In The Marketing Revolution AI Takes Center Stage, A Better Future Awaits?

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The past year witnessed a whirlwind of change across industries. Now, in 2024, businesses worldwide are still grappling with how to best utilise the transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI). Marketing is no exception. For marketing teams meticulously balancing effort and impact, mastering the interplay between AI and marketing isn't just advantageous – it's crucial for survival. Advancements in AI, its subsets like machine learning (ML), and generative AI are prompting a reevaluation of where this technology can be implemented to streamline processes, save precious time, and maximise return on investment (ROI).

AI: A Catalyst for Efficiency and Insights In Marketing

Economic pressures are driving businesses to constantly seek time-saving and efficiency-boosting solutions. Marketers, as we've learned from our customers, crave more time to focus on strategic initiatives, creative concepts, and audience targeting. To achieve this, they need to spend less time on repetitive tasks like data collection and campaign management. Consequently, most marketing teams have embraced some form of AI to expedite these processes, either directly through user-friendly tools or indirectly through partnerships and integrations with existing software. Beyond boosting efficiency through automation, AI empowers marketing teams and their tech partners to optimise campaign results. Measurement and analytics tools have always been cornerstones of marketing, providing valuable insights into user behaviour, campaign performance, and ROI. These tools fuel data-driven decision-making, allowing marketers to refine strategies and identify the ideal audience for campaign success. Our team and customers have witnessed the remarkable enhancements AI, particularly ML, brings to these tools. Traditional measurement methods like incrementality and media mix modelling (MMM) have been revitalised. Incrementality helps marketers understand the true value of their marketing activities by demonstrating the difference between campaigns with and without modifications. MMM, on the other hand, analyses a wide range of marketing activities using aggregated data to gain insights into their ROI impact. In addition to bolstering these established methods, cutting-edge ML technology now extracts insights from campaign data at an accelerated pace, predicting usage patterns and offering recommendations for campaign optimization. Previously, measurement focused on compiling data from a few sources and comparing results to inform future decisions. Today, with AI and ML, marketers can predict a user's lifetime value within days of a campaign launch. This predictive analysis, coupled with the modernised versions of incrementality and MMM, equips marketers with a deeper understanding of how to allocate their budgets for a higher return on ad spend (ROAS). The benefits are evident. For instance, analysing the effectiveness of out-of-home (OOH) advertising – traditionally a six-month wait for results – can now be achieved within weeks using ML-enabled measurement. This swift turnaround empowers marketers to assess the impact of their OOH campaigns on app usage, predict future success, and take appropriate action.

The Future of AI-Powered Marketing

With anticipated increased investment in AI, harnessing this technology will be vital for staying competitive in the evolving marketing landscape. Currently, AI empowers marketers to access more refined data, leading to smarter and more informed decisions. However, as we move forward, a critical question emerges: How can this new technology leverage data to empower users to make informed decisions and take actionable steps? By continuously analysing data, advanced learning models can provide robust recommendations to marketers. This can significantly assist growth marketers in optimising spending, reaching their target audience, and driving results, all with greater speed and accuracy.

Embracing the Future of Marketing

Traditional marketing and campaign measurement approaches are a relic of the past. While 2023 marked a year of transformation, 2024 and beyond hold immense potential. So, how do we capitalise on this opportunity? Responsible and thoughtful utilisation of AI is key to achieving the best possible results. This applies across various aspects of AI, including development, regulation, education, and more. From a marketing perspective, this translates to continuous communication with your tech partners. The mobile marketing industry, in particular, has witnessed significant collaboration in recent years. Through open communication with our customers and partners, we're constantly learning from each other, sharing insights on trends, demands, and solutions. Furthermore, the field of AI is rapidly evolving. Marketers must stay informed about the latest trends, technologies, and best practices to leverage AI for innovation and remain competitive. By staying informed and collaborating with knowledgeable partners, marketers can feel empowered to embrace new AI-driven strategies. While achieving perfection on the first try is unlikely, successful teams are the ones that experiment, test, and adapt their AI campaigns continuously.