2024 will no doubt see the ad tech industry adapt to the largest changes the industry has faced to date. The third-party tracking cookie is officially going away, budgets are tightening, and generative AI threatens to fundamentally change how we do digital advertising.
Marketers and personalization platforms however, are rising to these challenges and opportunities with new innovations that are changing how we approach addressability and how we can overhaul our workflows for the better.
In our recent webcast, Jamie Villacarlos from Jivox and Mitchell Pok from Media Monks sat down to discuss three key trends that are taking off in the world of personalized marketing.
1: A Shift To Meaningful Personalization With First-Party, Contextual, And Cohort-Based Data Strategies
Brands are shifting focus away from surface-level personalization to what we’re calling meaningful personalization. It’s less about ad variations that reflect random data points and more about identifying key moments that brands can be useful in.
As Mitchell Pok explains, “ finding ways to provide relevancy or real benefits to users in these (key) moments is going to be a key differentiator for the brands that do personalization well.”
It’s a strategy that takes advantage of privacy-friendly, contextual data sets, which will be very important this year as the tracking cookie is discontinued.
For similar reasons, commerce or retail media is rising quickly among brands and advertisers as a favorite marketing channel. It gives marketers a high-performing first-party data option that meets consumers close to the point of purchase.
2: Bottom Line Growth With DCO
With an uncertain economy, brands have put a big emphasis on doing more with less—-improving performance with a smaller budget.
Jamie Vallacarlos explains, “(Clients) don’t have the creative teams to build out the creative they need or they don’t have the budgets to engage their agencies. There is a push from the top to continue to drive and improve sales.”
Creating thousands of variations manually has made DCO seem unapproachable, but innovative DCO platforms now automate creative versioning using creative masters. They also make the transition from creative tools to the platform seamless by allowing designers to work off creative working files.
Automated DCO platforms can also make campaign adjustments quick and painless. When a brand wants new promotions, they can simply make adjustments to their feeds and have them reflected in their ad variations in minutes.
3: Generative AI Will Enable Further Efficiencies But Not Stand On Its Own
When we first saw AI generated images, many suspected that creative teams would be less reliant on designers in the near future. These image generators however, are not able to maintain the level of consistency that brands require for their paid media. Variations will still need to be strictly edited and curated in a post production stage.
Mitchel Pok explains how the content problem is changing, “with generative AI, content is no longer that bottleneck (…) advertisers without DCO tech now have a distribution challenge.”
A couple areas where generative AI has become fairly self-sufficient is voice over and translation. AI VO has already gotten to the point where it can convincingly replicate a human voice.
Similarly, translating scripts for different regions has traditionally been quite costly. AI-based translation programs are now roughly 99% effective at translations.
DCO platforms are already successfully using AI in streamlining workflow and generating content. Jivox automated DCO, for instance, allows brands to plug in data sources and product feeds to inform the creative and serve the most relevant ad to customers without a mountain of manual work. The platform is further augmented by AI for creative optimization, product recommendations, and reporting with many other use cases lined up for release in the near future.
Let Jivox help you automate a winning campaign today.