28th October 2024

AI: are we trying to run before we can walk?

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Jess Austin
Planning Account Director
Read time: 3min
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AI: the 21st century’s version of the space race as providers compete to develop the most useful and widely adopted solutions, first.

It seems you can’t scroll LinkedIn, read industry news or attend a planning meeting with the term ‘AI’ popping up at least twice. It’s an exciting time, and AI offers brands the opportunity to use automation to a whole new level, but let’s not ignore the fact that AI and machine learning have been around for a while.

From Discovery Ad campaigns to data-driven bidding strategies driven by AI, we’ve had the opportunity to test and learn from these data led solutions for some time now. The experience has taught us that we have to be able to understand and control the technology via highly accurate data analysis to make sure it doesn’t run amok, as we saw in the early days of Performance Max! 

Are we trying to run before we can walk? 

Just as we humans know more about space than we do our deepest oceans, I think brands are focusing on the new horizons opened up by AI but may be neglecting to optimise their current assets. It’s possible therefore, some brands will be trying to train machine learning solutions on non-optimised data and websites.

As we embrace an increasingly data-driven approach to planning, activating and managing our websites and media activity, brands need to ensure a number of hygiene elements are in place before diving into AI:

Website content

Google, Microsoft, AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and all the other AI solutions will be crawling websites and social media platforms to compile the (hopefully) most appropriate information to present based on increasingly complex searches. Therefore, it’s imperative that brands ensure their website contains high-quality, comprehensive information on their services and offerings, and have expertise and experience at the heart of their content writing. This will mean AI tools will have a better chance of viewing your content and be able to match it more appropriately with searches.  

Conversion optimisation

For AI-based campaign bidding algorithms you need a lot of good quality conversion data to train the algorithm. How can you do that if your website or media activity doesn’t convert very well?

Brands should review their user journeys from first engagement to conversion to ensure the journey is consistent, concise, and clear. By ensuring your advertising campaigns and website conversion journey make sense and deliver to the user’s needs, you will increase conversions and give the AI the data it needs to drive the most effective Return On Investment.

First-party data strategy

With the increasing emphasis on user privacy and control, brands should devise a strategy to harness and capitalise on their highly engaged users and customers. Not only because retargeting pools are our best opportunity to convert, but also because owned data is the engine that drives machine learning. It’s how AI driven solutions will understand your audience, their propensity to purchase, and their journey to purchase.

The AI developments are exciting and challenging, and with the landscape of AI changing on an almost weekly basis, brands need to focus on their housekeeping as well as keeping a keen eye on the experiences of early adopters.

If you’d like to know more about our thoughts on AI, please get in touch

 

 

 

 

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Author Jess Austin
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