How AI-led Marketing Is Enabling a Smarter Way to Engage Today's Audiences AI and the machine-based tools borne from the technology can help cut through the time needed to plan effective engagement strategies

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a technology isn't new; its widespread application in today's industries is ramping up. While AI usage is now commonplace in a variety of sectors such as finance, retail and even asset management, the technology and the efficiency it provides is gaining more traction within the advertising world.

The internet, smartphones and social media have transformed the way people interact with each other and consume information – pressuring brands to revamp their strategies to engage with their audiences more directly and efficiently.

From creating detailed consumer profiles and analysing audience data to understand them better, to optimising advertising campaigns and programmatic advertising, AI is changing the face of the modern advertising industry.

But is AI really the way for brands and advertisers throughout the world to maximise their customer engagement? And are the costs and learning curves associated with the technology's implementation only feasible for companies that can afford them?

Cutting Through The Digital Noise

TV has been a conventional dominant medium for advertisers in Asia. But soaring internet penetration rates and the ubiquity of smartphones means that more people are obtaining content via their mobile devices – necessitating advertisers to raise their audience engagement across multiple platforms.

As such, established and emerging brands now need to develop real-time solutions that go beyond TV to more contextual formats; meaning that the customer journey now needs to be bridged between TV, search platforms and – most importantly – social media.

However, human resources can only go so far, especially when advertisers need to scale-up their content creation without sacrificing their quality. But this can be challenging when they need to be bogged down in mundane tasks such as planning to search for the right keywords and optimising them; in addition to testing landing pages, planning social media shares, and sifting through analytics.

AI and the machine-based tools borne from the technology can help cut through the time needed to plan effective engagement strategies. While concerns have been raised that AI may replace the jobs of real humans, contrariwise, they can help advertisers focus on enhancing their content, rather than spend too much unnecessary time creating it.

Levelling The Playing Field

The prime concerns faced by advertisers over the last decade has been the dominance of the tech giants powering today's internet-driven ecosystem. While Facebook, Google and YouTube seem the most obvious choices for brands to disseminate their content on – the issues of opaque algorithms and whether the right content is being shared with the right audiences have increased.

It's still up for debate whether those problems are the fault of the platforms or just the nature of their advertising platforms to catch as many fish as they can with a single (inter)net. But the fact of the matter is that global brands are now choosing to reduce their overreliance on such platforms and instead of looking to go on their own with their audience engagements.

And it is within this space where specialist advertising platform providers – like those specialising in AI – are finding room to grow. By focusing on a specific range of outreach solutions that brands actually need (instead of providing a "jack of all trades, master of none' platform'), these emerging solution providers can help brands contextualise their content to the right audiences.

Yet, what about emerging brands that are prioritising capturing as much market share as they can, rather than the actual content? AI-driven marketing solutions can actually prove cheaper due to the reduced reliance on humans to drive wide-reaching campaigns. Simultaneously, leveraging on the right platform providers can help brands concentrate on investing in to improve advertisement quality rather than quantity.

In a nutshell, using AI for advertising campaigns isn't just savvy anymore; in this day and age, it's necessary.