The Year Ahead: Why Marketers Should Embrace Virtuous Advertising
As digital advertising matures, this may be the year of Virtuous Advertising. Learn what it is and how AI can help achieve it.
Digital advertising has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last few years. As the industry matures, we now understand its effects on the environment, people, and people’s data. Eric Schwartz, US Managing Director at Scibids, believes the next year is the year of Virtuous Advertising. Here he explains what it is and how AI can help achieve it.
For many in the industry, the arrival of digital advertising methods presented a rare opportunity for the marketing sector to improve its environmental record. Unlike print advertising, it required no raw materials. No cutting down trees to produce the paper. No hydrocarbons would have to be pumped from the earth’s crust to make the ink.
If you want to change a billboard, you need to send a crew to the location, and they are often carried in diesel-burning vans. Every campaign change had a visible ecological cost, which we could measure by the thick black plumes produced by the industry’s fleet of Sprinter vans. Digital advertising, meanwhile, only requires the passage of light through a network of underground fiber optic cables.
But as the digital advertising sector has matured, we have started to gain a fundamental understanding of the environmental costs. And it is worse than we expected. Digital advertising accounts for 3.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with this contribution growing by 6% year-over-year.
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The digital advertising supply chain is grossly inefficient due to invalid traffic. Targeting and personalization is a computationally-expensive process that relies on a vast apparatus of power-hungry servers to work. And that is without mentioning the increased power load faced by consumers. If the industry is set to reverse its ecological track record, it must radically change how it operates and thinks. The year ahead will see marketers strive to produce “Virtuous Advertising.” But what does this mean?
Virtuous Advertising is a concept that touches on three elements:
- Respect for the environment.
- Respect for data privacy.
- Respect for the human beings that run and deliver digital ad campaigns.
These three elements are not merely moral imperatives but also fundamentally achievable goals, and AI can play a pivotal role in meeting them.
The Importance of Respect
Before we talk about how we can achieve the lofty goals of Virtuous Advertising, it is worth talking about why these three elements are so vital.
First is the environment. Earlier this year, Scibids commissioned a survey of U.K. advertising industry leaders. When asked about their most pressing concerns, the leading item was addressing the carbon impact of digital advertising.
In many respects, the digital advertising industry reflects trends in other sectors, which are increasingly aware of their environmental footprint and growing consumer demands for climate action from brands.
As for privacy, the past decade has seen a groundswell of consumer mistrust in the digital advertising industry, fueled in part by more rigorous monitoring and headline-making fines by data-protection authorities. Rehabilitating its image among the wider public will be a task of arduous proportions.
Regulators and tech companies have taken action to curb the excesses of the digital advertising sector. Perhaps surprisingly, the most drastic steps have come from the private sector, with Google moving to retire the cookie. This move signals an end to hyper-targeted ads and a return to more contextual advertising.
Finally, let us talk about the third element in the Virtuous Advertising trifecta: respect for the human beings that run and deliver digital advertising campaigns.
This means giving employees the tools, technologies, automation, and training required to do their job to the best of their abilities. When we respect and empower employees, we are better able to meet the other two items on the Virtuous Advertising checklist.
How AI Can Fix Digital Advertising
Virtuous Advertising challenges advertisers to meet three distinct goals. Success, ultimately, depends on how effectively an advertising business utilizes and appropriates the resources available to them.
The most obvious solution to meet environmental requirements is to deliver fewer ads. Instead, we should serve content to those most likely to convert or meet specific business outcomes. AI is naturally conducive to this goal, as it can constantly adjust its targeting criteria based on new information and trends and can dynamically re-allocate advertising budgets to reduce waste.
Given the upcoming lean years for the advertising industry, driven by a rapidly-deteriorating macroeconomic climate, the environmental benefits of Virtuous Advertising will align with the urgent need within advertisers and media buyers to buy more efficiently. A well-engineered, custom AI platform can be configured to adjust its behavior to cope with changing economic, regulatory, and technological factors.
Although AI is seldom considered a privacy-preserving technology, it can play an essential role in how advertising businesses respect the rights of consumers, primarily by smoothing the path to our looming post-cookie future. However, not all AI is created equal. When engineered specifically not to use personal identifiers while providing efficiency and scale for media buying, AI is well-suited to maximize the use of anonymized contextual data to deliver powerful ad decisioning.
And finally, people. AI will allow advertising businesses to achieve new operational efficiencies, giving employees the breathing room to focus on the tasks that only human beings can do and improving the quality of insights employees leverage when making important decisions.
While AI has displaced humans in many industries, particularly manufacturing, the same is unlikely to be true for advertising, where creativity and problem-solving are vital. Instead, using advanced calculations and automation that increase media productivity will improve the quality of the outcomes that advertisers are looking for.
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While many advertisers lack in-house data science and AI engineering capabilities, off-the-shelf products can significantly uplift specific tasks, particularly regarding inventory buying.
However, those with advanced AI development capabilities will see the most considerable benefits and can tailor their AI models to meet specific business objectives and utilize proprietary (and often custom) data sets.
Faced with greater privacy and environmental challenges, Virtuous Advertising provides the industry with a path forward. As they shift their way of working, AI can help the sector adapt to changing market conditions while taking meaningful steps to rehabilitate the advertising industry’s tarnished image.
What steps have you taken to make advertising virtuous? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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