In 2018, Lexus released what it called the first advertisement scripted by artificial intelligence.
Lexus used IBM Watson to analyze 15 years of “car and luxury brand campaigns that have won Cannes Lions awards for creativity, as well as a range of other external data,” according to Variety.
Watson was able to identify which elements from the dataset would resonate with viewers.
AI-inspired PR stunt? Most definitely.
Yet it also points to a deeper, more important story:
AI is the future of advertising.
AI isn’t just creating ads, though commercially available platforms exist that use AI to create ads without human involvement.
No, AI is transforming what is possible in the world of advertising at every level, from ad creation to audience targeting to ad buying.
Andrew Ng, who built AI at Google and Baidu, highlights online advertising as a major use case for AI in his excellent AI for Everyone course. In fact, machine learning—a core AI technology—is used everywhere in major ad platforms to determine if you’ll click on an ad, and that’s just one use case.
But it goes even further than that.
There are already dozens of use cases for AI in advertising today, with brands using the technology to intelligently identify and segment audiences, build ad creative, test variations, improve performance, and optimize spend—automatically, in real-time, and at scale.
This has profound implications on both a brand’s competitive advantage when it comes to digital advertising and the careers of marketers who plan and run ad campaigns.
In this article, we’ll walk through a working definition of AI as it relates to advertising. We’ll look at some of the top AI use cases for advertising, so you get a better idea of how AI can actually create value for brands. And, we’ll show you some top companies that actually offer AI solutions in various areas of advertising, so you can start demoing tools.
READ more: Artificial Intelligence in advertising