By Rob Bradley
Following technological disruption over recent decades, the advertising industry is now experiencing another era of change as artificial intelligence and machine learning present new challenges and opportunities. This change is demonstrated by recent research from IAB Europe and Microsoft Advertising, which found that 91% of digital advertising professionals are already using or experimenting with generative AI, 41% have dedicated budgets for Gen AI experimentation and over two-thirds are leveraging Gen AI for content creation.
I fully agree with these findings and see potential to harness this technology to make advertising more efficient, more relevant and impactful to both the consumer and the advertiser. Here are three examples of how AI is being applied right now at CNN International Commercial to make us better and more efficient and also bring added value to the partners we work with:
n Through the usage of AI tools, we are able to process and analyse more data about what content users are consuming. By defining frequency, recency and the types of content that they’re interested in, we can deeply understand consumption and certain behavioural patterns. We then overlay this with first-party and third-party data to have a holistic understanding of our audience. This insight powers content recommendation and delivers a degree of personalisation that ensures they have the most relevant experience with us.
n Using AI powered advertising tech helps us to serve a piece of commercial content across our own sites or externally across social media. We use technology to see how a campaign performs so we have a constant feedback loop and can ensure that there’s precision in what and who the campaigns target with the ability to optimise in real-time.
n Creators in our in-house studio Create use AI to do many things from colour correction to transcription and translation — all tasks that speed up often arduous, time-consuming jobs around editing content, particularly video. It frees up time for our people to focus on the storytelling and creativity.
These examples show how AI can power digital advertising today and be of significant value to publishers and the work we do for our partners and audiences.
The author is senior vice-president, digital revenue, strategy & operations, CNN International Commercial
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook
