There is a terrific amount of great work going on right now across the entire field of marketing-media-advertising. This post will provide some examples and could not possibly include everything, so every now and then I’ll need to do other posts like this one.
To me, the biggest and boldest new move is the one I reported on last week, UltiMedia, which is aimed at solving the problem of excess frequency while returning growth to the television industry. (Disclosure: I’m involved in this effort.)
WPP Media Open Intelligence AI is working like a charm for RMT, who has joined the partnership supplier circle and had the experience of how easy it was to set up the RMT Agent within WPP Media Open Intelligence. And it’s even easier to use. The client can ask any question, ask for a table to be set up, can even ask what questions should I be asking; and the answers are perfect reliable outputs because based solely on authenticated supplier data. It’s a beautiful example of one of the right ways to use AI. (Disclosure: I’m involved in this effort.)
Karen Nelson Field has published The Attention Economy: A Category Blueprint,which is a rich treasure trove of everything a serious practitioner needs to know about not only attention, but also about how to think deeply about marketing and advertising. Its 371 pages are packed with brilliant ideas and solid findings, not only her own but from a wide span of others in the field, including me. The schematics and stories set it apart from simply being an essential read, making it fun in the process.
Rick Bruner’s Central Control, which set out to make Random Control Trials (RCTs) and other in-market experiments easier to implement, has just published a how-to guide entitled HOW TO DESIGN A GEOGRAPHIC RANDOMIZED CONTROLLED TRIAL, sharing his innovative practices with the industry, which have already started to catch on. Marketers are slowly coming to the realization that they need scientific experiments to ground MMM, MTA, and all other forms of observational ROI estimation. The stakes are too high to simply assume that observational correlational results are proofs of causation which credit each media type with perfect accuracy.
DATA POEM has created the world's largest Causal AI platform called FOUNT, turning the ideas of Judea Pearl into a whole new AI architecture upon which others can build predictive systems of unprecedented forecasting accuracy. Their new white paper offers impeccable third-party proof that FOUNT beat the time series foundational models of Google, Salesforce, Amazon, and other contenders across standard benchmarks, achieving 36% average superiority across all datasets, while also outperforming the Kaggle M5 forecasting competition winner. This new large Causal AI model can help unify MMM+MTA, unify measurement of all demand drivers, and measure multiple KPIs in one single model, while its benefits extend far beyond marketing to include the most difficult prediction challenges, such as weather forecasting.
Andy Pakula’s WiO platform has now partnered with Nielsen to make all ads shoppable, providing the fastest feedback for inflight re-optimization in the television business, both national and local. My work with Mars at TRA showed that being able to measure results quickly led to 52% average lifts in ROI because unproductive creative could be quickly pulled. Making all ads shoppable can be done by anyone with QR codes, but understanding how to optimize QR codes for new users, and how to dashboard the results for answering any question, is something requiring years of experience, which Andy has and few others have. On top of addressability and measurability, shoppable ads complete the circle in making TV the equal with digital in having the functionalities marketers want.
Vividata, “the MRI of Canada”, has just announced that RMT motivational Drivers will from now on be part of the basic package that all advertiser, agency, and media subscribers receive on their dashboards. This means that when new ads are being created in Canada from now on, creative strategies can always take into account the life motivations of the prospect segments to whom their ads will be targeted; these targets themselves can be picked out based on their life motivations; and the media used can be selected so as to resonate with those same life motivations. (Disclosure: I’m involved in this effort.)
Shopnosis uses its own panels, who wear special AI glasses when they go shopping to feed back videos of exactly what the shopper-respondent sees, looks at, picks up, and buys, and analyzes all of that data to optimize the in-store shopping experience for brands. I recall that P&G calls the in-store shopping experience the First Moment Of Truth (FMOT).
EDO and Affinity Solutions have conducted a QSR study of TV sports advertising which shows that creative can make a 7.7X difference in QSR online sales, and high-response DMAs can double sales ROI. Erwin Ephron and I are two practitioners who have always pointed out that every brand has its own fast-growth DMAs which can be leveraged by media heavy-ups, so I’m delighted to see that idea being brought back into industry awareness.
I’ve received a number of other new reports into which I’m digging deeply, and I suspect that there will soon be another compilation of other brilliant moves to report. It feels as if there are more great ideas being had than in previous times. I hope that feeling continues to pan out.
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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