‘Data is at the core of AI and the richer the data, better the output’

Data is at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and there is a need to set right expectations, feed the right data that is relevant to get the desired results. This was the view of experts from various media and creative agencies at the e4m Real-Time Programmatic Advertising Conference held in Mumbai.

During a panel discussion on ‘AI in Programmatic Advertising’, chaired and moderated by Nachiket Deole, Head of Sales, India at DoubleVerify, industry experts deliberated on how generative AI has created new opportunities for both creative and media optimization, from automating rote tasks to rapidly visualizing concepts and iterating on copy to developing hyper-personalized campaigns.

Talking about best AI practices, Tushar Gupta, SVP-programmatic growth and partnership at Amnet Dentsu said that the richer the data, the best is the output.

“Data is at the core of AI. Without data, there is no AI. Your data sets have to be very rich and diverse. The best data you feed in, the best output you get. So once you have the user preferences, patterns, you’re able to personalise your campaigns better.

“Coming to best practices, there is a need to set right expectations as to what is to be achieved and those are the kind of prompts that should go in AI so you get the desired results. The data quality should be good and there should be a good oversight as well. There should be a combination of man and machine and not man vs machine,” Gupta said.

Talking about opportunities created by AI for creative agencies, Anil Pandit, Publicis Media, SVP, Lead-Precision (Programmatic), India, said generative AI is not a new trend but a transformative technology.

“At Publicis, we are fully aware of the immense possibilities and opportunities that exist and benefits that kind of grew to clients/brands and everyone in the ecosystem. There are a lot of learning programs and training sessions that are on.

“As we speak, we have our own Publicis GPT which comprises of aspects- a factory GPT which helps in creating workflows and we have a Sandbox GPT which gives clients an easy, exclusive and a safe access to the large language model tech to fulfil their creativity and productivity,” Pandit said.

Sharing his insights, Latish Nair, CDO, EssenceMediacom, said that from the media lens, there is tremendous potential.

“The mundane jobs of manual optimization, data sets reading and large data curating have been outsourced but there is human intervention and not complete dependability on AI.

“From a creative side, there is a challenge of copyrights and violations coming in but again there is a huge potential in terms of creating copies by the fly provided the elements that are put in and taken care of from the copyright perspective,” he said.

On how keyword targeting stands out as a more effective and nuanced approach in this emerging space and how it connects audiences keeping the context relevant, Gandharv Sachdeva, Country Head - India & Thailand, Hybrid, said keyword targeting and contextual targeting are much more required in modern advertising.

“Today when we do keyword targeting, we are targeting the right audience and looking at right set of campaigns.

“The two tools we have are keyword and contextual targeting. We use Semantica 360 for contextual targeting. When we do a normal keyword targeting, it would just look at the keywords and throw the ad where the relevancy is but when we add Semantica360, it helps us in scanning the complete article and the image and throwing the ad at the right place where it wants,” Sachdeva said.

Talking about how AI can enhance video ad efficiencies, Salil Shankar, Regional Head -South Asia, Lemma, said in the times of the changing behaviour of audiences, AI plays a vital role.

“The days have gone where everything was manually setting the entire campaign, like identifying the customer audiences. Now it is more of an AI generated hybrid hyper targeted campaign, so it’s from screen to screen. Behaviour of audiences has completely changed and AI plays a vital role in overall marketing perspective as well,” Shankar said.