MediaAgenciesAILast year was stressful for the media industry which had declining margins and was understaffed and overworked. For those reasons, media agencies must break new ground with AI this year to tackle the situation and thrive to survive.

AI will give the media industry deep insights that allow running campaigns on a larger and easier scale than ever before. Especially in times of recession, marketing investments are all too often scaled back and budgets flow into more easily measurable performance measures. But every step in the customer journey is important, and this entire journey is also increasingly measurable.

When marketers must do more with less, those with a better understanding of how investments translate into returns will benefit from new insights to improve marketing strategy and execution. They will be the ones able to clearly demonstrate the impact of their marketing spend. In other words, if we let the machine handle the routine data matching tasks, we humans can develop the creative aspects of marketing.

A comprehensive adaptation of AI is therefore inevitable in almost all areas of life, even though we are still at the beginning of this development. The holistic measurement of advertising effectiveness is becoming more and more complex, primarily due to the development of new digital marketing channels, such as Connected TV. Despite this complexity, it becomes increasingly clear that AI will play an extremely important role in the future. The primary focus in 2023 will be on continuing to set the course. On the one hand, AI must become more democratic in this context, meaning that the entry threshold must be further lowered.

With the increasingly popular no- or low-code platforms on the market, the industry is on the right track in this regard. Despite this, many companies simply still have too much respect for the technology and that’s a major obstacle, especially when it comes to the elimination of third-party cookies.

You have to look at it that way: Half of your potential audience today is unresponsive to third-party cookies. If you don't find new ways to reach and engage with these audiences, your competitors can do so unchallenged. Not only will they gain market share, but they will learn faster and faster how to thrive in a post-cookie future. In other words, those who caught the train too late will be at a significant competitive disadvantage. Marketers will increasingly need to focus on scaling activation and measurement in 2023. This is the only way to gain access to new, untapped target groups and increase marketing efficiency and results.

However, that only works if adtech companies use multiple alternative signals for targeting and tracking. Because it requires sophisticated AI that can create patterns and predictive models from this multitude of probabilistic and deterministic signals to achieve accurate target group analysis and targeting from the numerous alternative signals. It will be the job of the industry to educate people then about this.

Generative and creative AIs are becoming increasingly important for the media industry. Large film studios are already partially using AIs to write scripts and this trend will not stop anytime soon. The timeless topic of "sustainability" will also be in focus in 2023, because although the AI makes business processes more sustainable, it itself consumes a lot of energy.

In a nutshell, 2023 will be all about new technologies. Marketers must seize this opportunity to measure consumers in real-time and optimize more effectively—at every step of the customer journey. This is the only way to achieve more efficient, coordinated, and effective advertising spending.

By MediaBUZZ