Can Artificial Intelligence be the future of advertising?

Authored by Sridhar SeshadriCo-Founder, Spotflock

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a process of imbibing learning, reasoning, and self-correction in computer systems to make machines act autonomously in a humanely intelligent way. 

Industries are evolving and catching up to the technology trends. Alike, advertising is to rewriting the traditional means. Generative Adversarial Networks models of AI have enabled image synthesis & generation. We can generate realistic and high-resolution images which look like genuine photographs. Companies need not spend time and energy on costly photoshoots and video shoots. AI-generated models will only partially supplant accurate human models. But we can see the trend catching up in a big way in the days to come. 

Now, companies leverage AI to help their client in this regard. And then, companies like Albert AI, Intellihub, and Rosebud.ai make AI-generated real-life-looking outputs that are hard to distinguish from real-life human prototypes. 

Can Artificial Intelligence be the future of advertising? Of course! AI-created videos surely will save companies costs and time. 

Meta's Make-a-Video & Google's Imagen previewed AI tools to generate photorealistic video from text prompts. These tools shall enable independent ad makers and content creators to have one of their favorite actors in their Hollywood mashup using an AI video generator to create.

Also, recent Cadbury's campaign is another remarkable example of the effective use of AI. The company used AI to create synthetic video advertisements with Bollywood celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan and served hyper-localized content by region.

The deep technology of computer vision and AI has taken dynamic hyper-personalization to the next level. Marketers have just started to scratch the surface of this tech. The entertainment industry has already started using celebrity deep fakes in conjunction with personalization for video commerce platforms and movies. 

As per a research report, a considerable proportion of marketers (92%) continue to value video as an "important part" of their marketing strategy. For customers who like to learn about a product or service, 73% said they would prefer to watch a short video as they spend 30% of their time watching ads, tutorials, informational pieces, etc. Now imagine AI and DeepFake generate these ads. Shot once and hyper-personalized! A dream come true for a marketer.

AI dynamically helps identify underlying customer behavior and consumption patterns, delivering/recommending personalized content and maximizing ROI. Imagine the quality of output ads is high. And the content is personalized, and with the minimum human effort, it is created. Won't this make it a preferred option for marketers? 

We can expect AI's widespread usage in marketing and advertising soon. AI has already made an enormous impact on marketing and advertising, and it will grow with each day passing. Advertisers use AI to identify and segment audiences, build ad creative, test ads, improve ad performance, and optimize spending in real-time. Also, Covid has boosted the use of digital advertising in all sectors.

AI models like GPT-3 & DALLE-2 by OpenAI can generate Ad copy and creatives. AI can alter a live social network ad campaign. Copywriting, short video creation, or poster/banner creation using AI is possible. Data scientists take the help of historic ad campaigns and expert marketers to fine-tune it. Since it reduces iterations, the cost and time come down drastically. Also, the high ROIs make it the preferred option.

 

We should also be talking about the negative aspects of AI-generated ads. They are bound to be misused, with the issue of deepfakes hanging over us. We must deal with AI's potential unethical uses in the field. 

Deepfakes hurt consumer trust and safety when the technology is misused. The Cadbury campaign may have benefited many local businesses, but that also shook consumer trust and safety for the aware ones. 

Like how the security industry has devised anti-virus systems, we will see some anti-deepfake systems/highlighters in social networks that shall disclaim. 

The government has always taken the proper stance, keeping in long-term and short-term readiness of a diverse consumer base of India. An ethical AI, consumer protection framework shall act as a watchdog mechanism. Also, if need be, Central Consumer Protection Authority Guidelines 2020 within the Consumer Protection Act can be used to notify advertisers of their responsibility to state expressly at the outset if the making of the ad used synthetic media or process. We need more consumer awareness about these technologies' possibilities than laws and policies.

Sridhar Seshadri is the Co-Founder of Spotflock, a DeepTech company specializing in AI, ML, and natural language processing

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