AI's Impact on the Advertising World

Salmela has been interviewing AI experts for several months to understand future recruiting needs. These conversations have ranged from awe inspiring, to a bit concerning, to next level mind-boggling. We will continue these conversations and report on them here on Musings. This week we are looking at the advertising space.

As AI capabilities grow in the ad agency space, we can expect big changes in how ad campaigns are developed, targeted, and measured. Ad agencies will likely hire for new roles and skill sets to take full advantage of AI's potential.

Audience Targeting and Personalization

One of AI's biggest impacts will be allowing hyper-personalized audience targeting and messaging. AI can analyze a vast trove of data about consumers - their online activity, buying patterns, demographics, interests, and more. This allows incredibly granular segmentation and tailoring of ads and creative to resonate with each micro-segment. Roles like AI Audience Strategists and Personalization Experts will emerge as essential agency personnel. This talent will likely self-train within the existing pool of agency employees until university communications departments develop specific training.

Ad Creative and Copy

While the creative strategy will still be driven by humans, AI can lend a hand with the actual design and copy creation. AI will be able to rapidly generate numerous creative concept variations to target different segments. Agencies may hire Computational Creatives and AI Copy Specialists to manage this process. One creative leader we interviewed felt there may be an initial dip in headcount, but he felt it might likely recover with technically savvy creatives testing a greater array of concepts.

Media Buying and Planning

AI promises to make media buying and planning much more analytical and dynamic. AI can constantly analyze mountains of data to determine the optimal channel mix, timing, spend levels, and more for each campaign. Roles like AI Media Strategists and Programmatic Specialists will be sought after to manage these tasks.

Campaign Analysis and Optimization

With so many moving parts and variables, AI's analytical abilities will be invaluable for measuring and optimizing ad performance in real-time. Data Scientists, AI Analysts, and Marketing Modelers will crunch the numbers to keep campaigns finely tuned.

While AI will certainly have major impacts, it will be a tool that augments and empowers the core creative and strategic functions driven by human intelligence. Savvy ad agencies will be looking to hire hybrid talent - those who combine traditional advertising skills with technical AI abilities. It promises to be an exciting era of innovation and opportunity in the ad world.

Current agency talent who bring traditional ad agency real world experience and who bulk up critical AI skill-sets will be best positioned in this new landscape. Agencies that provide this training will have a leg-up and attract the talent driven to scale up their AI skills.

We will take a deeper dive next week into what we all can do to prepare ourselves for the AI revolution.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash