Modern advertising and marketing in the digital world is about gaining insights and the fast-improving technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) and of machine learning (ML) in particular as pushing the sector forward.
To gain an insight into the key issues facing the adverting sector and the future developments impacting on the field, Digital Journal spoke with Jerry Hug, CEO of AiAdvertising.
Digital Journal: Can you provide a brief background on AiAdvertising?
Jerry Hug: Formerly known as Cloud Commerce, which was a traditional digital marketing agency, AiAdvertising has completed a successful pivot to a technology and software company. We develop innovative solutions leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and data science for the marketing and advertising space.
DJ: What is the Campaign Performance Platform that you helped to create and why is it important?
Hug: Our proprietary, patent-pending, cloud-based Campaign Performance Platform (CPP), which is our flagship solution, is a workflow automation solution. CPP harnesses the power of AI and ML to ingest, organize, and cleanse disparate company data, automate persona creation, predict and scale creative content, and display real-time campaign performance allowing marketers to understand what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next.
For the past two years, we have been looking at new commercial applications using AI and ML in the ad tech marketing stack. And we noticed that most, if not all, of the companies we assessed were focused on one component of the ecosystem. It was then that we embraced the need to “think bigger” which inspired us to create a solution that fused all of the disparate pieces together into a single software platform. Our CPP provides the power to streamline and automate different aspects of advertising at scale, including audience creation, content creation, ad and campaign planning, media activation, and performance measurement. The platform directly ties marketing investments to sales revenue, enabling marketers to quantify their impact on the business’ bottom line.
There are many point solutions that can help with incremental improvements, but it wasn’t until AiAdvertising integrated each step of the advertising process and layered in AI and ML that advertisers could get a real understanding of their campaign performance and measure ROI by campaign, persona, and media channel.
Traditional marketing technology is built on legacy technologies, whereby humans code a set of instructions to tell machines what to do. With AI and ML, the machine has the ability to analyze troves of data in minutes, recognize patterns, and identify insights that would typically take weeks, if not months, for humans to do. Simply put, AI enables the possibility to analyze and organize trillions of data points revealing invaluable patterns and insights that would previously remain hidden. Therefore, it unlocks unlimited potential to transform marketing.
With that in mind, it is really important to note, that our solution does not replace people, it simply enhances their performance.
DJ: Can you discuss some of your recent results?
Hug: We are very proud of our results. A few examples are below:
We have seen Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) as high as 14x for a client in the heavy duty machine category, which equated to more than $6 million dollars in new revenue. The client also amassed a pipeline of new opportunities exceeding $6 million dollars.
We achieved a 20 percent lift in new memberships for a renowned golf community, while creating a two-year wait list where the membership fee is $150,000. We helped a specialty retailer in the direct-to-consumer category achieve a 100 percent increase in average order size from $25 per order to $50 per order.
DJ: What are the latest trends you are seeing in the advertising technology industry?
Hug: One of the most significant trends we are noticing is marketers are beginning to see the value in their CRM data. This is important given the anticipation of cookie tracking for new customers going away in 2023.
DJ: Where do you expect the industry to go in the next five years?
We are still in the very early stages of the adoption curve for AI and ML solutions in digital advertising. In the next five years, we see a world where both Agencies and Brands become much more educated, and therefore trustworthy on the importance of these innovations which leads to more widespread adoption given the competitive advantage they help provide.
