Most marketers rely on some type of paid advertising to drive demand. But few marketers are very good at every part of the advertising process. Sure, some of us excel at copywriting or audience targeting or media buying. But making all these pieces work together is often a huge—and costly—challenge.
This is one area of marketing where artificial intelligence is already producing results.
Today’s digital advertising platforms rely on AI to auction and place ads in real time. The business literally would be impossible without machine learning. But, AI tools are also helping marketers do more with less—and drive real performance gains.
At Marketing AI Institute, we’ve spent years investigating AI use cases in marketing, experimenting with the technology, and talking to vendors. We’ve profiled 50+ vendors and currently track more than 1,500 AI-powered marketing and sales companies with more than $6 billion in funding.
And, in that time, we’ve found some great use cases for AI that you can start using today for advertising.
Write and Test Ads
As of today, artificial intelligence can actually write and test advertising copy for you on certain platforms.
- Write ad copy for Facebook, Instagram, and SMS. Phrasee uses deep learning to write ad copy for Facebook, Instagram, and SMS that is optimized for more clicks and, thus, more revenue. One of the tool’s main capabilities is that it automatically writes email subject lines better than humans—but that same AI-powered functionality has now been adapted to automatically write Facebook ads and push notifications.
Target and Convert Audiences
Artificial intelligence won’t just write ads for you. It’ll also show you exactly which audiences to target—and how to convince them to act on your ad messages.
- Find new audiences. Albert uses artificial intelligence to optimize your advertising, in the process finding new audiences for your products and services—based completely on what the system is learning from your advertising data.
- Get more conversions for less money. Adobe Advertising Cloud is a demand-side platform that unifies advertising data from digital and TV campaigns. As part of the platform, Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI product, offers “predictions on how to get the highest conversions for the lowest costs,” according to the company’s website.
- Get more eyes on your ads. GumGum uses proprietary AI-powered computer vision technology to scan images, videos, and content across the web. Then, it uses insights from that analysis to help your brand place ads where consumers are most likely to pay attention to them.
Optimize Ad Budgets
Money powers your advertising, but machines can help you spend it better. Today, artificial intelligence is able to optimize budgets in real time or near real time, across channels, faster and better than humans.
- Optimize current advertising spend. Albert (mentioned above) also uses AI to help brands optimize their current advertising spend by adjusting it continuously across specific platforms to maximize ROI.
- Allocate money across media types. Lucy, an AI assistant from Equals 3, uses predictive models and forecasting to show how well a media plan will perform. The tool then provides re-allocation strategies to make sure every dollar is doing its part in your advertising.
- Save time and avoid waste. WordStream is an ad management platform that deploys AI in a number of ways to quickly analyze your advertising, recommend ways to optimize ads so you don’t waste money, and make changes to campaigns in just a few minutes and at scale—rather than the hours, days, or weeks it might take to execute manually.
How to Get Started with AI in Advertising
If you're an advertiser or marketing relying on paid ads, chances are that AI can help you increase revenue and reduce costs. That means now is the time to get started with AI, no matter your skill or comfort level.
To do so means you build a potentially insurmountable competitive advantage. To delay means you risk getting left behind.
Good news, though:
There are two ways to accelerate AI adoption in your career and your company.
The first is by accessing our free Ultimate Beginner's Guide to AI in Marketing.
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to AI in Marketing is a free resource with 100+ articles, videos, courses, books, vendors, use cases, and events to dramatically accelerate your AI education. It's based on the years we spent on research and experimentation—and you can access this knowledge in a fraction of the time.
The second is by attending our Marketing AI Conference (MAICON).
MAICON brings together top authors, entrepreneurs, AI researchers, and executives to share case studies, strategies, and technologies that make AI approachable and actionable for marketers.
The conference is simply the best way to learn how to adopt AI, straight from marketing leaders already using the technology.
Mike Kaput
As Chief Content Officer, Mike Kaput uses content marketing, marketing strategy, and marketing technology to grow and scale traffic, leads, and revenue for Marketing AI Institute. Mike is the co-author of Marketing Artificial Intelligence: AI, Marketing and the Future of Business (Matt Holt Books, 2022). See Mike's full bio.