Deciphering The Next Frontier For Artificial Intelligence In Marketing And Advertising Posted on : Dec 11 - 2020

In 2020, the digital walled gardens have more working in their favor than ever before. When you add Google's effective death knell to third-party cookies to the passage of CCPA's enforcement date, we see a dramatic acceleration of a trend that was already well underway: Closed ecosystems are garnering an insurmountable edge in the world of online advertising. Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, mega-players like Google, Facebook and Amazon have only widened their moats.

The advantages of closed ecosystems were indisputable well before the abolition of cookies, the go-live of new privacy laws and pandemic-driven consumer behavior shifts. That said, their advantage was built on technology that is rapidly becoming more democratized across the media landscape: artificial intelligence. As AI applications become more common and sophisticated among a diverse set of industry players, we're going to see the power within the media landscape continue to shift. Let's look at how AI's role in media is going to evolve in the coming years and ultimately give rise to tomorrow's cast of power players.

Yesterday: AI Brings Intelligence To Scale

Within the media landscape, closed ecosystems like Google, Facebook, Amazon and others have proved themselves to be leaders in developing and applying AI for the benefit of their business. They have, in many ways, proved to be the very best at it. That's not terribly surprising given the inherent benefits that these platforms have enjoyed since their early days.

The initial AI advantage of closed ecosystems came from their large bases of known users — in other words, quality data at scale. The insight that these platforms have been able to derive from the massive amount of interactions flowing through their platforms is precisely what is required to make AI smarter over time. When machine learning continually evolves, it can do amazing things. It's what has allowed today's tech titans to create giant ad businesses built on proprietary intelligence. Fed by an endless stream of new data, these platforms' algorithms became proficient at maximizing yield for their businesses.

The power of AI has driven the vast majority of consumer time and advertising dollars spent into the walls of these closed ecosystems. However, despite the well-understood audiences of these platforms, the true intelligence behind them remains locked within their walls, posing challenges for advertisers that increasingly need to understand their audiences across devices and platforms. This brings us to where today's AI enhancements are concentrated. View More