of creative placements and subsequently placing the creative in the most appropriate space or conduct real-time testing of creative against synthetic audiences.

4. Automating how marketers activate, adjust, and monitor their campaigns

Advancements in how ad buying is executed have become automated by AI and marketers are seeing how AI can assist in real-time campaign optimization and fraud detection.

Real-time bidding

AI algorithms enable real-time bidding for ad placements, ensuring that ads are delivered to the most relevant audience at the optimal price.

Programmatic advertising

AI-driven programmatic advertising automates the buying and selling of ad space, optimizing campaign performance and reducing costs.

Personalized advertising

AI allows businesses to create personalized ad experiences based on individual user preferences and behaviors, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Fraud detection

It has always been a challenge to detect fraudulent activity during a campaign’s flight, but AI algorithms can help detect and prevent fraudulent activities, such as click fraud and bot traffic, protecting businesses from financial losses.

5. Changing how messaging reaches customers

AI is having an impact on how audiences consume their messaging, focusing on making it easier on the consumer to experience more relevancy and impact.

Native advertising: AI enables the creation of native ads that seamlessly blend with the surrounding content, improving user experience and increasing engagement.

Voice advertising

AI-powered voice assistants are creating new opportunities for voice advertising, allowing businesses to reach consumers through smart speakers and other voice-activated devices.

Search engines

AI is now embedded into most search engines to assist in providing recommendations which is changing the future of search rapidly.

Using AI for success in the ad industry

AI has undoubtedly brought positive change to the ad tech industry, but it’s important to note that AI can only do so much and shouldn’t be relied on for everything.

Humans still need to be involved in overseeing the tasks AI performs, as well as developing and executing campaign strategies.

To succeed, it’s important to strike the right balance between humans and technology:

• Assess the landscape you operate in and define your campaign strategy objectives.
• Think about where to incorporate AI into your campaign strategy and where it will be most effective.
• Understand both the capabilities of AI and its limitations.
• Evaluate different AI tools and then pick the ones that best meet your needs.
• Remember, not all problems can be solved with Generative AI. Make sure the problem is something AI can excel at to provide value.