According to an urban legend, a shopkeeper in North London Suburb used to routinely not miss his daily newspaper, particularly the weather report. Reading the weather report, he had a brilliant idea of moving a bin of black umbrellas closer to the front of the store so that customers could purchase it if they needed a quick break from the oncoming rain.

This took place around 1861 and the popular newspaper called the Times had likely influenced the passers-by to purchase black umbrellas from the shop. This would be one of the first times when data was used to make a decision to influence buying behaviours of customers. (EConsultancy, 2019)

Fast forward to 2019, over 158 years with AI being more integrated into our daily lives with smart speakers such as Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Home Pod, taking virtual assistants to the next level. However, these products are designed to be used at home and possibly at work for working on basic day to day tasks. With incredible level of innovation taking over the AI space let’s explore how AI can be applied into Advertising and Marketing with the 5 applications listed below.

Product Recommendations

Spotify, Netflix and Amazon have been successful as a result of their ability to be able to recommend products and content tailored to their audience. Having said this, many publishers are taking the same approach to implement AI based content recommendations that will allow readers to customise their reading recommendations based on their browsing habits. For example, suggested reading articles/videos will show up on a user’s feed based on how the they consume content, personalised to their taste.

Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis simply means using data to provide forecasts of potential consumer behaviour. This could potentially save thousands if not millions of dollars of advertising spend as the advertising decision makers can now use predictive analysis to identify and segment clients and potential customers into demographics and precise segments to deliver tailored content to. This takes away guess work from what marketing efforts are most likely to work and allows the decision makers to make data driven decisions (Salesforce 2018).

Image Recognition

Tools such as TalkWalker have made it possible for brands using their AI and Machine learning algorithms to recognise and interpret how a particular brand is doing in real time for their audience interactions. For instance, the tool can identify a brand in user generated content and helps create a story of the full picture of the brand.

In addition to this using a tool like this can prevent the misuse of trademarked brands as the visual recognition software can identify and communicate any breaches if they occur (Talkwalker, 2019).

Figure 1 – Source: TalkWalker

Copywriting

With applications such as Phrasee, AI is now being repeatedly used to write copy not only for Email Headers but also for Facebook and Instagram posts. This trend is increasingly seen across different industries even with Journalists for the Washington Post, where simple statistics and structured data is being used to showcase reports all written by AI. GPT-2, a model developed by Elon Musk’s Open AI initiative also shows broad capabilities to write text and it is getting increasingly difficult to difficult to differentiate human vs AI writing (OpenAI, 2019).

To conclude, AI is increasingly affecting different business verticals and is integrated with our daily life, sometimes even without us knowing consciously. With AI comes new opportunities that help provide insights to age old problems and present new and innovative solutions for Marketing. As decision makers tend to focus more on Data driven decision making, AI based analytics and tools will grow to be of further importance. Whether it is writing copy or image recognition or providing the right products at the right place, there’s tremendous uses of AI. With the right AI strategy tremendous value can be brought to your marketing efforts.

For more information on applying the power of AI to your marketing efforts please reach out to hello@mediasmiths.com.au or call us at 02 9460 0177.

References:

1. https://www.smartinsights.com/tag/artificial-intelligence-ai-for-marketing/
2. https://www.smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/marketing-innovation/15-applications-artificial-intelligence-marketing/
3. https://econsultancy.com/a-brief-history-of-artificial-intelligence-in-advertising/
4. https://econsultancy.com/15-examples-of-artificial-intelligence-in-marketing/
5. https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/predictive-analytics-for-marketing-whats-possible-and-how-it-works/
6. https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/best-practices/predictive-marketing/
7. https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/
8. https://www.talkwalker.com/image-recognition-sea?gclid=CjwKCAjwkenqBRBgEiwA-bZVttAgpAP364M9xZaG9VbgsR8JiYmRnrMJrQ-dWpecsxF1i2elVMD9oRoCSq0QAvD_BwE
9. https://developer.amazon.com/en-GB/alexa/alexa-skills-kit/conversational-ai