How AI will transform media buying

Strategic advisory and consulting firm Madison and Wall recently released a Google-commissioned report exploring AI in media. “The Future of Planning is the Platform” reimagines budgets in a world where AI-driven platforms make dynamic decisions. Here, Elissa Lee, Google’s senior director of media measurement and optimization, unpacks how the industry can adapt.

We’re in a new era of marketing, one where AI-driven tools will reinvent how advertisers plan, buy, and optimize campaigns across platforms. Strategic advisory and consulting firm Madison and Wall’s new analysis explores how this transition will change the discipline of media planning.

Let’s take a closer look at a few of the report’s themes, including how AI-driven ad platforms can improve marketers’ outcomes, how customer journey mapping is due for a refresh, and how cross-platform optimization will be critically important going forward. And let’s zoom in on a few specific ways media planning teams can prepare for this new world.

Media planning for the future

To understand where media planning is headed, it helps to consider the past. The media planning discipline evolved over many decades as a discrete function within ad agencies, and we can expect that evolution to continue in an AI-driven marketing environment.

Madison and Wall’s report discusses the intertwined roles of media planner and media strategist, and how both functions will continue to evolve. For example, they will help to identify the right campaign goals, find ways to take advantage of platforms’ unique ad offerings, do competitive analysis, and more.

Of course, some things won’t change.

For instance, high-quality creative will continue to drive greater impact. As the cost of experimentation and testing continues to fall — thanks to AI — the impact of good creative on marketing outcomes will be easier to ascertain. This improved clarity around creative effectiveness will pull the media planning discipline into more strategically important discussions with creative and marketing leaders.

A new focus on outcome-based media planning

With improvements in measurement, more marketers have gravitated toward outcome-based KPIs and avoided overreliance on reach. While reach remains important, advertisers of many stripes increasingly prefer to evaluate campaigns based on how well they support business metrics, like incremental sales.

This will naturally affect planning decisions. Madison and Wall notes that media mix modeling (MMM) will become more central, and outcome-based measurement will require a clearer view of what’s working. For instance, it’s not enough for marketers to evaluate contributions of individual ad placements and creative to a desired outcome. They must also be able to parse the combined contributions of those ads across platforms.

A foundation of robust data, combined with clear KPIs, enables outcome-based planning. AI makes it possible to measure and optimize the impact of marketing against business outcomes. By using AI and incrementality measurement, leaders can predict results and improve campaign performance — and, in turn, optimize their media budgets.

Time to rethink journey mapping

Another impact of AI in media is how marketers visualize customer journeys. It may seem intuitively true that AI will change how we understand and manage the consumer path to purchase. But how exactly will that play out?

In the old world, our industry visualized customer decision-making as a linear journey from awareness to consideration to conversion, with each stage often pegged to specific media formats. (Need to drive awareness? Buy TV ads.) This no longer captures the nuances in how people move among media spaces and behaviors. Fragmentation of media and variation in individuals’ preferences means that these journeys are often quite different from one person to the next.

Boston Consulting Group offers a new way to think about customer journeys. Their framework is based around four key digital media behaviors: streaming, scrolling, searching, and shopping. Starting with these behaviors, BCG recommends that marketers create “influence maps” to tailor strategies that match to each person’s unique journey.

By combining audience definition and influence maps with AI tools, marketers can develop individualized media plans that generate the greatest possible impact by taking into account influence at different points along the journey. A recent conversation with BCG underlines the importance of using AI to address this complexity.

AI in a cross-platform world

The ubiquity of digital engagement across a wide range of platforms — search, video, social, e-commerce, and more — brings powerful opportunities for marketers to connect with audiences wherever they are. But knowing which ad experiences create the greatest influence, and in what combination, is harder than ever.

Madison and Wall posits that MMMs and multi-touch attribution models will play an important role in solving this challenge, helping marketers and their agencies identify which platforms and placements are contributing most to desired outcomes. Furthermore, the report predicts that optimization will get better over time with improvements in transparency and trust.

To make the most of these tools, planners will need to upskill to focus on analyzing and interpreting data. They’ll need to improve their ability to evaluate long-term brand health alongside performance metrics, balancing the two in ways that have been difficult in the past. Media agencies have an opportunity to thrive as these challenges come to the fore, becoming critical partners to marketers who need to quantify the impact of ads across the many platforms where consumers spend their time.