Decoding AI's Impact on the Effectiveness of Digital Advertising

By Chris Gallanongo – Head of Platforms, Audience2Media

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a part of our ecosystem for many years, generally speaking when asked about the future of AI, there is a sense of an underlying fear of a human versus AI conflict, where AI will takeover the world.

However, the emergence of advanced AI tools like ChatGPT, released at the end of 2022, has catapulted AI into the spotlight and is somewhat changing peoples perception artificial intelligence and how it can be useful.

AI is found across a broad range of industries and is especially integrated within our digital advertising landscape. Its application in digital advertising is diverse, touching upon various phases of the marketing process.

According to the most recent research by Statista, Digital Display Ad spend in 2023 will grow to $161bn and Influencer Marketing is expected to achieve $31bn, with that being said, we know that digital advertising works with AI and Audience2Media has been delivering behavioural influencer marketing like no other and proves to impact our campaigns exponentially.

Taking a look at the previous 12 months of campaign data, positioning a campaign with no audience or influencer data versus a campaign set up with audience interest data on followers, delivered 333% greater engagements rates than without data.

This positions Audience2Media embracing AI data and software applications helping our brands campaigns fly. It is without question our investment in acquiring data globally remains at the forefront of our platform strategy.

Most prominently, AI has been harnessed in digital advertising and has shaped the way ads are targeted to people. AI software can segment customers, utilising rich data to categorise consumers into behavioural groups based on shared characteristics.

This enables more effective targeting and personalisation, ensuring that each customer receives the right ad that resonates with their individual preferences and behaviours. Audience2Media’s audience targeting platform, Krypton, continues to pioneer the ad tech targeting arena (since 2009).

Audience2Media takes audience targeting to the next level by excluding online bots and fraudulent engagement in comparison to social media platforms which are known to have huge amounts of fake audiences.

Chris Gallanongo – Head of Platforms, Audience2Media

AI continues to be a game-changer in digital advertising. Leveraging machine learning capabilities, AI can efficiently sort through large amounts of data in nano-seconds. The proficiency of AI grows with each additional piece of data it receives, resulting in increasingly precise outcomes.

Essentially, AI embodies the principle of on-going learning, continuously refining its analytics on fresh datasets it acquires. It functions as an ever-evolving analytical application, delivering increasingly accurate insights to improve marketing strategies.

AI has also found its way into influencer Marketing, it serves in optimising influencer partnerships for brands. It facilitates the identification of specific influencer and audience traits, such as age, interests and location.

More importantly, AI has been instrumental in combating influencer fraud. It enables Audience2Media to delve deeper into influencer profiles, beyond the surface-level statistics.

AI can assist in distinguishing genuine profiles from those riddled with bots or purchased followers, ensuring we connect brands with relevant people who offer authentic reach and engagement. Thus, the capabilities of AI not only streamline the matching process for brands and influencers but also validate the authenticity of the influence to real people, ultimately driving successful, genuine collaborations.

Here at Audience2Media we have 144 million influencer profiles within our Impact platform that utilises AI machine learning to identify actionable data points and credibility that help aid our team to make the right decisions.

When we combine our complete data set from the worldwide web as well as social audience data highlighting real time interests, AI capabilities power up!

Interestingly, AI is also capable of crafting virtual avatars, one of the most popular virtual avatars on Instagram is lilmiquela amassing 2.7m followers. These entirely digital entities are unique, can have human-like characteristics, and can be designed to resemble any individual or entity.

They can be programmed to express any sentiment or perform any action, thereby giving brands unprecedented control over campaign creativity and enabling faster, more consistent output. As AI continues to evolve, and as crazy as it sounds these types of profiles are set to increase in popularity, paving the way for increasingly engaging virtual influencer collaborations.

The prospect of AI overall can seem daunting. As Elon Musk once said in an interview, “AI is far more dangerous than nukes!”

Such a sentiment could indeed hold truth if AI is misused or mishandled. However, within the scope of the digital advertising sphere, I believe AI is here to stay and evolve, not as a threat to take over the world, but as a potent tool.

It serves to assist brands and marketers in making crucial decisions, driven by the insightful analysis of vast data sets, thereby transforming the landscape of digital marketing.