Traditionally in digital marketing, users were segmented into consumer groups that shared common characteristics like age or gender, which were likely to have an influence on their buying behaviour. Then new technology like Real Time Bidding (RTB) made it possible for advertisers to automatically bid on each potential ad impression based on an individual user’s past online behaviour.
The way people consume media and the way they spend their time has dramatically shifted over recent years. For many of us in the 21st Century time is a precious commodity. We have less and less of it and we continually seek services, technologies and applications that allow us to make better use of it. In our “age of consumer choice”, the users expect an exclusive, personalised experience tailored to their preferences and needs, no matter where they are, which device they are using, what they are looking for, and when they access content. We are saturated with information and during the course of the day we fulfil a variety of roles – with different moments of inspiration and desire depending on what we are doing.
Targeting the right individual based on their profile alone is not enough anymore for advertisers. Now the moments matter.
A marketer’s success will depend on their ability to understand at what precise moment a specific individual is likely to perform a defined action to achieve the best possible ROI for them. In order to do this they need to look at a lot more parameters relating to how different individuals respond in different situations and make split second decisions about which ad to show on what device and at what time.
2pm on a Tuesday could be a very different moment from 2pm on a Saturday for the same person. For example if they just purchased a plane ticket, or if it’s raining outside, or they just watched a video on how to build a new flower bed; all these factors could help indicate what ad to show at that exact moment. Those moments for the same person would be scored very differently.
We refer to this as moment scoring and with marketing technology that utilises Artificial Intelligence (AI), the bidding process can be informed with exactly how much value should be given to each individual at every moment of the day, calculating in real-time every moment of ad influence.
Essentially each opportunity to show an ad is the moment that is being scored. Advanced machine learning algorithms continuously improve moment scoring by learning what has worked in the past to inform and enhance the next marketing moment of influence. It continuously learns from the most informative, anonymous data generated about an individual to determine how likely they are to respond to an ad based on the profile attributes that prove most successful in a campaign.
For example, early into a campaign, the AI might see a large number of purchases occur because of showing ads to people interested in sports. As a result, the AI would assign a higher score to sports fans, particularly those fans who are currently on a sports site. After serving these ads, the AI might learn that it is not actually just sports fans driving performance -- it’s more specific than that. It is football fans. As a result, the AI would assign a higher score to football fans and lower the score for fans of other sports. These scores, together with a multitude of other scores for hundreds of different attributes make up the total score for each precise moment.
Due to the amount of data and the speed of the decision-making, machines are best placed for this job; however, this doesn’t mean human input is no longer needed. The process of machine learning needs human comprehension, capable of observing what factors come into play when influencing a purchase decision and adapting the parameters, messages and creative in order to fine tune and optimise the results.
In an online world, the advertising market is increasingly complex and the success of an advertising campaign depends on the ability to define the real value of each impression. How likely is a user to respond to your ad in each moment, that is the question. And the best thing is, you don’t need to guess when you have the wealth of big data to give you the answers.
By Andy McNab, managing director at Rocket Fuel UK.
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