When it comes to media planning, the data points tell the true story: every click, every impression, in every zip code, from every customer segment—this information holds the verdict on a campaign’s success.
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The trouble is that until recently, no tools existed to integrate these valuable data points, across all types of media into an easily-understandable good source of advice. Machine learning platforms like our marketing assistant Lucy are making history in this area: it’s now possible to bring the power of big data to bear on media buying decisions.
The value of Lucy is how she brings a competitive advantage to every stage of the media planning process. Analyzing data. Creating and comparing scenarios. Understanding campaign objectives and suggesting appropriate strategies. And now, finally, advancements in tech mean Lucy can use near real-time data to reallocate money during campaigns, improving them as they unfold.
This toolkit will revolutionize the process of media optimization. The data sets involved are too vast, disparate, and frequently regenerating for a marketer to extract the level of insight from them that AI like Lucy can.
Brand managers, CMOs, internal media teams, and agencies can all use Lucy AI for both high-level strategizing and granular, localized decision-making. Suppose business goals include specific growth targets in designated markets. Given a budget limit and geographic targets, Lucy builds allocation models so marketers can see how different scenarios are likely to play out. She can come up with 1000s of scenarios in minutes and help the planner identify the correct one that leads to a best outcome for the brand.
Lucy runs a variety of strategy and channel choices and turn them into models that are easy to analyze. She converts data to graphics with just a click, no technical expertise needed. Then it’s up to decision-makers select the optimal choices from the models.
Lucy’s utility goes beyond this first step, because connecting her to various regularly-updated data sources allows her to keep track of a media plan’s execution. She “digests” the data every day, and can offer course-corrections at a hyper-local level. Why waste money on ad spend in places where it’s not working when Lucy can be trained to check in on performance weekly and reallocate money to more productive zip codes?
With machine learning, Lucy can be taught which outcomes are successful and can get better at her job over time. As a result, reforecasting and reallocating ad spend with Lucy as a media planner increases ROI with dramatically less time and energy from her human companion.
These new developments are remarkable—smart choices have evolved into accurate predictions. Lucy’s media capabilities allow brands to build plans around achieving business goals and objectives using the full continuum of media options, from high level decision-making all the way to an extremely localized level, with the scale of 1000s of media plans by geography. She can both generate predictive models to forecast the results and receive data around the end results to further enhance her predictive capabilities. And it all takes place at lightning speed, without taxing valuable people resources …. ultimately delivering on the promise of our data-heavy media planning environment.
