Generative AI impact on Online Advertisement
What is Generative AI ?
The concept of Generative AI is hot from beginning of 2023. The technical industry becomes excited than ever before. The technical giants all around the world have started arm race on the generative AI products. Generative AI refers to the AI model that can be used to generate content based on what it has learned. It has begun to save work load dramatically in the daily r routine. Chat-GPT, Midjourney, Mircosoft designer, etc. All of them have been starting to replace the roles of repetitive work. Nowadays, generative AI models are used to compose product descriptions, write articles, design product posters, generate marketing assets, etc. More and more cases are coming out. As a veteran of online advertisement, I’m cautiously optimistic on how generative AI can change the world of online advertisement.
What are the key elements of current online advertisement
Starting from 90s of last century, online advertisement has developed for decades. However, the online advertisement nowadays is still relying on 3 core elements, which are planning, targeting and meansurement. They are projected to 3 steps of the whole campaign process, which are
- Pre-campaign planing: This is refering to assests preparation, campaign designing , targeting group definition
- Campaign execution: Along with the campaign running, targeting group can be changed according to the audiences’ reaction. Assets will be optimized to improve the campaign outcome.
- Meansurement is the most critical part of online advertisement. The feature distiguishing modern advertisement from the ancient advertisement models is it’s measurable and attributable with technical approaches.
Online Advertisement is changed along with AI evolvement in recent years.
AI model started to be applied to online advertisement for a long while. The most widely applied use cases are to use AI to generate marketing contents. Content generation is always the most costly part within marketing procedures. Besides, generative AI can apply well accumulated experience on the targeting definition as well as the post-campaign analysis and management.
How will Generative AI improves the core of online advertisement
Generative AI can help on targeting
Generative AI is commonly used to summarize the information. It can be used to summarize the common characteristic of a group of audiences. With the summary, it’s much easier for the campaign executors to complete the targeting setup. Finding the targeting users is always the most critical part of marketing campaigns. The mis-configuration of targeting configuration is mostly resulted from misunderstanding from brief to execution plan. But with the generative AI, it’ll generate the concise and accurate targeting setup with the identical definition as the source of truth. It’ll avoid the misunderstanding by human communication.
Generative AI help on creative generation
This item is quite straight-forward. From the birth of generative AI, it helps to generate all kinds of creative assets including the marketing stuff . Such will cut the creative asset cost dramatically.
Generative AI help on measurement
Measurement is the most critical concept of modern advertisment. The major difference which distiguishes modern advertisement from the industry of a century before is the way to measure the marketing spending and attribute the performance to the marketing spending. Hence, marketers can definitely know how spending can work to stimulate their sales. Generative AI can help to improve the attribution accuracy and improve the attribution models. Most of advertising platforms are using last click model. However, it locks revenue increasing of the platforms because of the valuable click amount is limited. In such case , platforms are trying to convince advertisers to attribute performance to other user behaviors. Therefore, they can make more income. On the other hand, advertisers are willing to know more about the user journey and try to figure out how to influence customers with marketing campaigns. With generative AI, the attribution model will be enhanced and automated with optimization actions in the campaign iteration process.
Challenges are getting along with opportunities.
Generative AI could be very expensive to take advantage of
To train the model is quite expensive. Moreover, the data quality and density define the quality of output contents. Before feeding the data into AI model, you should clean the data and format the data to what form it can be disgested by AI models which abosolutely cost much. Meanwhile, you need to find a place to store the data and set up the pipeline. The pipeline needs maintenance. The AI model can absolutely save cost but building and maintaining can’t .
Generative AI output can be unpredicatable
The AI model requires tunning along with the production. And sometimes the outcome is not predictable. Hence, it requires training by the ones who are using them. The model requires the ones with correlated knowledge to optimize them as well. If you are using an open SaaS service, it won’t be fully customized that you need to face tradeoffs when using them. But if you are going to deploy a private version, which is quite similar to the modern IT system deployment,budget is the question you can not skip.
The conetent consent censoring
Besides the quality of the generated content and the cost, the consent censoring is another issue faced by the AI model. In some regions, even big tech giants can’t lay off their censoring team or remove the special policies according to the local political and legal particularity. Therefore, the solution is to add more factors to the model or build another model to do the censoring.
Conclusion
Future of online advertisment is promissing powered by generative AI
It’s unddoutable that generative AI can upgrade the effectiveness of the advertising industry. It kills all the cost of duplicate tasks and provide inspiration to human employees. Moreoever, it’ll figure out hidden patterns from the mountain of historical report/articles to facilitate the upcoming campaigns.
The business won’t be changed much
As you can see, the generative AI empowers the industry within the traditional way. There’s no new business models resulted from the leveraging of the new technology. In another word, the ceiling of the upgrade is quite close even with the new technology. But we don’t need to be that pessimistic because the advertising industry haven’t been staying in the same model in more than a century. The new technology still brings exciting prospects to the indsutry like, marketing process automation, effective analysis and realtime campaign optimization.
The content censoring remains chanllenging
Since marketing is a kind of information for the public, it has to follow the local law , religion and tradition that content censoring can’t be ignored.
It’s still in early stage to apply generative AI in the every corner of advertisement industry. Fortunately, we can apply it in some specific existing process and keep on looking for more inspiration to shock the whole industry.