The world awaits the paradigm-shifting potential of Machine Intelligence (MI) and Advertising Intelligence (AI).
MI and AI are foundational technologies like electricity that need to be deployed for specific purposes to generate economic and social value.
The competition is fierce, with established corporations and countless start-ups worldwide vying for a piece of the MI and AI pie. With its unique strengths, India can make a significant mark in this arena.
This column briefly explores India’s opportunity and potential to be a leader in applying MI and AI to marketing and advertising—a field I term as MaI and AdI.
The first requirement for MaI and AdI is the accumulation of relevant data, including public-facing data like syndicated market, media, and consumer data compilations and research and, to the extent possible, private data on sales, consumer profiles, and research with brand owners from across the world.
Developed on this data, MaI and AdI engines can offer a brand owner the following based on deep and evolving consumer insight:
- Fine-tuned and dynamic marketing mix plans that maximize ROI
- Messaging templates that turbo-charge the marketing mix
- Product enhancement and development ideas
Can India become a global leader in this game?
Yes, if we move fast and move-wise.
The first step would be to test and perfect new modes of collecting consumer data.
The internet, the smartphone, MI, and AI promise a new age of syndicated consumer research. Currently, syndicated consumer research sits in silos. Sales numbers are compiled through retail audits. With retail worldwide increasingly dominated by e-commerce and big-box retail, retail audits largely fail as market share indicators simply because e-commerce and big-box retailers treat sales data as a valuable resource and loathe sharing it with third parties.
Conventional media research needs to be improved. The increasingly dominant digital powerhouses like Alphabet and Meta think of audience data as the engine central to their business, and they have it at a level of granularity that no conventional research technique can match.
As OTT platforms like Netflix and e-commerce giants like Amazon muscle into advertising, they will keep their audience data close and be equally impenetrable to conventional research.
Media research focused on traditional mass media has a utility and funding problem. As a hangover from the halcyon days of advertising agencies when they fed at the 15% trough, brands wanted the agencies to fund media research and who, in turn, twisted the arms of media houses to share the costs. Audience research for traditional media thus came to be split into silos – press, TV and even radio, OOH and cinema – had research funded and controlled by narrowly focused bodies.
As the percentage of marketing communication budgets allocated to traditional media continues to shrink brand, mass media owners and media agencies are finding it hard to continue funding research and the brand managers who are increasingly used to the clarity of performance marketing and pay-per-click contracts, wonder whether bland broad-brush data of who watched what is adds any edge to their marketing data.
The third data dimension is brand lift. Marketing is going down the AIDA funnel – from awareness to consideration set to intention to purchase, with the final sale, satisfaction, brand loyalty and advocacy culminating in the process. Currently, very little syndicated consumer research is available in this area. The big brands invest in privately funded research to track this dimension, with others adopting a set-of-the-pants approach to this crucial aspect.
The answer to the challenges above is developing a technology-led process in which the consumer is the direct and single source for all three data dimensions—brand lift, 360-degree media exposure, and purchase. The two critical issues to be resolved are compliance, incentives, and data privacy regulations. The answer lies in innovation in technology, including LLMs and contractual relationships. In the spirit of full disclosure, my partners and I are experimenting with one such system in collaboration with a UK-based company.
A critical element differentiating successful brands is a nuanced understanding of what works and what does not in advertising and other marketing communication for a particular product category, geography and consumer segment. Ogilvy, in its heydays, used to generate multimedia Magic Lanterns for product categories of interest that laid out, with examples, the dos and donts when creating advertising for a particular category. These Magic Lanterns were assiduously produced by a cell of PhDs running factor analysis on advertising from across the world and some measure of the efficacy of each ad.
The single source data envisaged above will produce multidimensional efficacy data for campaigns across categories, markets and segments. A state-of-the-art AdI engine could be developed that uses Deep Learning to pinpoint what works and what doesn’t.
While MaI and AdI will be the first generation of AI in marketing, the third generation will likely result in AI avatars of brands.
Parallelly as the Siris and the Alexas of the world will, over decades, morph into Concierge Intelligences (CI) that will become AI avatars of individuals. I have written about the idea of CIs in an earlier MxMIndia column. In the age of AI, marketing and marketing communication will evolve to primarily be an interaction between the AI avatars of brands and the AI avatars of consumers.
In the near future, the single source would meld with the client’s private data, providing a never-before-used base for effective marketing planning.
There is scope for more than one Indian player to make India the single-source powerhouse of the world for the following reasons:
- India has the technology nous in the high quality, low-cost quadrant.
- India is an evolved B2C and B2B market that can support the development of single-source-research-based MaI and AdI systems.
Since the single-source system will be digital, India can market its fully developed MaI and AdI systems worldwide.
Single-source data coupled with MaI and AdI are the future of marketing and advertising, and India, on its way to Viksit Bharat, can own it.
By Vikas Mehta