Artificial Intelligence in Marketing and Advertising

AI insights and resources for digital information strategists.

We have previously discussed the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) to business information technology. AI innovations are everywhere and stand to transform the way that humans process information and manage personal and professional business. Marketing and advertising are key growth areas, as AI offers opportunities for personalization, customization and direct communication between brands and consumers.

Below is a curated list of 13 resources to help information professionals understand and apply key insights about the state of AI in advertising and marketing today and in the future.

15 Resources That Review AI in Advertising & Marketing

1. Adobe’s CMO explains How AI Is Making Its Way Into Marketing, examining both advertising and marketing applications of AI technology. According to the article, AI “is gaining an early foothold in marketing. From market research through to personalisation, AI is becoming pervasive as marketers look for ways to improve data insights and scale responses without unnecessary costs.” The piece provides examples of current AI marketing initiatives being deployed by leading companies.
2. Econsultancy offers case studies and use cases of AI in various forms and applications in a recent blog piece, 15 examples of artificial intelligence in marketing. The examples are organized into categories including content curation, search engines, fraud prevention, social semantics, website design, product pricing, predictive customer service, ad targeting, speech and language recognition, customer segmentation, sales forecasting, image recognition, content generation and bots/messengers.
3. ClickZ offers a breakdown of seven ways artificial intelligence can be used for marketing, including new customer experiences, new product launches, insight from data, pre-emptive marketing, programmatic advertising, content production and website design. The article is an excerpt from the company’s downloadable report, A Marketer’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence (registration required).
4. MarketingTech asks, What does AI in advertising actually mean for digital marketers? The piece “delve[s] into greater detail about where today’s (and tomorrow’s) adtech developments are stemming from, and what their implications are.” Categorization of content and semantic technologies are of particular importance.
5. In Demystifying the Role of Artificial Intelligence in Marketing and Advertising, eMarketer interviews Josh Sutton, global head of the artificial intelligence practice at Publicis.Sapient. The detailed Q&A explores what AI technology is, how it is used and defined, and how it can be applied to advertising.
6. In its recent piece, AI In Ads: 13 High-Momentum Companies Using Machine Learning In Marketing, Ads, And Sales, CB Insights zeroes in on startups to show how new companies are making use of new technologies. The article names 13 “companies to watch,” detailing each company’s use of AI, key investors, and total funding.
7. What Impact Will Artificial Intelligence Have On The Ad Tech Landscape? Business 2 Community considers the current and future state of AI in advertising and ad tech, pointing out that AI, while not a new concept, is experiencing sudden and exponential growth: AI startups increased 300% between 2014 and 2015, and by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human.
8. RetailWire considers the consumer perspective, asking, Will shoppers want to interact with AI ads? The piece includes a brief discussion of AI-driven ads, followed by expert responses to discussion questions. While AI “technology will be fighting consumers’ general apathy toward digital ads, especially on mobile,” this inherent challenge may be balanced by the fact that “the popularity of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa suggests an opening for artificial intelligence.”
9. CNBC explains how ads are about to get way more personal thanks to AI as “brands look at new ways to target and engage customers.” According to the article, “AI is in its infancy when it comes to advertising but a handful of companies are trialing the technology and are bullish on its potential.” The piece provides examples of several recent campaigns and discusses the “challenge” of mobile advertising.
10. AI can also be used to help companies buy advertising. Data Science Central explains the “collision of ecommerce, digital advertising, predictive analytics, and AI” in the “new digital battleground” in a recent blog post, When Milliseconds Count – Using AI to Buy Advertising. The piece considers programmatic advertising and data science as they relate to advertising in the digital space. (Computerworld discusses this phenomenon in relation to Google’s new Smart Bidding feature, which uses AI to help companies with ad bidding.)
11. Artificial Intelligence Helps Advertisers Be More Compassionate, according to AdExchanger. The personalization and detailed analysis made possible by AI, the piece argues, enable advertisers “to make their advertising more compassionate, to go beyond thinking of the consumer in a broad sense and to help understand and solve for the needs of each specific consumer in each specific situation.”
12. A recent AdvertisingAge sponsor post, How You Can Prepare for the Future of Performance Marketing, encourages businesses to embrace AI: “Early adopters will win by taking advantage of [the] massive shift in discovery marketing” presented by AI. Even though the specific technologies and terms of engagement “will continue to change, search will always be a powerful ad platform for marketers.” Content, structured data and voice advertising are areas of particular importance.
13. Campaign takes something of a contrarian view in its article, Why artificial intelligence will not create more engaging ads. Describing an ad campaign in which “artificially intelligent posters” read people’s engagement and emotions and then adjust their visual displays, the piece identifies potential downsides to highly personalized technologies: “In an age where consumers are more aware of the value of their data, it’s not inconceivable that this could prompt some sort of backlash against the advertiser using the AI tech. … Technology that appears to read our minds will never have wide appeal – it’s comedy rather than telepathy that is better at connecting with people.”

In the ever-changing landscapes of healthcare, technology and data analytics, perhaps only one thing is certain: There will always be more data, and with it a greater need for effective data analysis.

As the retail sector continually refines its analytic capabilities, and as healthcare continues to shift toward a consumer-focused model, the intersection of retail and healthcare becomes increasingly likely, perhaps inevitable. Healthcare professionals benefit from an awareness of retail-centric techniques, particularly those that may enhance the consumer experience or the delivery of care.  Whatever their given personas, consumers are likely to be placed into one category or another. As the prediction stage gives way to the implementation stage, the outcome of these new analytics experiments will certainly be instructive for professionals throughout the industry.