The benefits of implementing AI in video advertising

Advertising business involves a ton of moving parts. There’s a lot you need to keep in check for it to be effective.

And you already know how it goes for the AIHunters’ team: if there’s a thing that needs a lot of attention, we wanna try to automate it.

Today, we tell you how AI can streamline and enhance video advertising workflows.

How can businesses use AI for advertising?

Before we go into that, let’s make sure our bases are covered.

Advertising is a goldmine of all kinds of data waiting to be interpreted in some ways.

“The correct interpretation of that data corresponds to better performing marketing campaigns, whereas mistakes can lead to the budget lost to delivering the wrong message to the wrong audience.”

The right solution to that would be having something interpret the data with as much consistency as possible.

Increased speed and minimized human involvement would be great as well.

That is how we arrive at AI for advertising and what lies beyond. Businesses can use AI for ads optimization across countless targeting filters, powering social listening tools to gauge buy signals across thousands of posts, and automating outreach/follow up campaigns over massive databases of key audiences.

Having realized its potential, now everybody is implementing the technology into their marketing.

Let’s see what they do with it.

Recover hidden insights

Artificial intelligence allows you to get insights you would’ve never got yourself in the first place. Its thorough data analysis algorithms can sometimes present unexpected results.

You might focus on the most obvious of data to form your marketing campaign, choosing to cater to the widest audience. You know, like selling video games to teenagers and young adults.

But AI for advertising can extract decisions you could not. For example, you may not have the capacity to gather as much data as possible and go through it all, since you’re clearly limited by your budget. On the other hand, AI does that far quicker and cheaper, allowing you to get more insights with less resources.

With video game marketing, machine learning can offer not only teenagers as a target audience, but their parents too, since they are the ones making the purchasing decisions for their children.

You get more info to act upon with the same amount of effort.

Having that information, you can create promotional content targeting the parents that paints the game in a better light in terms of influence on a child's mind.

You know how parents are, right?

Improve the quality of promotional content

When making content to promote your business, you would like to be sure that the content clicks with the intended audience.

Nobody wants to spend money and other resources on a creative that the viewers are not interested in.

How can you improve the promotional content then? By taking what has worked best so far, of course.

That’s where machine learning lays a helping hand — it can analyze the performance of previous ad creatives and videos, and which of them were engaged with the most. And then you can use the data to create better promotional content, bringing in more viewers.

But with less work than you would have to do yourself. You know, AI automation and all.

Figure out the context

You can also apply machine learning to analyze how and when users interact with your ad content and the content of your competitors as well. It can look at the times when the people are most active on the given platform, what content they interact with more at specific times, and so on.

Then you can use that data to publish the right content at the best possible time, catching as many eyes as possible.

Those are just a couple of examples of what AI can do for advertising.

But let’s talk more about the larger aspect of it all: the video side of things.

Some AI in video advertising stats before we dive in

The whole point of automation is making hard, tedious, and time-consuming work to be less hard, tedious, and time-consuming. At least for humans, that is why we are trying our hardest to teach robots to do such tasks.

Sure, a human can analyze the data, edit videos, assemble vehicles, and do all sorts of things.

But hear me out.

How much time will it take for a team of analysts to analyze and interpret astronomically large volumes of data? Or the data that is updating very quickly.

I assure you, had humans decided to analyze the data from the Event Horizon Telescope themselves — we wouldn’t get the first ever image of a black hole in 2019. Maybe in 2029.

What does it have to do with video advertising? The thing is that it is growing.

Let’s see.

According to the report from Wyzowl, 88% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, and 92% of those think of video as a vital tool to their marketing efficiency.

87% of those relying on video advertising say that video helped them increase traffic.

As for those who are not on it, they report they don’t use video advertising because they don’t have the time (23%), or they don’t know where to start (16%). or they think it is too expensive (10%).

So here’s what we got — a lot of businesses do realize the potential of video advertising.

Which means more will follow suit.

Which means there will be more work.

Which means more demand for automation.

The use cases of AI in video advertising

Applying an AI system to gather and analyze information to fuel your marketing campaigns is no doubt beneficial to its effectiveness.

You get to know what your audience likes, you serve the appropriate content. They, in turn, are less likely to be annoyed by the ads, since those actually may be useful to them.

And to top it off, you don’t have to spend hours upon hours researching — AI in video advertising does that automatically in the shortest time.

Now, let’s talk more about the ways in which you can apply AI in video advertising endeavors.

Automated ad insertion

Ad insertion allows you to offer advertisements to viewers within the content they enjoy.

And here’s the problem: they do enjoy the content. The ads? Not so much.

The main reason for that is the ads themselves. Imagine you sit down to watch the game, and each 20 minutes or so you have to look at ads for shaving cream or food delivery service.

It’s not relevant. And that is what needs to change.

And you can have that process done completely automatically with the help of AI in video advertising. Such systems can analyze the video content, understand what it is about, and insert contextually relevant ads.

This way, the viewers do not get annoyed at the ads, because those can be actually relevant to them at the moment.

Let’s break it down a bit more.

You’re broadcasting a basketball game.

During the broadcast, you have an AI system set up analyzing the footage. It applies a whole bunch of advanced Cognitive Computing tech like:

• deep learning;
• digital image processing;
• cognitive computer vision;
• traditional computer vision;
• probabilistic AI;
• cognitive science;
• machine perception;
• math modeling.

That tech helps the system to understand that the footage is a basketball game. Having that info, it can insert advertisements that would be the most relevant to the subject-matter, like betting companies or sports-related clothing businesses.

When I say that the software understands that what it analyzes is the footage of a basketball game, I don't mean that it just looks at the orange ball being tossed around.

Thanks to the advanced technology, ad insertion tool makes sense of everything that happens on video, and can identify a 3-pointer or a foul. What it allows the software to do is insert ads not just anywhere, but at the appropriate moments of the footage, not ruining the flow of the game.

Ad detection and replacement

Say you get the footage you plan on running on your media platform, and it already has ads within the content, or you’re streaming a broadcast with somebody else's ads.

Obviously advertisers you’re partnering with won’t benefit much from that, right?

So you use an AI-powered ad detection and replacement solution, of course!

The software can easily scan the footage and find the slots with ads in the. Then one of two things can happen:

• The tool replaces the original ads with yours. And make sure they align with the content in terms of the theme for good measure;
• The tool cuts the original ads and inserts yours somewhere more appropriate in order not to break the flow of the content.

Brand logo detection

Sometimes it’s not the video ads, but the ads appearing right in the footage — for instance, banners or logos placed or the field of the game you’re broadcasting.

Utilizing AI for video advertising tech, you can have the footage analyzed and all of the logos identified. A bit more of software magic and wuolah — your preferred logos replace the original ones.

At the end of the day, you will be able to provide better content with more coherent and better-placed advertisements that can be useful to your audience. They get less annoyed at the ads, you get to spend less on footage processing, and keep the advertisers happy with better ROI.

What you get with AI in video advertising

Advertising business is all about trying everything out there to appeal to the potential audience.

To achieve that, businesses spend tons of resources studying the folks that dwell on the web or watch TV in order to figure out what they like and what they don’t. Hundreds of hypotheses are tested, dozens of focus groups are gathered, and many ad campaigns are launched to understand the consumer as best as possible.

With advancements in technology, many started seeking the way to automate at least some of the laborious tasks. Artificial Intelligence has proved to be an efficient way to chew through data and come up with decisions as quickly as possible, offering useful insights.

Now, media businesses can use the power of AI in video advertising to target ads within the video content. The ad insertion solution can analyze TV shows, sports broadcasts, or movies to determine the context and provide appropriate ads.

Looking to apply ad insertion to your media production workflows? We are happy to help! Drop us a line at support@cognitivemill.com, or use the form below.