Nick Kavanagh
As social platforms seek to increase audience engagement and time spent on-platform, they’re constantly refining their recommendation algorithm to deliver content that is ever more personalised, ever more relevant, ever more likely to drive a conversion.
Whether we like it or not – and I know many that don’t - AI has become the true gatekeeper for the dissemination of both information and entertainment to those buying the products and services of our clients. Within the space of roughly 15 years, we have left the broadcast, brand-building era that has shaped the global advertising industry for the previous 50 years behind.
First came the era of precision marketing, defined by short-term performance capability, into what we now see on the horizon - a new, algorithmically-driven advertising era. An era in which media’s very role within our lives will become more expansive - more pervasive - as it becomes 100% addressable, 100% shoppable and, as some would like us to believe, 100% accountable.
In the latest edition of our Media Trends report The Year of Impact, the 15th in the series, we at dentsu have dug into this Algorithmic Era in more detail, and explored what this might mean for how brands navigate and take advantage of this change. One theme of which is the pivot to algorithm-based planning.
The idea that we must evolve how we approach the very building blocks of communications strategy if we are to take advantage of the opportunities available.
Whilst how we define and profile the typical category buyer for deployment of communications in the early stages of the customer journey may not necessarily change [hooray], prospecting will use AI to achieve a larger net reach and increased consideration by identifying more diverse segments not initially considered. Finally, propensity will utilise AI to define the best type of content, delivered at key category entry points later in the journey to convert each individual.
Through this approach, brands may uncover unexpected but viable audiences that may otherwise have been missed.
But it’s the implication for the creation and distribution of creative where we at iProspect believe the pivot to algorithmic planning potentially gets most interesting. And that’s because it will a) force greater collaboration between media and advertising agencies and b) potentially herald a new era of creativity and creative effectiveness.
You may have heard of the term content ‘slop’, low-quality content made using GenAI that fills our feeds and search results. Indeed, in his article ‘The Age of Slop’, Ryan Broderick contends that slop has become the defining theme of the 2020’s internet. He states slop as having three defining characteristics:
- It feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that type of content is being created.
- It feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm.
- It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimised to be so
Algorithmic Planning will allow us to elevate our brand message[s] beyond the slop, by harmonising our media and creative efforts. AI will help communications strategists working in media agencies understand performance principles for both channels and creative, by stage of the customer journey, before the campaign has even gone live.
And when we say performance principles, this is at both a brand-building level and a commercial one. Everything is performance.
Brands will therefore go to market with a stronger portfolio of creative assets, ready for deployment by algorithms prioritising content with the greatest velocity. Dynamic creative optimisation [DCO] will evolve from a technological add-on to plans, to a core aspect of the integrated strategy. This algorithm-based content will dramatically reduce wastage as brands will need to produce less ‘stuff’ whilst increasing personalisation, simultaneously reducing the cost of production for clients and our industrial carbon footprint.
While we’ve always been data-led, the algorithm era has the potential to transform the discipline of communications strategy. This new school of planners will be able to design ecosystems for our clients that demonstrably prove impact at every stage of the customer journey, harnessing data to truly integrate media and creative once again.
Nick Kavanagh is Chief Strategy Officer at iProspect, a dentsu company.