We’ve been talking about AI quite a bit around Operative. We recently announced our new Adeline AI tool, we wrote a detailed eBook diving into GenAI and Machine Learning use cases for the media world, and we sat with our VP of Product Management Holly Rae to get her take on AI. In this article, I want to share a few AI use cases that reinforce why we’re so excited about the value of AI tools built into products like Operative.One and AOS.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming nearly every industry, and the media world is no exception. While AI applications like content personalization and audience analytics have gained a lot of attention, one area that may be even more impactful is how AI can supercharge advertising sales and operations for media firms. From prospecting and targeting to optimizing yield and expediting campaigns, AI offers powerful capabilities to revolutionize ad processes. Let’s explore some of the key ways AI will drive advertising sales and ops for media companies in the years ahead.
Dynamic Ad Packaging and Cross-Selling
Getting the right ad package put together is essential for capturing ad revenue, but often an arduous, back-and-forth process between sellers and buyers. AI can recommendation engines (like Operative’s Adeline) can dynamically assemble ideal ad packages and insertion orders by analyzing the prospect’s interests, budgets, audience objectives, and more alongside all available ad inventory and opportunities. This maximizes potential yield for every opportunity. What’s more, the same AI models can make intelligent cross-sell and upsell suggestions to ad buyers based on their needs and untapped opportunities across other media properties and platforms.
Within the next few years, media companies that effectively leverage AI throughout their advertising operations will gain a significant competitive edge in capturing more ad revenue, delighting customers, and streamlining processes.
Automated Yield Management and Optimization
Many media firms struggle to optimally manage their ad inventory yield in traditional ways. Unsold or underpriced inventory is a constant challenge. AI can maintain real-time supply and demand forecasting models for every slice of ad inventory or audience segment. By factoring in criteria like pricing history, time sensitivity, associated content value, and more, AI enables publishers to dynamically adjust pricing, audience packaging, ad load balancing, and other yield levers. The result is maximizing revenue yield for every impression sold. For buyers, AI can also continuously optimize campaigns, adjusting targeting, budgets, and creatives to boost performance.
Streamlining the Ad Operations Workflow
The manual processes and handoffs behind coordinating ad operations like creative uploads, schedule management, billing, reporting, and deliverables are tedious, error-prone work for media companies. AI workflows and process automation can streamline much of this labor for greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency. AIs can automatically check for errors and issues, categorize and route work, trigger notifications and next steps based on conditional logic, and maintain a real-time unified view across all campaigns. With more automation handling the process orchestration, media companies can run far leaner operations and focus more resources on higher-value tasks.
Richer Analytics and Business Intelligence
Perhaps the biggest area AI can unlock value is making sense of all the data generated across the ad sales and operations lifecycle. AI can identify hidden patterns, correlations, and insights buried across sales pipelines, lead data, pricing signals, buy paths, content interactions, and performance metrics. These insights can inform all kinds of strategic and tactical decision making, from rep coaching to product pricing models to unearthing new audience opportunities. AI also makes it easy to deploy analytic dashboards tailored to every business stakeholder’s needs, distributing rich intelligence in frictionless ways.
The media industry has long been filled with hype around AI innovations that never fully delivered on transformative impact. But modern AI is now advanced and domain-specific enough to superpower how advertising is bought, sold, served, and optimized across even the most complex media organizations and partners. Within the next few years, media companies that effectively leverage AI throughout their advertising operations will gain a significant competitive edge in capturing more ad revenue, delighting customers, and streamlining processes. Those that lag in adopting AI may find themselves disrupted into obsolescence. The time to embark on pragmatic AI strategies for advertising is now. Innovative media firms that move first will be the long-term winners.
Learn more about Adeline AI and register to join the queue for our private beta.
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