So many in the industry have become accustomed to utilizing data-driven software for optimizing outcomes in performance-driven marketing.

But, for one man, that overlooks the latent promise of data to improve the initial awareness at the point brands first meet audiences.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Robert Redmond, IBM Design Principal, Head of AI Ad Product Design, says machine learning now offers the ability for brands to re-focus on creative awareness-raising executions.

Rebooting the power of creative

“Over the course of the past decade, creative has kind of fallen back a little bit,” Redmond says.

“All too often, especially in the display space, we see it just becomes kind of like a little punch of message that really has no effectiveness to it.”

Instead, Redmond says, there is an opportunity to reboot “how our relationship with the humans that we refer to as consumers is crafted”.

“What it is that makes the consumer tick, not in a post-campaign, reports-and-insights sort of way but, rather, at the moment that we greet them, at the moment we reach them?”

Machine learning for creative effectiveness

Remond hopes technology launched by IBM last year can help.

Launched in January 2020, IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator, Accelerator, assembles ad campaign creative elements based on audience reactions. Accelerator technology applies to digital display ads, and as of a few months ago, also video and OTT spots.

That adds up to automatic, dynamic creative assembly of ads.

AI is Building Ad Creatives On The Fly: IBM’s Olesnevich explains

“Within Accelerator, we’re trying to understand the groups of people who are interacting with the advertising and to create cohorts on the fly based on indistinguishable patterns that we might not see when creating a segment or targeting them,” Redmond explains.

“We teach an algorithm how to predict which individual assets to combine at real time to be most relevant for that consumer.

“We’re going to see more and more uses of technology and creativity together in very powerful ways to do this type of work.”

Dynamic creative assembles

Dynamic creative was already rising in prominence in the couple of years prior to the pandemic, as some ad buyers sought to assemble optimal ads for the right audience using raw components of underlying creative.

Now ad-tech vendors are also suggesting DCO could be one way they can practice the kind of agility necessary to respond to profound and sudden change.

IBM’s Redmond says he wants to see “gains in actually pushing people down the (marketing) funnel”.

But, if he gets his way, it is AI that will help fill that funnel.

The Global Forum will be streamed on the GroupM LinkedIn feed from 1 to 5 pm EDT on 6/23.  The program is made possible with the support of IBM Watson Advertising, MediaMath, Nielsen and PubMatic. To stay informed of the Forum details and agenda use the hashtag #ResponsibleMedia and visit beet.tv/media-future.