How GenAI is revolutionising CTV advertising in South-East Asia

In this interaction with Adgully, Noelia Amoedo, CEO, mediasmart, and Nikhil Kumar, Chief Growth Officer, mediasmart, delve into the transformative potential of Generative AI (GenAI) for CTV advertising, particularly in the booming South-East Asian market. They explore how GenAI can revolutionise ad targeting, content creation, and campaign optimisation, ultimately shaping the future of CTV and multi-screen journeys.

How has the emergence of Generative AI and its potential impact on CTV advertising been in global and South-East Asian markets?

Nikhil Kumar: CTV has been a force to reckon with in global and South-East Asian markets. In regions like India and Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, CTV has particularly seen rapid levels of adoption and more brands are confidently investing in CTV advertising. Navigating this transformative wave, it’s hard to ignore the potential that GenAI can bring to the CTV ecosystem. While it is still a new technology, there’s much to explore on how GenAI can revolutionise advertising. GenAI is likely to only strengthen the level of efficiency and precision targeting offered on CTV currently. With the ability to analyze vast amounts of data and generate personalized, contextually relevant insights, we can expect CTV advertising to become more relevant.

In South-East Asia, where diverse cultures and languages co-exist, GenAI plays a pivotal role in bridging communication gaps and delivering culturally resonant content. For instance, GenAI can help brands improve their targeting as well as creative messaging for ads to tailor to the languages their audiences speak. While this is still possible via programmatic technology, what GenAI tools can do is make vernacular advertising easier and more automated to target these different vernacular groups. This can not only improve relevance but also maximize the effectiveness of ads.

Could you tell us about GenAI’s ability to create new content based on patterns learned from training data enhancing contextual targeting in CTV advertising?

Noelia Amoedo: AI-driven programmatic has been changing the way marketers approach contextual advertising. Now, with GenAI, there’s an evolution of how creative content can be improved for contextual targeting. Since GenAI doesn’t follow predefined rules and can instead come up with its own, it can create new content based on the patterns it learns from the underlying training data. That’s the key difference between GenAI and “traditional AI''. GenAI is based on LLMs that can create new content depending on the audience. This can be used by brands to create multiple ads featuring captivating content and creatives to target different audience groups. For instance, a brand can create multiple ads in different settings such as rural, urban, seasons, etc, depending on where the ad is shown and what kind of household it is targeting.

Another capability of GenAI is to make sense of unstructured language-based information. This can be used, for example, to analyze the transcripts of shows and reduce dependency on predefined content categorization for targeting, which can open up new possibilities for personalization within the CTV space and make the medium more exciting for both consumers and advertisers. These specific examples are still futuristic, but at the pace at which LLMs are progressing, they could be a reality very soon.

What are GenAI offerings in terms of automatically discarding certain types of content and ensuring brand safety in CTV advertising?

Noelia Amoedo: At mediasmart, we have been working on innovations in the CTV space that can make the medium more safe, efficient, and rewarding for advertisers. Our new feature AI CTVSafe is a step in this direction that utilises GenAI capabilities to improve brand safety. This feature can assess ad suitability of CTV traffic to automatically filter out risk categories, ensuring that advertisers benefit from a secure and brand-appropriate environment. This has plenty of benefits for brands and can automatically discard showing ads on content that may be deemed inappropriate. For example, on content intended for kids or shows that a brand would consider to be violent or not in line with their brand values. GenAI can also offer enhanced privacy and fraud detection, which is one of the areas where Affle has filed new patents to cover futuristic applications in interaction, training and integration of GenAI agents.

What role does GenAI play in analysing and interpreting large datasets to provide more value and efficiency in the advertising process?

Noelia Amoedo: Campaign optimisation and intelligence are likely to get more advanced with GenAI at play. GenAI can empower media traders to set up their campaigns for optimum performance as well as change how campaign intelligence is presented and analyzed. By allowing campaign managers to focus on improvement rather than reporting, GenAI can make a huge impact for brands to improve their efficiency. For instance, a GenAI agent can guide advertisers to configure their campaigns based on other similar campaigns for maximized performance. Rather than large reports that need to be downloaded and studied, GenAI would also be able to present quick data insights.

One might imagine being able to ask questions such as, “how is my campaign performance across cities?” or “which audience engages the most during weekends?”. This can make the entire campaign optimization and reporting less manual, reducing man hours, while increasing efficiency and performance.

What are your views on GenAI in Connected TV shaping the future outlook for CTV and multi-screen journeys?

Nikhil Kumar: Any advertising that we do today needs to take into consideration the many different consumer journeys of users who exist across devices and mediums. Advertising needs to respond to integrate these consumer journeys to offer measurable, actionable results that improve ROAS. We’ve seen great use cases of AI-driven programmatic shaping up how targeting is set up and advertising messaging is served across devices. Through technology like Household Sync, for instance, we can already target different viewers within the same household and prompt action from CTV to mobile apps or drive them to the nearest store to prompt purchase.

GenAI, with its ability to further deliver personalised content recommendations, with regional preferences, will drive further localization to establish connection between brands and viewers. In the future, AI agents can also be trained to interact with each other making multi-screen interactions more seamless and engaging.

How do you envision the role of Gen AI evolving in the future of programmatic advertising, and what opportunities do you foresee for further innovation and growth in this space?

Nikhil Kumar: Programmatic advertising has already changed the way digital advertising operates. With GenAI, we are looking at an exciting future that will be driven by increased efficiency, automation, and will improve how media is bought and sold. GenAI's evolving role also involves intelligent decision-making by harnessing real-time data for trend prediction and optimized advertising strategies. Within the CTV ecosystem, GenAI will have a transformational impact on content creation that is likely to elevate the way both viewers and advertisers experience CTV. The future entails a shift towards personalized and contextually relevant ads, with GenAI tailoring content based on individual preferences and behaviours. Cross-channel integration is set to become seamless, ensuring a unified brand presence across various mediums.

Noelia Amoedo: The role of advancing technologies is definitely a game changer for the future of advertising and GenAI has been no different. The transformative impact can be felt across areas – whether it is content creation, automation, serving and placement of ads, and optimisation.

At Affle and mediasmart, we have been early adopters of using AI/ML-based offerings and our vision to use tech innovation to improve advertising has also motivated us to move towards leveraging GenAI-based tech applications. We recently filed 15 patents in India covering advanced AI subject areas, including automated AI agents, personalisation and recommendation, predictive analysis, privacy management, enhanced fraud detection, and security. The impact of GenAI is multifaceted and I imagine that as we learn more about the evolving technologies, we will be able to find more use cases that will enhance user engagement and make campaigns more effective.