For instance, machine learning tools are currently being used to catch anomalous budget inputs within social campaigns to flag them for second-level approval.

So if a campaign is extended by a month, but the extra budget has been erroneously applied to the final two days of the current month, the tool can flag this error and prevent a month’s worth of budget being spent over a two-day period.

“It’s sort of biddable operations,” said Mike Bregman, chief data officer at Havas Media Group. “We constantly have to think about the billions of dollars that we have in our treasury at any one time so the idea of using AI to help with that bookkeeping is key. We’re able to use AI to help keep track of all of that at a real scale.”

Elsewhere, machine learning is also being used to recommend how much to spend on a given day based on a week or month level budget, as well as the seasonality and past spend patterns for that specific brand.

Both examples speak to the biggest benefit the agency has reaped from AI to date: speed and time savings — hours of human work reduced to minutes or seconds.

Take the aforementioned case of catching anomalous spending decisions, for example. Not only did it generate upwards of one million dollars a year in savings, according to Havas Media Group, it also freed up hours — time execs at the agency could spend working with clients or with one another.

“The agency model has to be futureproofed and in order to do that there are some fundamental changes to the way organizations are designed, the way they operate and the technology that helps them do that, which need to be addressed,” said Bregman. “AI has the ability to unlock all of that.”

Creative — or rather the way it is optmized — is another process AI has permeated through at Havas Media Group. Nowadays, any dynamic creative optimization-driven campaign deployed in and around the purchase funnel by the agency has AI in the background. 

“These AI platforms can come up with different combinations of messages in a few seconds when it would take a copywriter a few days,” said Bregman.

Copywriters should breathe easy. Havas Media Group isn’t planning to replace them outright. Rather, it’s using AI to handle certain tasks.

As Bregman explained: “it’s still smart to have a human that’s reading all the iterations, because some of them might just be ridiculous or outside the norms.”

This is just the start.

Over the next two to three years, Havas Media Group wants AI more deeply embedded into the fabric of the agency. So not just using AI to optimize all media buys but also to create custom algorithms within a programmatic bidder or using …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron