The AI Co-Pilot Elevates Marketing Performance

In today’s fast-changing digital marketing landscape, companies are transforming how they plan, execute, and optimize campaigns using AI. But AI’s real power lies in enhancing human creativity and strategy, not just automation. The Trade Desk embraces this synergy, using AI as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement. Its AI, Koa™, helps marketers identify valuable ad opportunities and drive meaningful results. In this blog, we’ll explore how to optimize your AI marketing efforts with this co-pilot approach and elevate your strategy.

The AI Co-Pilot: Augmenting Human Expertise

In the complex world of programmatic advertising, campaigns analyze millions of ad opportunities daily. This volume of data is too much for humans to process effectively. AI excels at sifting through this sea of information, identifying patterns, and making data-driven decisions. However, AI should not operate in a vacuum. The most successful AI implementations leverage human expertise to guide the AI’s learning and decision-making processes.

The Trade Desk’s Koa™ AI operates on the principle of partnership, collaborating with marketers to achieve their campaign goals. Marketers share their knowledge, insights, and preferences with the AI, which enables it to identify the best ad opportunities.

Customization: Tailoring AI to Your Campaign Goals

One of the key advantages of The Trade Desk’s platform is its ability to customize how the AI works for each campaign. By inputting key campaign parameters and preferences, marketers provide AI with the context to prioritize the most valuable impressions. These inputs can include:

• Target Audience: Defining the ideal customer profile based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and other relevant factors.
• Location: Specifying the geographic areas where the campaign should focus its efforts.
• Exclusion Lists: These are lists of websites, applications, or other locations where advertisements shouldn’t appear.
• Time of Day: Targeting specific times when the target audience is most likely to be active.
• Channels: Select the appropriate channels (e.g., display, video, mobile, connected TV) to reach the target audience.

After setting these parameters, the platform generates a pool of eligible impressions. While every impression in this pool meets the criteria, not all are equal. AI analyzes each impression and identifies those most likely to drive the desired campaign outcomes.

Value-Based Bidding: AI-Driven Optimization

The Trade Desk’s AI actively manages the heavy lifting of impression valuation and bidding by ranking each impression opportunity based on its likelihood of driving performance. This ranking takes various factors into account, including:

• User Value: Whether the user or household is hard to reach or highly sought after.
• Impression Cost: Whether there are other high-value impressions available at a lower CPM.
• Historical Data: Whether the current bid price aligns with historical clearing prices.
• Bidding Strategy: Is there an opportunity to lower the bid without impacting the ability to win the impression?

This analysis happens in a fraction of a second at bid time, ensuring that marketers win the best impressions at the best price. This value-based bidding approach optimizes campaign performance and maximizes ROI.

Benefits of Using AI as a Co-Pilot

By using AI as a co-pilot, marketers can unlock a range of benefits, including:

• Improved Efficiency: AI automates many time-consuming tasks associated with campaign management, freeing marketers to focus on strategy and creative development.
• Enhanced Targeting: AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify the most relevant audiences and tailor ad messages accordingly.
• Increased Performance: By optimizing bids and placements, AI can drive higher click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall campaign performance.
• Better ROI: AI helps marketers maximize their advertising budgets by ensuring they only pay for the most valuable impressions.
• Data-Driven Insights: AI provides valuable insights into campaign performance, allowing marketers to make informed decisions and continuously improve their strategies.

Best Practices for Optimizing AI Marketing

To maximize the benefits of AI in marketing, consider the following best practices:

• Define Clear Goals: Define your campaign goals and objectives before implementing AI. What are you trying to achieve? What metrics will you use to measure success?
• Provide Quality Data: AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. Ensure you provide the AI with accurate, relevant, and up-to-date data.
• Monitor Performance: Continuously monitor the AI’s performance (or ensure you have a knowledgeable partner that embraces this role) and adjust as needed. AI is not a “set it and forget it” solution.
• Embrace Transparency: Understand how the AI is making decisions. Avoid black box solutions that don’t provide insights into their processes.
• Invest in Training: If you run the marketing in-house, train your team to use AI and effectively. If you are using an agency, ensure you are working with a group that understands the capabilities and limitations of AI.
• Combine AI with Human Expertise: Remember that AI is a tool, not a replacement for human expertise. Leverage AI to augment your team’s capabilities, not replace them.
• Start Small and Scale: Don’t try implementing AI across all your campaigns simultaneously. Start with a pilot project and scale up as you gain experience and confidence.
• Stay Up-to-Date: The field of AI is constantly evolving. Stay up-to-date on the latest trends and technologies to ensure you use the most effective solutions.
• Test and Experiment: Don’t be afraid to experiment with different AI strategies and tactics. Testing and measuring your results is the best way to learn what works.
• Focus on Value: Always focus on the value that AI is delivering. Is it helping you achieve your goals? Is it improving your ROI? If not, re-evaluate your approach.

The Future of AI in Marketing

AI is poised to play an even more significant role in marketing in the future. As AI technology continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more sophisticated applications of AI in areas such as:

• Personalization: AI will enable marketers to deliver increasingly personalized experiences to customers.
• Predictive Analytics: AI will help marketers anticipate customer needs and behaviors, allowing them to target customers with relevant offers proactively.
• Content Creation: AI will assist marketers in creating compelling content that resonates with their target audiences.
• Customer Service: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants will provide instant, personalized customer service.
• Fraud Detection: Marketers will use AI to detect and prevent ad fraud, ensuring they don’t waste their advertising budgets on fraudulent impressions.

Embracing the Future of AI in Marketing

AI is a powerful technology that can change how marketers plan, execute, and measure their campaigns. However, artificial intelligence is not a cure-all. To fully realize the benefits of AI, it must be approached as a co-pilot, collaborating with human professionals to achieve joint goals. By adhering to the best practices highlighted in this blog post, marketers can realize AI’s full potential and achieve significant gains in campaign performance, ROI, and overall marketing effectiveness. The Trade Desk’s Koa™ AI demonstrates a co-pilot approach, allowing marketers to leverage AI while maintaining control and expertise. As AI evolves, marketers who adopt this collaborative strategy will thrive in the ever-changing digital marketplace.