AI in Advertising Part 2 of 3: Seven lessons from AI creative optimisation in SA
This month, in Part 1 of a jam-packed AI in Advertising VML strategic director Antonio Petra gave us a practical guide to using AI to improve how your agency operates with your clients and internally.
Now in Part 2, Vincent Maher gives seven life-changing AI tools you should check out.
We will round up with Part 3: Key AI in Advertising news and highlights from the past few weeks.
7 Lessons from AI Creative Optimisation
Over the past year, my team at Broadband has been working closely with Newsroom AI to help clients improve the performance of their ad creative.
Our hands have gotten dirty, and we have gathered valuable learnings while rolling out our AI creative platform for South African clients.
Here’s what we’ve discovered:
- Display inventory performance
We’re seeing display inventory suddenly performing with CTRs that range from 4% to 6%.
This shift makes the display media buy look attractive again, and the brands we’ve worked with have started to move more of the budget away from social media.
These results are mainly because AI removes the incremental cost of expanding the variety of ad layouts and messaging.
- Hybrid metrics emergence
The metrics that matter are beginning to look like a hybrid between video and social.
We’re now capturing time spent in ads and internal engagement actions that aren’t just clicks, revealing deeper audience interaction.
The combination of AI, rich media and video content in ads creates experiential engagement that encourages exploration, product education and brand recall.
- Compressed time to market
In most cases, the time to market for ad creative has been compressed by 80%.
This rapid turnaround allows for quick adaptations to changing market conditions.
It also means teams are under less pressure to prepare the readiness of ad creative – resizing, formatting, quality checking – and can focus on producing campaigns that have a big impact.
- Cost-effective creative variants
Suddenly, having 1,000 creative variants can come with zero additional cost and effort.
In some cases, we cut up to seven weeks of process time between the brief to the creative agency and the media buying agency running the campaign.
This means impression-level creative optimisation is now a daily reality without a massive cost or time penalty.
Most marketers we speak to are limited by the escalating time and effort required if they want to do large-scale multivariate testing, so this presents an opportunity to do more with less.
- Creative teams focus on innovation
Creative teams can now focus more on innovation rather than wrestling with formats or worrying about the downstream impacts on asset generation. This fosters a more creative environment.
- New opportunities with video ads
We’ve just started alpha demos to clients showcasing a capability to deliver thousands of video ad variants in a single VAST tag. This hasn’t been done anywhere at scale, highlighting our push for innovation.
- AI as a strategic assistant
At the briefing agent level, AI has stepped in to fill the gaps where human effort needs a little assistance. It can help in generating a comprehensive set of thematic variants, especially in concepts where there may be experiential or knowledge gaps.
That said, there is no way AI competes with the creative minds in agencies and marketing teams, but often, those minds get bored when they need to take an idea and extend it to all the messaging variants.
For example, people may travel to Italy for food, but writing out over 300 types of food takes a lot of work. This is where the AI comes in.
There is no doubt AI is going to make many lives easier in the advertising and marketing industry, but there are also pitfalls.
Over-reliance on vanilla Chat GPT as an example or relying on GenAI to create your assets or do your thinking in general.
These are all bad things to be avoided. If you are a marketing leader, focus on specialised areas where AI has been proven at scale and can improve the value you create for your brands, products or clients.
About the ACA
We are the official industry body for advertising agencies and professionals in South Africa, counting most major agencies among our members.
Find out more about the ACA.*ACA Future Industry committee comprises Jarred Cinman, Vincent Maher, Musa Kalenga, Haydn Townsend, Matthew Arnold and Antonio Petra.
