Group Head of Media Performance and Analytics at Foxtel Group

What happens when you take the most measurable form of marketing, digital advertising, and power its very existence with machine learning and AI? That is the question marketers around the world are asking as we embark on an exciting new age of advertising unlike anything preceding it. Will AI be the death of traditional marketing, or will it be the beacon of inspiration from which an evolution of how brands connect to customers will occur? As someone who has lived and breathed in digital advertising for over 19 years, I feel the best starting point to answer this question starts from understanding its evolution over the years.

Google and the Early Years of Digital Advertising

At the turn of the millennium, when emerging search engines were engaged in browser wars, Google and Overture (Yahoo!) made the single biggest shift in the usage of the internet by enabling sponsored advertisements in search results. They called it search engine marketing, allowing brands to show product results to customers within search results. 

The guiding premise for its meteoric adoption was rooted in measurability. Spending millions of dollars to buy a 30-second TV ad and measuring its sales/ROI impact was nearly impossible. Spend money on search engine marketing, and you know exactly what keyword click led to what page, at what cost, and what sales it generated. Overnight, the measurability of marketing entered a new age and digital e-commerce was born. Fast forward to today, the battleground has never been fiercer, with advertising platforms spanning hundreds of ad formats, platforms and decisions that need to happen faster than ever. 

Why Is AI The Single Biggest X Factor in Advertising?

Enter AI. It would not be fair to say that components of machine learning were never integrated into media buying. Marketing platforms offered scripts and algorithm-based bid strategies that allowed marketplaces to function as real-time exchanges of inventory for years. What changed is that AI has automated the manual processes of digital advertising. 

Low-code platform and browser plug-ins, with machine learning and cloud functionality, allow portfolio-based decisions to be made in real-time. The ML works 24 hours a day, even when staff is comfortably asleep, with changes to auctions picked up in milliseconds, something humans are not capable of. Done right, it has created opportunities to drive more traffic to websites at an efficient cost and maximise purchase propensity. The possibilities have officially become endless. 

"What changed is that AI has automated the manual processes of digital advertising. ​"

Real-Time Beats Aggregated Time

Historically, the manual constraints of campaign launches limited how many campaigns companies could launch and often fell prey to delays in deployment. This led to campaign underperformance, late arrival to the market and trivial mistakes. While ad campaigns still served their roles in some capacity, AI planning and deployment tools have made broad marketing campaign launches radically easier, allowing timely go-to-market campaigns that hit the mark. No component of advertising has benefited more, in my opinion, than creative deployment. 

The Era of Instant Creative Is Born

Creativity was a nightmare when it came to digital advertising. Within just Facebook alone, there are multiple ad formats spanning multiple ad specs. Should a brand wish to deploy a hyper-targeted campaign, the creative job took an entire village to deliver and created a black hole of countless head-hours lost. AI’s impact on creativity is particularly noticeable as its ability to resize, reformat, repurpose, and tag creative across multiple ad platforms instantaneously changed the game. Creative teams were no longer constrained by output and, after a long time, focused on the message and marketing itself.

Does the Rise of AI Herald The End of The Traditional Search Engine

It begs the question that in the exponential growth of AI technology, is a consumer’s way of searching changing as well? Some of my peers argue that advances such as the AI Pin and Apple vision indicate that traditional search engines will soon become obsolete, replaced by your personal search portal. 

I tend to digress from this view. While I believe that the integration of Chat GPT (Bing) and Bard (Google) will allow for more tailored and smarter addressable search results for consumers, I argue that it would be the quality of results that will change, not the act of searching. Human beings are communal, so there is a limit on how personalised a search result should be, as we seek validation on the same questions by our peers, to truly accept the answers. In short, yes, advertising with AI must keep up and produce highly addressable one-to-one advertising, but it cannot lose the essence of the traditional mechanisms that preceded it. 

Privacy and the Third Eye

No doubt, AI benefits marketing. However, the massive elephant in the room that needs to be addressed is the impact of AI on consumer privacy. LLMs and other AI functions rely on ingested information to learn and build upon results. However, some models have taken that liberty too far and crossed over into the realms of data collection beyond what customers would consent to. For AI to become a mainstay in digital advertising, marketers must build ethical privacy constraints on the technology to limit what can ethically be collected about the consumer with fair consent. 

AI is here to Stay, And Marketers Must Make the Best Ethical Use of It

Any company that shies away from embracing AI-led technologies in advertising will be left behind. As ad exchanges and advertising platforms become transactional in real time for data and inventory exchange, AI is the means to quickly adapt to exponentially swift marketplace interactions and take advantage of them to drive business outcomes. However, it must be done with a built-in privacy lens and clearly programmed to understand the innate intent of the advertising.