SAN JUAN, PR – The era of artificial intelligence is finally reaching its “rubber meets the road” moment in advertising, with the way marketers think about audiences, targeting, and reaching people undergoing a profound transformation, according to Justin Wagner, senior sales director at Cognitiv.
Gone will be the days of bucketing consumers into broad demographic cohorts based on age, gender, income, and family size.
While someone might fall into the “white male, head of household income, 45 to 60 with three kids” category, this approach misses crucial elements of intent and actual interests, Wagner argued.
Moving beyond categorization with AI
AI is enabling a shift from categorizing websites and audiences using keywords to reading and understanding content at the URL and page level with human-like comprehension.
“It’s not just (about asking whether) this is the right demo for a car brand. It’s not only (asking) ‘is this the right demo for the car brand that they’re trying to reach?’, but it’s also people that are doing research on competitor brands and they’re actually in market, they’re doing research to potentially buy or lease a new car,” Wagner explained.
Cognitiv offerings include predictive analytics, custom AI models, and media buying optimizations designed to enhance ad performance.
Rethinking the marketing funnel
The traditional marketing funnel of awareness, consideration, and conversion is also being disrupted. “Nobody makes purchases like that,” Wagner said. “The reality is we are all on a million different devices all throughout the day, whether at work or at home.”
AI allows marketers to reach people across devices in those moments, aligned contextually with the content they are engaging with. Understanding mindset and user journey enables much more efficient targeting, freed from the constraints of legacy media planning.
Increasingly, then, Teams at agencies, brands, and ad tech partners who understand how to wield AI as another tool in their kit could be at an advantage.
Year of AI reality
“It feels like this is the year where that’s finally really starting to happen and it’s going from concept to practical application,” Wagner observed. While AI may replace some jobs, he sees massive opportunities for people to use these tools to enhance their work, drawing an analogy to how savvy accountants leveraged Excel in the 1980s to dramatically scale their businesses.
Ultimately, AI is enabling marketers to fulfill long-held dreams of reaching consumers with the right message at the right time in the right context.
“We’re in this moment now where it feels like a lot of the dreams that marketers have had … we’re actually able to do the things that we’ve always wanted to do,” Wagner said.
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