Throughout history, an advertising transaction has involved two parties, where one party has something to sell that the other party is interested in buying with focus on advertising revenue management and optimization. While the process has remained the same, achieving higher efficiency with automated and streamlined process using tools and technologies has always played a vital role in driving yield for publishers. The advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) allow for publishers to analyze large volumes of data in real-time and automatically recommend products and packages based on buyer intent all the while focussed on improving yield.
In fact, according to DemandBase survey, 84% of marketing and sales professionals were either already using AI as a part of their business operations or were in various stages of adopting and implementing AI strategies. While the marketers are already using AI or adopting AI, the marketers firmly believe that adopting AI across their organizational functions will drive Double-Digit revenue growth.
Emergence of AI in Advertising
AI has been in existence within the advertising ecosystem for a long time, but most of the AI that has been there has been purely rule based engines or pre-defined statistical models enabling publishers to predict ad inventory and revenue. The role of AI in the advertising industry is still relatively young. A timeline of some of the use cases where AI has been used actively within the advertising ecosystem were:
- Ability to organize content using structured data
- Managing advertising inventory across multiple media properties for better yield management
- Measuring user intent using causal relationships have been attempted numerous times without any luck
- Personalizing experiences and ads based on user behavior
Above are some of the ways in which AI has been used in the advertising industry up until now. However, AI has lot more bigger scope and a bigger role to play in the ad sales and ad operations organizations. With possible applications in multiple areas, AI can make a significant difference as technology continues to grow and mature.
Benefits of Applying AI in Advertising
Application of AI can drive a lot of value to publishers and advertisers alike, offering a potential wealth of advantages. While AI is being used in multiple ways, the most prevalent ways in which it is deployed currently is in the programmatic space. Some of the results that are offered by deploying AI is:
- Increased Productivity — Productivity is the key element in enabling your sales professionals to execute a contract or your operations team to setup the campaigns in the ad server. Handling tasks, like communicating media plans, placing approvals, seeing historical prices, can be time consuming, but AI can drive significant change providing immediate advantages. AI can automate many of these tasks that go into the overall ad sales process.
- Accurate Forecasting — While inventory forecasting has existed for over a decade in the advertising industry, the methods that has been applied are primitive in nature. Being able to get a picture of your forecasted inventory allows you manage your business financials effectively
- Improved Budgeting — The top line and bottom line are key metrics that the revenue organization tracks in and out on a daily basis. By monitoring and analyzing buying and selling price points, and evaluating discounts allows for companies to effectively manage yield thereby directly contributing to top line and bottom line.
- Predictive Analytics — Understanding the media plans, sales orders and the associated rate cards of the products in the media plan will allow yield teams to model out multiple scenarios which was extremely difficult prior to AI being available. Advertising invested about $6 billion in artificial intelligence marketing.
Role of AI in Media Planning
Media Planning is a laborious task which involves a lot of data crunching and multiple back and forth across several teams within the organization and across the organization, but AI offers a plethora opportunities to streamline the media sales process and enabling sales team to effectively put together media plans that can aggregate across channels, device types, and formats. With AI, publishers can optimize allocation of inventory and rates that drives higher yield and effective inventory management.
With AI coming into the fore front of media planning, a lot of time that used to go into managing and crunching data can now be effectively used to manage relationships with customers thereby providing a more wholistic personalized buying experience.
Role of AI in Media Sales
With AI getting proliferated across the sales organizations, a significant amount of information that goes into creating sales orders, analyzing price points, and evaluating inventory contentions are now being crunched by using AI. Having access to so much data with complex AI engine, AI can monitor sales operations and yield operations, trigger alerts and run multiple revenue scenarios. With new age AI, systems can now adapt and learn to changing data conditions, making it much easier to optimize the media sales environment before closing deals.
AI has a direct impact on revenues, too: the Indian media company Bennett Coleman & Co expect an additional $10 million in sales through the use of artificial intelligence.
Role of AI in Media Buying
Gone are the days where significant effort used to go into creating and managing advertising transactions where data is typically stored across multiple excel sheets across the organization. AI has enabled transactions to move more programmatic or more system driven, enabling transparent, faster and automated transactions.
With the increasing usage of AI in the advertising transactions, buyers done have to spend time estimating outcomes, managing campaigns, constantly reviewing under-delivery and negotiating terms while burdening the finance team with billing problems. Buyer and sellers can now work on ensuring the transaction is fast, automated and streamlined focussing on delivery and yield rather than spending time on mundane manual tasks.
About Symmetriq
Symmetriq is an Omni Channel Advertising Revenue Management platform allowing you to unify inventory, manage quote to cash, and maximize revenue across OTT, Digital, Linear, and Print in a Single Cloud-Based SaaS Advertising Revenue Management platform. Symmetriq was born out of the need to provide tools, technologies, and platforms to enable media companies to manage and run a profitable advertising business. Our omnichannel advertising revenue management platform is built natively on the cloud leveraging the latest web technologies with the scale being the primary driver without compromising security and compliance that has become paramount in the current privacy-first world. With Symmetriq, you can:
- Scale your ad sales
- Streamline your ad operations
- Reduce your leaky revenue bucket
- Get complete visibility on your revenue
- Manage multiple rate cards as your business scales
- Customize your product catalog based on your business requirements
- Measure the health of your advertising business in real-time
We help leading publishers across the globe manage advertising business in a single platform enabling them to run a profitable media business. For any queries, please reach out to info@symmetriq.io.
https://symmetriq.io/advertising-revenue-management-ai-and-its-impact
