Authored by Mark Penn via RealClearMarkets,
For decades, marketers have been chasing the holy grail of marketing – the perfect ability to get the right ad to the right person at the right time in an effortless fashion. Before AI, this was never really possible. We moved from radio advertising to linear TV to digital, each time getting closer to the holy grail but missing the mark on truly effective marketing. Now with AI-based advertising, this perfect ability is finally possible.
Marketing used to be about brand building. The original intent of virtually all advertising was to build a brand people would recognize and ask for when they went into the store – becoming a household name akin to Kellogg’s or Dove or Budweiser. The advent of radio revolutionized reach beyond print ads, but brands were speaking to millions without much insight into who was listening. Then came television. Brands could buy segments targeting the sports fans or the teenagers, but they still couldn’t differentiate between the parent watching baseball who needed diapers and the college student who didn’t.
Then came digital, promising cookies, search, consumer insights, and never-before-seen targeting. The industry shifted from the era of brand building to the era of performance marketing. Digital allowed marketers to pay for specific, measurable results – clicks, leads, and conversions directly tied to ROI. No longer was it about marketing to the masses but about precision. Indeed, today’s CMO now has to evaluate the various channels and decide on the right media mix for their audience. They have to ask themselves if they’re a Coke company or a diaper company. Are they speaking to 150 million people thirsty at sporting events and festivals? Or are they selling to the 3 million women giving birth each year, just 1% of the population?
Yet the era of performance marketing brings its own challenges. Marketers have too much data and too little orchestration. They sit on billions of data points with consumer insights but only use one-tenth of it, they use dashboards that don’t talk to each other, they build campaigns across disconnected systems, they trial and error strategies to find the optimal media mix. They know generally who to target but lack the tools to execute efficiently across each channel. The dream of the holy grail remains just out of reach.
Enter AI. Suddenly a central platform orchestrating all of the different tasks of marketing – aggregating data, understanding the customer, creating content that resonates, deploying targeted campaigns, collecting performance data, and adjusting strategy – is possible. AI is the technology that finally lets marketers achieve true performance marketing and unlock virtually unlimited ROI.
To paint a better picture, I’ll reference Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. The ship has a computer capable of adapting and repairing itself. It holds complex conversations with the humans on board. It controls advanced doors, lighting, shields, and weapons, and transports the ship across time and space. It works as a collaborator to the captain and the core team on the bridge.
Running a marketing campaign in the age of AI is a lot like running the bridge of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. It takes a team of talented people with different skills aided by an incredible suite of technology that enables marketers to do tasks they could never do before in terms of creating content, targeting audiences, and managing client relationships – all at record speed.
This holy grail central marketing platform built on AI has to be (1) omnipresent – connecting all of the tools, data, capabilities, and people in one place; (2) anticipatory – capable of predicting consumer behavior and suggesting actions based on the goals of the marketer or the client; and (3) adaptive – constantly responding to performance results, changes in strategy, or external macro shifts.
What can brands do now that they couldn’t before? Take the Mark Penn pen company as an example. Say my pen company sells various types of pens and I want to sell different products for different occasions – engraved fountain pens for birthdays and graduations, custom ballpoint pens for events and corporations, gel pens for everyday, multi-color use. In the age of digital, I would find the aunts and uncles of graduating students, the event planners, the artists and designers. Then I’d run a campaign on social media for a rainbow pack of my gel pens, another on a news platform for my ballpoint pens, and maybe an OOH campaign in stationery and campus stores for my fountain pens.
But with the holy grail of marketing, I can now take all of the data that I have – most of which may appear irrelevant to my pen company – and identify all the other people who may be interested in my pens: the homeowners celebrating a new house, the entrepreneurs taking their company public, the legal offices and the bookworms who do everything on paper. I can figure out which pen is most attractive to which person. And then I can then take my previous fountain, ballpoint, and gel pen campaigns and create AI marketing agents that build custom campaigns for each of these segments. The AI agents deploy creative, manage spend, and learn in real time which messages resonate with which audiences.
It’s a whole new world of marketing deployment that can harness every source of information and run campaigns in a seamless, virtually perfect way that was impossible before.
This isn’t some abstract idea – it’s becoming reality. Stagwell is building this industry-first AI-driven platform for marketers in a groundbreaking partnership with Palantir, pairing Palantir’s Foundry with Stagwell-owned agency Code and Theory’s orchestration level software and The Marketing Cloud’s proprietary data sources and solutions. The platform allows large enterprises to sift through tens of millions of records in a central hub to identify, segment, and better understand audiences, then create agents to implement complex marketing processes at scale like audience alignment optimization or campaign management. The partnership is already seeing client adoption of the early MVP model.
The holy grail of marketing is coming. In order for marketing to evolve into the next phase, this AI-driven platform has to become as commonplace as Windows or iOS. Brands need to integrate the holy grail into their marketing tech stacks in order to make full use of the sea of consumer data available, centralize targeting in a simple and efficient way, and create agents that will run campaigns across all of the use cases to reach all of the people.
And to those who say AI will end marketing – it won’t. It will supercharge it. Remember that even with every possible tool of the future on deck the Enterprise, it still has a captain and a core team steering the ship. The holy grail of marketing won’t replace human creativity – it will deploy creativity in the most effective way where AI and marketers can work as collaborators to deliver outstanding results. For the first time in history, marketers have the power to truly deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time.
Mark Penn is chairman and CEO of Stagwell (NASDAQ: STGW).
Loading recommendations…
Read the full article here