Using AI to optimize creation, production and reach

8.1.2021

AI is revolutionizing content production and making marketing more efficient. But what exactly does that look like?

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This article was written by:

Alice Bucher

Artificial intelligence is no longer a niche topic. Thanks to machine learning, AI systems are constantly evolving: data is analyzed, interpreted and existing problems are solved on this basis. AI systems can also constantly adapt to changes, as they are constantly improving and continuing to learn.

The technology is now used in most areas of life and is now also increasingly being used in digital campaigns and on television. For example, the German supermarket giant REWE recently used AI-controlled advertising in the VOX program “The Perfect Dinner.” In the summer of 2020, regional products from the food retailer were advertised:

For example, when the keywords “tomato” or “apple” were used during the cooking show, VOX showed the appropriate advertising from REWE. With the help of artificial intelligence, the corresponding preset keywords were identified and played out at the right moment. In addition, sentiment analysis software ensured that this only happened at moments that viewers associate as positive: The AI tool scans and analyses the format in a sentiment analysis. The metadata obtained from this ensures that playback is ruled out right from the start in negative situations. The advertisement did not overlay the TV program, but was played as a framework for the current program. The technology comes from the advertising alliance Ad Alliance.

Context Video Tagging von einer Rewe Kampagne
© AD Alliance for RTL media group

Cooking shows in the focus of Context Video Tagging

So-called “Context Video Tagging” is not new: Rügenwalder Mühle already used this advertising campaign in 2019 as part of “The Perfect Dinner.”
In particular, the context of a cooking program, in which foods are repeatedly specifically named, seems appropriate for the use of AI in TV advertising. This is reflected in the success of Rügenwalder Mühle: According to a market research analysis carried out as part of the playoff, 77 percent of respondents remembered the brand and rated the form of advertising as very positive for the most part.

“Alexa, play a commercial! ”

Although TV advertising combined with AI has very good responses, media usage today is primarily in the area of smartphones, tablets and laptops. By using voice assistants such as Alexa & Co., innovative advertising formats can be implemented, especially via smartphones. As part of a campaign, Mercedes Benz created the voice command “Hey Mercedes...”, which allowed users to open appropriate advertising material for the new A-Class.

The pay-TV channel Sky also integrated this feature to draw attention to its new Sky Q receiver. With a voice command, users were able to interact directly with ads and view the latest TV productions. This function became known in a similar form back in 2008 by the provider Shazam: The technology in the Shazam app recognizes music in progress and shows users the corresponding track and also directly offers the various streaming platforms with a link.

Solutions such as these create new points of contact between consumers and brands, thus increasing not only awareness but also the added value of the brand.

Avatars as influencers

The use of avatars offers another opportunity for companies to draw attention to their brand and their products. The avatar created by AI @lilmiquela 2.9 million (as of 01-2021) people are currently following on Instagram. As an influencer, she presents fashion, appears in magazines and gives interviews. The fees she receives for this go to the company that created the avatar. The concept is successful: Many more avatars created by AI followed @lilmiquela and act as virtual influencers. The beauty brand essence, for example, developed its own corporate influencer, the girlbot Kenna, which gave insights behind the scenes as an intern. At least around 22,000 people follow Kenna on Instagram (as of 01-2021).


Content creation with AI

However, AI can also optimize advertising at a much earlier stage — starting with creation. The company Persado, for example, developed a system that uses self-learning AI to recognize natural language and divides creative marketing content that is fed into it into the elements of storyline, emotions, descriptions, calls to action, formatting and positioning. With the resulting language comprehension, the tool then generates appropriate marketing messages for campaigns — and does so successfully. Many customers find that the messages created by AI perform twice as well as the texts created by humans. In addition, the system created by Persado learns with every campaign and develops ever better language comprehension. With machine learning, the needs of the target group can ideally be met even better and thus offer a useful addition to classic content creation.

 

Target group insights

Not only can the content be optimized by algorithms, they can also better define the target group itself. Among other things, pattern recognition can identify connections between conversions and user interests. When playing AdWords or on real-time advertising platforms, AI can be used to select users and target groups through appropriate analysis of usage data. These methods can ultimately automatically optimize the time and place of playback of content by AI. On the one hand, companies can use the resulting data to define the target group even more precisely and to expand or refine it accordingly. On the other hand, the data obtained can be used to optimize your own content and/or website and thus achieve greater reach in the long term.

Take marketing to the next level with Uhura Digital

The use of AI is massively changing the work of creatives and content producers — and of media planners anyway.

Above all, however, the deployment will optimize production costs and provide creative people who really use ML and AI with completely new opportunities to effectively address and address target groups in terms of content — this allows us to grow beyond our standards and traditional expectations.

Uhura Digital and our partner agencies from the international Affinità network have already been able to automatically generate and optimize tens of thousands of missing product descriptions for an e-commerce customer from the fashion sector using ML. The use of the algorithm was not only able to result in a massive cost reduction but also achieved a rapidly faster live process and better search engine visibility.

The website had a variety of pages with dynamic filters, on which users could search for a subset of products that were assigned to a category or other filters. For SEO purposes, the customer wanted to implement an applicable and unique description (description) on these pages - but there are far too many possible combinations to enter them manually. Until now, this problem has been solved by only writing descriptions for the most common categories, but with the help of machine learning, the common properties in the descriptions of the individual products on the page could be distilled into a type of summary text that applies to all products.

Grafische Darstellung einer künstlichen Intelligenz
© Uhura Digital

We have also already been able to use similar processes for our customer TOTAL Germany to improve the search engine visibility of the heating oil platform: A learning algorithm has automatically generated more than 7,000 landing pages, which provide localized content in accordance with the most important postal codes.

The use of ML and AI in the improved distribution of content and advertising messages, particularly in the digital space, is already almost standard today. The platforms of Google Adwords, Facebook and Co. offer a variety of applications for this purpose in order to reach people at the right time with the right content and attract their attention again and again. Classic media planning is neither suitable nor effective for this purpose. When it comes to distribution, Uhura is extremely agile and uses the available data points and data tools to quickly adjust and thus optimally execute campaigns. Would you like to find out more about how you can use artificial intelligence specifically in your advertising? contact us.