The Evolving Role of AI in Modern Marketing
Long before the ChatGPT frenzy in 2023, marketers have been using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to optimize not only in-campaign performance, but also everyday workflows from planning to attribution. This has included audience targeting and segmentation, personalized content at scale, ad placement and optimizations, creative insights, fraud detection and prevention, and most notably, analytics and reporting.
While very few brands do the above well, the shared pressure to adapt and incorporate AI’s evolving solutions is felt by all.
If it isn’t already, AI will be a key aspect of nearly every performance conversation today’s CMOs face. The heightened pressure on CMOs, as well as CFOs, to measure ROI on shorter timelines with fewer resources has accelerated the importance of identifying opportunities within full-funnel marketing to capitalize on AI’s exploding capabilities.
While there are many areas of AI for marketers to lean in, preparations for future-proofing brand strategies and performance against a looming cookieless landscape will be paramount. All of this requires brands to balance both the power AI brings with the human creativity and strategy that elevates it.
There are three top areas brands can use AI to elevate their marketing strategy: identifying audience solutions, maintaining personalized messaging at scale, and preparing for the current and future state of attribution. Let’s explore all three.
Leveraging AI To Mitigate the Impact of Cookie Deprecation
If CMOs’ performance challenges were not already enough, Google kicked off 2024 with the announcement that it restricted third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users starting January 4th and plans to ramp up third-party cookie restrictions to 100% of users in Q3 2024.
Currently, there is no silver-bullet replacement for third-party cookies, and it will likely stay that way for some time. (Unsure of where to start? Check out seven alternatives we recommend to a cookieless future.) Instead, heightened importance has been placed on marketers to leverage solutions that depend on first- and zero-party data like customer relationship management (CRM) systems, as well as proprietary or vendor-supplied “ID Resolutions.”
However, these solutions can be barebone without third-party cookies tying online behavior across other sites to a user. AI-based solutions can step in by analyzing vast amounts of data across user browsing habits, interactions with previous marketing campaigns, sentiments expressed on social media, and product review patterns to not only build out a more complete user profile, but also create lookalike audiences and serve users with personalized messaging increasing their propensity for brand engagement.
How We’re Navigating This Challenge
Choosing the right identity platform can make a difference. At Goodway Group, we use Passport One™, our award-winning identity solution for creating customized audience design, enhancing existing first-party data, and identifying new opportunities for closed-loop measurement. Passport One™ was developed with modern marketing needs in mind as a featured tool for the cookieless future and uses elements of AI to solve for these challenges:
- Uncovering sophisticated audience insights and effective audience targeting with or without rich first-party data.
- Enhancing CRMs with specific customer and audience data signals.
- Delivering cost-effective access to data sources with all the right attributes (geographic, demographic, technology preferences, retail, and online behaviors).
- Investigating competitive insights.
- Reaching audiences at the right time with the right message on their preferred channel(s).
Passport One™ is among a suite of products that comprise our modern marketing tool kit, which is powered by Goodway Group’s robust team of analysts, engineers, investment leads, data scientists and strategists.
Delivering “Intelligent Creative” Tied to Audience and Measurement Data
Once audience identification has been accomplished, a big part of creative success is personalizing messaging to the right person at the right time without exhausting resources. A lack of compelling creative can hold a campaign back from its potential or if done successfully, command audience attention and drive them further down the path to purchase.
Marketers should seek a partner that has proven experience and success tapping into the power of AI to continuously evolve creative process and efficiency through offerings such as creative ideation, Creative Optimization (DCO) and more.
Our Approach to “Intelligent Creative”
At Goodway Group, it’s our standard practice to combine the power of data and technology with creative design to deliver “Intelligent Creative” that’s immersive and provides personalized experiences through a brand’s audiences’ journey to drive real outcomes.
AI aids our creative teams in increasing efficiency, delivering personalization, and enhancing creative ideation. Goodway Group offers DCO services that use AI to create hyper-personalized experiences for consumers. By leveraging customer data, supercharged by our proprietary PassportOne™ tool — plus real-time testing and analytics — AI can help select the most effective combination of creative elements for each consumer to drive impactful performance.
But as marketers continue to leverage AI as tool in the creative toolbelt, it’s important to remember that AI is only as powerful as the involvement of human creativity and strategy that fuels it. Overarching creative strategy, from concepting to creating assets, is where human intelligence is vital to creating work that resonates. Brands that use AI too much in their creative approach run the risk of diminishing what consumers want most from their favorite brands: authenticity.
While AI can deliver data-driven insights to guide creative optimization, marketers should identify new and innovative ways to connect brands with consumers in an authentic and meaningful way without AI.
Closing the Loop Across Audience Targeting and Messaging with Even Deeper Analytics
Third-party cookies have played a critical role for attribution models for the last ten years, but marketers need to move beyond the traditional cookie-dependent testing methodology. While no partner can offer a direct a replacement for the role cookies played in measurement, selecting one that has been proactively tapping into AI and its ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data to make better decisions will help mitigate the loss of key data points and future-proof overall transparency into performance.
Capabilities around harnessing machine learning to deliver cross-system data summarization, real-time sentiment analysis, ultra-fine segmentation, optimized lead scoring, and customer behavior insights should be at the top of each brand marketer’s shopping list.
Here are a few examples of how Goodway’s data science and analytics team has been finding new ways to integrate these capabilities across practices:
Media Mix Modeling (MMM)
Due to AI’s enhanced data processing capabilities, we can speed up reads and create “what if” scenarios for more frequent and in-depth analysis.
Scenario Planning
AI in scenario planning helps stress test strategies to derive and deliver insights for our clients more quickly and model complex scenarios for future plans.
Testing
Whether we are conducting a creative test, an A/B test, or a messaging test, AI helps us across all these practices through analyzing user data. We can also better understand their preferences through developing an automation of tests at scale.
Predictive Analytics
AI can aid in analyzing past performance to predict potential future trends and patterns like lifetime value (LTV), churn rates, forecasting, refresh rates and identifying cross-sell opportunities.
Proprietary Tech & Tools
AI is crucial in our proprietary tools at Goodway Group, such as our bidding algorithms (RealValue™), Q/A monitoring system (SmartGuard), and management platform with reporting dashboards (GoodLook). Using AI in our tools boosts operational efficiency and allows us to make ongoing optimizations with agility and strategic precision.
Driving Transformational Change by Unlocking AI
In a quickly evolving and changing landscape, brands and marketers must look inward and challenge their own capabilities to take them to the next level. Unlocking AI’s full potential requires a unique tango weaving together human intelligence with AI’s need for defined constraints and clear communication for desired outputs. Most brands will need to welcome some outside support to accomplish their full potential across the holistic marketing funnel.
In this rapidly evolving digital landscape, Goodway Group is committed to continuously embracing this dance to ensure we deliver innovative solutions that elevate our clients and bring them measurable outcomes.
We have practices in place to ensure that we are early to adopt, as well as create, all types of machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence capabilities to keep ahead of the curve. We continuously build out our toolbox with access to AI and ML platforms like OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock and Meta Robyn, to name a few. And at the end of the day, we are constant explorers — we hold regular innovation guilds and hackathons that play a massive role in our cyclical and iterative process of developing, training and evaluating AI and ML capabilities.
As a strategic partner for some of the most recognizable brands and agencies in the world, we are dedicated to mastering the art and science of blending human and artificial intelligence to consistently deliver modern, digital excellence.
Contact us to learn more about how we solve complex challenges that the modern marketer faces and help you future-proof your business.
Leila has several years of experience in crafting stories that elevate brands and better connect them with their audiences. She is a part of the Client Solutions & Innovation team at Goodway Group, where she gets to work with talented and smart people to find solutions for ever-evolving marketing challenges. She resides in Washington, D.C., holds an MBA from American University, and loves uncovering new ways to help brands navigate the modern-day marketing landscape.