#SMTrends2019 - Key AI Marketing trends for 2019 brands need to know of

From conversational AI to Programmatic Media Buying, Bindu Balakrishnan, Country Head India, DCMN offers insights on AI marketing trends 2019 that will shape the year. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized marketing and advertising solutions by bridging the gap between data science and execution. With its capabilities of learning quickly and evolving as it learns, AI is going to open up enormous opportunities to the marketing industry. 2019 will see a much higher and wider adoption of AI backed technology, bringing benefits both to the advertiser as well as the end consumer. Let’s look at what will rule the roost in the marriage between AI and marketing in 2019.

Trend 1: Conversational AI (Chatbots)

Use of chatbots by brands to engage with users to offer a highly personalized and contextualized experience will continue. These bots will become more specialized depending on the domain where the tech is deployed - finance, eCommerce food tech, cabs etc. They will get more human-like and communication with the customer will become even more seamless.

2019 will see more and more companies handing over their customer communication to chatbots.

Trend 2: Voice Assistants

The uptake of voice technology in its various forms has been enormous in 2018, whether it is as voice assistants on smartphones or as smart home assistants. And, the Asia-Pacific region is spearheading this growth, most notably India, China, and Indonesia. The challenge now is how to monetize it.

The battle between the two most popular voice assistants (Alexa vs Google) will continue from proprietary speakers and wireless headphones to other voice-enabled devices.

Expect more turf war (intense advertising) to gain access to our voice in every possible environment to deliver the ease of consuming and ordering both physical goods (voice-enabled commerce) as well as digital content.

Also Read: #SocialThrowback: Indian digital Ad Spends see double-digit growth on the back of various driving forces

Trend 3: Programmatic Media Buying

Use of AI in programmatic media buying improves efficiency and helps in making better budget decisions for the advertiser. Deep learning algorithms give us the ability to automatically adjust activations in real time in response to the changing market dynamics. These activations include dynamically amending creatives, changing website content, or bringing in changes based on seasonal differences.

Currently, machine learning has widely been deployed in RTB (Real-time bidding) platforms to aid with bidding strategies (for media buying), fraud detection, dynamic creative optimization etc.

Expect this to grow to other aspects like recommendations for specific strategies derived from a vast amount of data.

Trend 4: Advanced Brand safety & Fraud detection

With marketers continuing to grapple with increasing losses due to ad fraud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will continue to be at the forefront in the war against it. With ad fraud methods getting more and more sophisticated, only AI can keep pace, or better still, stay ahead of the constantly evolving fraud techniques. The AI-based approach has the ability to crunch through multidimensional data and self-learn as it goes along. With increased sophistication deployed by fraudsters, the algorithms currently in use in media buying platforms need to constantly evolve.

Expect current vendors to increase the sophistication of its use in their already specialized products to ensure brand safety and prevent fraud.