Vivek Singh, Executive Vice President – Business & Delivery. Palayekar Companies Inc.
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It's widely acknowledged that artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the advertising business (ad sales), changing how advertisers operate and spurring unprecedented growth. For many, it has become an essential component due to its human-like intelligence. Now, I believe AI is poised to revolutionize ad sales in several ways.
The digital revolution in media and entertainment (M&E) is strongly influenced by customer experience, with advertising remaining a major revenue stream across all platforms: traditional theatrical, linear (traditional TV), digital (like Netflix and Amazon Prime) or a mix of these.
AI plays a crucial role in several aspects, including predicting user preferences, generating AI-driven ad content, offering personalized recommendations, reducing content search time, and ultimately boosting viewership and readership for media companies. Media companies are increasingly turning to AI solutions for advertising sales, addressing challenges like cookie deprecation, automating ad sales processes, providing AI-powered dashboards for stakeholders, enhancing transparency with advertisers and creating self-service portals.
The Benefits Of AI In M&E
With the aid of AI solutions and tools, advertisers can work toward developing closer bonds with customers while developing a more stable and positive ROI. Additionally, suppliers adding AI capabilities to ad tech can potentially increase usability for both viewers and ad agencies. Let’s look at a few ways AI is changing ad sales and the possible challenges that must be overcome.
Content Writing And Production
Ad development can now be completed in a much shorter span of time with the use of AI solutions like AdgenAI, Jasper.ai, ChatGPT and more. AI tools are revolutionizing ad development and creativity in various ways. This includes AI-generated images, creating different versions of photographs and automating audio recording. For instance, individuals can utilize AI tools to change backgrounds in pictures for Instagram ads, while media companies can leverage them to diversify their ad templates.
Generative AI holds the potential to assist broadcasters in creating searchable and accessible databases of video content through content digitization. Additionally, AI enables the generation of personalized ads across platforms like Facebook, Google and Instagram. While the possibilities for AI in ad development are seemingly limitless, it's important to recognize that we cannot solely rely on them at this time.
Automating Ad Sales Processes
AI is transforming the landscape of media ad sales by automating many of the tedious and manual tasks associated with campaign management, ad production and deployment, and reporting. With its analytical capabilities, AI can optimize campaigns for higher return on advertising spend (ROAS), allowing for budget reallocation based on predetermined parameters.
By streamlining and automating these tasks, AI can enable creatives and analysts to devote more time to improving and generating ideas rather than getting bogged down in manual processes. A plethora of AI-enabled demand side platforms (DSP) and supply side platforms (SSP) are available in the market, such as Google Display Network, which assists media companies in automating campaign processes, ad sales, payments and agreements.
Enhancing Ad Personalization
AI is revolutionizing advertising by enabling advertisers to target the right audience with the most relevant ads, thereby enhancing the overall user experience. Through AI-enabled predictive analytics, analysis of customer behavior and the creation of personalized custom ads, media companies can now plan and target their ad campaigns more accurately, ensuring they reach the intended audience across various platforms.
AI also plays a crucial role in increasing user engagement on over-the-top (OTT) platforms by providing real-time insights into campaign performance to advertisers. As AI continues to improve, it is expected to deliver increasingly personalized experiences to audiences while capturing valuable behavioral data.
Boosting Monetization
Finally, AI provides media companies with cost optimization opportunities. For example, AI chatbots can help streamline lead qualification and automate sales processes by offering instant responses to ad inquiries and customer queries. They collect initial information and suggest suitable products or ad options to sales representatives, considering factors like ad sales timing, space availability and cost.
Moreover, AI can aid advertisers in forecasting and understanding marketing outcomes. Picture AI creating dynamically tailored ads that adjust in real time based on product attributes, personalization factors and customer preferences. This customization could help lead to higher click-through rates and increased advertising revenue per thousand impressions, empowering advertisers to craft impactful campaigns that boost sales and ROI.
Challenges To Consider
Along with these benefits, it's crucial to understand the potential challenges of AI in M&E as well.
Ensuring Trust
Ultimately, the trustworthiness and effectiveness of AI-generated outputs are crucial for widespread AI adoption. Despite its potential to streamline operations, skepticism about AI adoption persists among many organizations and individuals.
It's essential to prioritize transparency and adhere to existing guidelines on data privacy, security and ethical AI standards. Independent third-party validation of AI model outputs will be instrumental in building trust in AI solutions until confidence is established.
Data Privacy
To safeguard data privacy—particularly sensitive data such as human behavior, age demographics, viewing habits and payment information—when gathering information for advertising or content creation, certain regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the U.S. are in place. However, it's crucial for industry leaders to collaborate and establish a unified platform. End users should be informed about who is accessing their data and have the ability to opt out or delete their own data.
Content Display
AI solutions can be invaluable for developing advertising sales content, but certain content is inappropriate for certain age groups. It's essential to ensure that AI solutions do not inadvertently use minors' images or any other data for automated ad sales without proper consent. Because of this, I believe it's important for social media platforms such as Meta, Instagram and TikTok to implement algorithms that regulate the display of advertising content.
Conclusion
The M&E industry will likely undergo a huge transformation. Ad sales has opportunities to implement AI in many areas like content creation and audience engagement, potentially shifting the audience experience in a short time.
Although there will be some challenges to implementing AI in ad sales, I believe this can be addressed through a well-planned strategy. By taking the proper steps to overcome these challenges, organizations can better create an engaged customer base.
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