To prevent further revenue drop, linear television will have to change advertising practices completely

For many years, advertising budgets were gravitating towards the Internet because only this medium could offer media buyers precise targeting and efficiency metrics for campaign analysis. The experts predict that by the end of 2018, the Internet advertising budgets will outweigh linear TV by a whopping $40 billion. A couple of years ago, the ad market was close to the point of no return and the industry players predicted nothing but a slow demise of TV advertising. In order to prevent further revenue drop, linear television will have to change advertising practices completely. Let’s find out how the market adapts to the new programmatic-driven addressable TV reality.

What is addressable TV and how it’s different?

Technically, all…

Chart of the Day: Brands and Agencies Struggle to Trust AI with Budget Allocation

Business success demands a balanced approach when it comes to decision making – objective analysis and subjective experience. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the hottest tools to improve the scale and quality of our data analysis, but research from Albert Technologies has shed light on what tasks marketers are having difficulty letting go of. Polling brand and agency marketers on their adoption of AI, both groups agreed that budget allocation was one of their hardest tasks to relinquish. Brand marketers had the most difficulty handing over campaign analysis, while agency marketers wanted to hold on to their audience segmentation. These attitudes may be the result of AI systems having varied levels of automation. Marketers are likely more open to systems they can use to improve their analysis…

Over half of the leading marketing teams report they are using AI in some way, and 57% of teams believe that AI is necessary to support their strategies and sales goals

It’s no surprise that AI technology is all the rage in nearly every marketing department these days. According to Forrester’s report on AI adoption, a shocking 94% of respondents believed that AI-driven marketing would be very valuable to their company. And yet, over 67% of participants also reported they had concerns and obstacles that stood in the way of AI adoption.

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The benefits of AI technology in marketing…

6 implications for selecting and managing today's and tomorrow's marketing technology

We've been sharing the latest Marketing Technology Landscape map by Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec for several years now. You've almost certainly seen one of the earlier iterations since it has been widely shared. I love it because it's a USEFUL infographic - it prompts marketers to review their current Marketing Technology and take action to improve their Marketing Technology Stack. When I discuss it with marketers when speaking or training, it certainly has a big impact, not always in a good way... It prompts that "OMG how do I cope?" fear amongst marketers and business owners due to its complexity. But, for me, from a positive POV, it shows the opportunity of the many tools we have available to deliver more relevant, more personalised communications today. It's inspired the Smart Insights team to create our own Martech infographic which includes both insight and operational tools…

Blockchain has revolutionary applications in marketing and will be good news for both publishers and advertisers

Blockchain has been a hot topic in the tech world ever since Bitcoins emerged from obscurity to become the obsession of nerds the world over around 2013. Marketers love finding shiny new technologies to distract them from their day jobs and have enjoyed hopping on bandwagons to prove their down with the latest trends ever since some bright spark realized that newfangled printing press things could be used to churn out flyers to promote the latest in powdered wigs and ruffs. But whilst marketers have been all over other trends, such as the growth of Snapchat or Live video, like a rash, they've yet to properly 'get' what the blockchain can actually do for them. I think this is in large part down to two key reasons: Blockchain is the result of mind-bogglingly clever cryptography and thus…

8 ways by which AI will affect comprehension of data, analyze and utilize data as well as shaping the development of digital marketing tools

Earlier this year, Toyota’s usage of AI for its Rav4 Marketing Campaign got the jaws dropping and the eyes widening. IBM’s Watson had struck again – a Machine Learning (ML) program that used an algorithm to generate ad scripts! The campaign is an example of how Toyota agency-of-record Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles is using what it calls "creative programmatic." The agency wanted to connect the Toyota's Rav4 crossover to the favorite activities of individual consumers but in an unpredictable way. So, Saatchi fed Watson the world's top 1,000 activities - like biking, dancing, and cooking - and asked Watson to pair two activities that had low probabilities of being matched. The agency then used the pairings to create 300 unique videos, which targeted at users on Facebook and Instagram. This is…

What works best in Digital Marketing today?

In our latest infographic, we show the importance of digital marketing to businesses today and the digital marketing techniques that marketers find most effective. To create it, we blended the latest research from the best sources for digital marketing consumer adoption stats with the results from our latest Managing Digital Marketing 2017 report. It's structured in three parts:  The Global Picture of consumer use; a review of benchmarks across the RACE customer lifecycle followed by research on the most effective techniques for managing Digital Marketing. This research from Smart Insights in association with the TFM&A 2017 event explores approaches businesses use to plan and manage their investments in digital marketing. Findings and recommendations are grouped into 6 areas to improve the commercial contribution of their digital marketing. Given that we're…

Which tools and sites do you use to keep up with digital marketing?

The idea for our new guide for marketing agencies ‘keeping up with digital’ came from a conversation that the Smart Insights team and I had earlier this year - around how agencies often struggle to ‘encode’ a way of refreshing their digital knowledge within the business. Agencies that I speak to or work with will often say that they know that staying on top of all the opportunities that new or evolved digital technologies, platforms, media, techniques - and more - can help them and their clients. It’s a ’good thing’ to do. But they find it hard to put a structured approach to that together. Hence the guide. As we worked on the new resource we realised that many of the most useful digital marketing sites and tools that we recommend are also relevant for other types of marketing…

Chart of the Day: How does use of Artificial Intelligence vary in different sectors

As with any new disruptive technology that is moving it's way up the hype cycle, Artificial Intelligence won't be uniformly adopted. It will be a better fit in certain sectors and for businesses of a particular type. As futurist William Gibson put it: “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”  This new research from the McKinsey Global Institute is useful since it looks specifically about how AI and Machine Learning will generate value in the future. One finding, which mirrors our advice for marketers is that businesses should focus on using machine learning applications to support the marketing and sales process and acquire skills where needed in this area. One example of the value that machine learning can generate in the report is about how Netflix has used a machine learning algorithm to personalize recommendations to its 100 million…

Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs, Social Media and Memes

As a PhD student, I’m keen to discover the latest academic research, which often happens at conferences. Although my main area of research is within marketing, my specialist area is social media. This year I stumbled over the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. In case, like me, you didn’t know, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) is a major international organisation focused on ‘Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession’. Their members include Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and many of the computing great and good. They hold 170 conferences a year and have 37 Special Interest Groups, including Hypertext and Social Media.

Academic research source: ACM Digital Library

They also have a Digital Library that contains a wealth of significant academic articles about fake news, analysing Twitter data, bots and big data, privacy and artificial intelligence, as well as every aspect of applied…