The advertising toolkit is undergoing a radical overhaul. Blunt instruments are rapidly giving way to precision tools, capable of dissecting campaign performance with unprecedented granularity.
The imperative for advertisers is to “embrace the change,” according to Paul Zovighian, VP, marketplaces, Index Exchange.
He pointed to the rise of companies using artificial intelligence to refine their campaigns, a stark contrast to older methods. Zovighian shared his views in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Embracing AI’s ‘fine-tuning scalpel’
The AI in marketing market is forecast to see substantial growth, projected to expand from $27.83 billion in 2024 to $35.54 billion in 2025, according to a Research and Markets report. According to an eMarketer survey, nearly 60% of U.S. ad buyers had used or planned to use such AI-powered media buying products. AI-powered ad systems like Meta’s Advantage+ and Google’s Performance Max are gaining traction.
Advertisers need to recognize that “new capabilities now that are being evolved rapidly at increasingly reduced, lower barrier to entry as well,” Zovighian urged.
He characterized the impact of AI as moving from a blunt instrument to a fine-tuning scalpel. “Comparatively… previous techniques and tools… looks like a sledgehammer,” he said. This shift allows for a more nuanced and effective approach to reaching target audiences and achieving campaign goals.
Index Exchange facilitating AI-driven decisions
To support this transition, Index Exchange launched Index Marketplaces, its sell-side decisioning platform. Zovighian explained that this platform is “intended to help facilitate exactly this” shift towards more intelligent, AI-driven advertising by providing the necessary infrastructure.
The platform’s role involves collaboration with various companies that have AI at the core of their solutions. “Our job as the platform is to help bridge the gap between those solutions and making it possible for them to make decisions on the sell-side before the auction even takes place,” Zovighian said.
From Index Exchange’s perspective, this requires robust infrastructure. “We need to stand up really intelligent infrastructure to connect those solutions to make decisions across… the entire open web and all of those ad opportunities, very efficiently and in real-time, very, very fast,” he added.
Deep learning for privacy and scale
Zovighian highlighted the role of “deep learning” in understanding and engaging audiences.
These advanced models can identify subtle connections and patterns in data that previous techniques might have missed or found too costly to analyze at scale, he said: “You now have these models that are making connections, finding patterns that maybe otherwise, the previous techniques were missing, or maybe it was too expensive to do at scale,” Zovighian explained.
This allows for drawing conclusions from diverse data types without necessarily relying on traditional identifiers.
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