As AI grows more sophisticated, advertising agencies are ramping up their adoption of the technology – not just using generative AI on the creative front, but also building new AI tools for media planning and buying. And while AI has actually been used in media planning for some time, agencies are increasing their investment, deploying AI across a wider range of tasks.
VideoWeek asked four agency leads about their latest AI developments on the media side.Â
Shamsul Chowdhury, EVP Paid Social, JellyfishÂ
AI has been the toast of the town since ChatGPT’s meteoric rise, but it has primarily been focused around the creative elements pertaining to AI. The other area that AI has had a significant impact on is media. Google, Meta, TikTok, and others have all been using AI to help brands scale with better ROI as well as making campaign management more effective for advertisers.
Meta’s Advantage+ Audience product is designed to expand the traditional parameters set by advertisers, which have shown to limit reach and stunt performance. Advantage+ Audience uses Meta’s AI to target potential customers that would have otherwise been intentionally excluded based on antiquated targeting parameters. Not only are we seeing performance improvements in the double digits, but we’re also seeing net new customers when utilising Advantage+ Audiences, which is a big part of our narrative of helping brands grow.
Guillermo Dvorak, Managing Partner – Digital and Data, Total Media
With the depreciation of the cookie, we have been looking at alternatives, building from very strong and legacy options like contextual and behavioural targeting.
Not much has change over the last few years in this two areas, until AI and more accurately LLM (large language models) have taken over the world. With these advancements, we can now ingest the entire content of a website and the metadata, classify it based on behaviourial segments, and decide if this content will achieve our KPIs for our client brief, all before we bid for that ad space, allowing a level of personalisation that cookies did not – and respecting the privacy of the user by not misusing their data.
Lucy Barnes, General Manager, Havas Media Manchester
At Havas Media Network, we have recently launched our proprietary AI tool, ‘Havas Performance Feed Optimiser,’ which is already transforming Matalan’s Google Shopping results. By using innovative AI-powered feed descriptions, our testing in Matalan’s men’s suiting category has already achieved an impressive 16 percent increase in impressions per pound spent compared to traditional, manually entered feed descriptions.
As the first UK advertiser to harness a specific third-party AI solution to enhance Google Shopping, we are excited to revolutionise industry standards, dramatically enhancing the efficiency of these key digital marketing channels. Our vision is to extend its success across product categories, offering new and existing clients a competitive advantage. We’re looking forward to witnessing the transformative impact of the tool over the coming months.
Graham Wilkinson, Chief Innovation Officer, KINESSO
At KINESSO, we’re embracing AI across the media landscape, and have seen solutions emerge across three key areas: fuelling creative thinking, enhancing research and analysis, and optimising performance. We’ve empowered our team to build their own custom AI agents for a wide range of tasks, from concepting to consumer journey mapping, and synthetic surveys to audience insights.
One of our most exciting developments is our advanced audience emulation technology. We’ve created a sophisticated system that accurately simulates target audiences, allowing us to test and refine campaigns before launch. We’re also pushing the boundaries of AI collaboration with agents that can interact and even recreate creative workshops. This allows us to explore new ideas and gain insights in a dynamic and innovative way. Finally, we’ve recently launched a new tone-of-voice analyser, creator, and manager, enabling non-experts to easily define and manage brand voice across all channels.
