The advertising industry sees news publishing’s untapped inventory as a valuable resource. With four out of five advertisers, agencies, and publishers recognizing the high value of open Internet audiences, there’s a growing emphasis on leveraging AI-powered tools to engage and convert these opportunities at scale. Despite 2024 being a pivotal year for AI implementation, breaking news suggests many marketers are still not fully harnessing AI’s capabilities.
Recent reports from the UK and US indicate that many businesses are struggling to move beyond AI experimentation to effective execution. Challenges such as lack of C-suite vision, data hurdles, and legacy technology hinder AI adoption, leading to missed opportunities across the board. Forty-two percent of SMEs feel that not maximizing AI usage is a significant handicap, with half of them citing inadequate automation and AI adoption as barriers to achieving their goals.
Alex Cheeseman, head of enterprise at Outbrain, states, “SMEs are leading the charge in AI momentum. A lack of adoption and optimization is massively affecting their scalability and efficiency. AI and automation tools offer marketers great potential for realizing performance excellence, but only if used correctly to empower human intelligence in strategizing and innovating.
Developing an effective digital advertising bid strategy is crucial.
Manual bid management is time-consuming and often inefficient, especially for large campaigns.
Harnessing AI in digital advertising
Predictive algorithms in bid automation technology can set real-time bids by leveraging numerous bidding signals that manual optimization often misses.
These automated solutions ensure campaigns are continuously optimized, freeing up marketers to focus on other critical areas. In today’s privacy-first landscape, personalized engagement with customers is challenging. AI and contextual tools can unlock future audience engagement by using advanced contextual signals to predict outcomes and understand audiences more deeply.
Platforms with direct publisher relationships can leverage AI and machine learning to target users more effectively and contextually, leading to greater efficiencies at scale. Cheeseman explains, “It’s about setting a better standard for meaningful digital interaction.” For example, using Outbrain’s platform data for targeting led to acquiring 64% more new users compared to social media rates at a significantly lower cost.
Campaigns often require extensive testing to determine which creatives best meet their goals, leading to a time-consuming reliance on stock imagery.
AI-powered advertising platforms can turn real-time performance insights into more compelling creatives. Creative automation tools streamline the ad personalization and optimization process, resulting in contextually relevant images and titles that drive higher conversions and growth at scale. For more information and advice about using AI to engage audiences on the open internet, please visit Outbrain’s resources.
