With AI, the future of advertising is personalized

When people spend time on their favorite social networks or websites, they want to see content that is relevant to them—and that includes ads. When ads are personalized, they lead to better user experiences, which translates to stronger business outcomes.

For a long time, creating a truly personalized ad experience was easier said than done, representing a big investment in terms of time and resources. There’s good news for advertisers, though: AI is making ad personalization easier and more efficient. Advertising platforms have been introducing more and more AI-powered tools. These include features like Google Dynamic Search Ads, a targeting tool that helps brands find customers searching for exactly what they offer, and Facebook Dynamic Ads, which uses AI to deliver the most high-performing combination of creatives.

Facebook also recently announced new machine learning-based features to help advertisers better scale their personalized ad experiences through dynamic formats, multiple text optimization, and automatic translation.

What AI can do for advertisers today—and in the future

To take the pulse of what AI can do for advertisers today in terms of personalization, and to gauge how the technology is evolving, we spoke with our chief of product for AI, Dmytro Bilash. Dmytro has years of experience working with marketing and AI, and is one of the creators of the algorithm behind our own AI recommendation tool.

HOW IS AI HELPING CREATE PERSONALIZED AD EXPERIENCES TODAY?

Advertising is one of the key areas where AI can be applied, and AI has been at work in the industry for a long time. Working with data in a smart way has long been an important part of advertising, and things like targeting, smart bidding, and Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) are all AI-based tools. So AI is nothing new in the world of digital advertising, and personalization is a continuation of this.

In advertising, we are able to collect a lot of data, which is the fuel for any AI system. When it comes to personalization, AI is able to make ads focused more and more on each person. We have plenty of data to do this: who people are connected to, where they spend time, what their tastes and specific interests are, what languages they speak, and more. All of this helps define each person, and then match the things they’re interested in with the things advertisers have to show to them. This is a good direction, in my opinion. No one likes bad advertising, and personalization helps prevent this by matching advertisers to the right people. This is what major players like Facebook and Google—and also us here at Paragone—are aiming for with their AI tools.

HOW DOES AI IMPACT PERSONALIZATION IN TERMS OF EFFICIENCY AND BUDGET?

Ad personalization doesn’t depend exclusively on AI—you can personalize without it—but it changes the accuracy. AI lets us be really precise. This is particularly useful for big advertisers with a lot of creatives, products, etc. With AI helping personalize their ads, advertisers are better able to manage and optimize their budgets, matching marketing dollars to real customers who are ready to pay for their products.

HOW DO YOU THINK AI WILL HELP ADVERTISERS CONTINUE TO PERSONALIZE ADS IN THE FUTURE?

I think there are two main directions where we’ll see AI-based ad personalization develop in the future. First, data scientists will be able to do even more with the data we have. This should of course be done in the right way, maintaining people’s privacy. But by collecting more information and by doing more with it, we’ll be able to improve accuracy, better matching ad messages to people’s needs. AI is helping us get better at delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

AI is also playing a big role in breaking down the silos across networks, which is an important step in personalizing ad messages. Each person spends time across many different networks, and we need to be able to take into account their experience on all of them. With cross-network AI tools like our own recommendation engine, advertisers can make the right decisions to deliver the right messages not only on each network individually, but across all of them.

Learn more about AI and digital advertising

We wrote a guide to AI & digital advertising to help you understand the impact of AI on online ads and the tools you can leverage today to get more out of your advertising spend. It also covers:

• What exactly we mean when we talk about Artificial Intelligence.
• How AI can help advertisers respond to evolving customer expectations by delivering more personalized ad experiences & why it’s important.
• Where AI is integrated in advertising tools in social media and on Google.
• The AI tools that are helping advertisers work smarter and improve performance through the entire advertising cycle: optimization, dynamic creative, measurement, and consumer & competitive intelligence.
• How AI can be an asset in building a successful cross-network ads strategy.