AI is taking ad targeting to a new level. Here's how

Artificial intelligence is helping marketers keep up with the rapid pace of change in the advertising industry, allowing them to stay nimble while also expanding their creative capabilities, says Kern Schireson, CEO of the full-service advertising agency Known. That’s making it easier for marketers to know exactly what you want — and how you want to see it.

“It’s a real asset to us as we look to work through a bunch of complex decisions on where and how to introduce messaging, where it’ll be most persuasive to our clients’ audiences. AI gets us there faster,” Schireson said in the latest episode of Quartz AI Factor, a video interview series set at the Nasdaq MarketSite (NDAQ).

But it’s not just an efficiency tool. Known also deploys AI to help tune advertisements to individual viewers, a gargantuan task that used to take far longer and use up considerable resources.

“If you want to do that manually, that’s an insurmountable level of content that you need to create,” Schireson said. “But if you have AI tuning and optimizing the creative iteration for the individual audience at the particular time of day, place context platform in which they’re receiving it, you can do that quickly and efficiently that creates opportunities that never existed before.”

Known ran a Super Bowl ad featuring John Stamos, Schireson said. Using AI, Stamos said the name of whichever city viewers were watching from, giving each individual viewer a different and more targeted experience.

Photo: Alexander Spatari (Getty Images)
Photo: Alexander Spatari (Getty Images)

In another example, the company’s AI chatbot, known as “The Big Letbotski,” dug through 80,000 active subreddits to identify the most relevant conversations about chicken sandwiches for its client, Shake Shack (SHAK). After finding 30 of the most content-specific subreddits, it ran targeted ads promoting its Chicken Shack Sundays giveaway in April. That helped Shake Shack beat sales estimates by 31%.

“The Big Lebotski helped look at the dimension of audience and the context of the conversation in that particular subreddit to say, ‘where is this gonna land, where it actually feels like it makes sense for people who are likely to be persuaded by it,’” Schireson said. “And so the intersection of those two questions was really where it helped us zoom in, and the performance speaks for itself.”

Watch the latest episode of Quartz AI Factor above.

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