Why Artificial Intelligence is being used in advertising

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all around us, and we interact with it without even knowing. Whether it is a web search, a voice command to your smartphone, virtual assistants, or a book recommendation on Amazon, all of them use some Artificial Intelligence.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence is a way of making computers, robots or software, to simulate human behavior.

We, as human beings, can quickly look at a photo of a car and identify that it's a car and its characteristics. We can say that the car is red, has four wheels, the brand, and the model, among other things.

Now if we asked a computer to identify what's in the photo, how would he do it? He would probably give us technical details about the file format and not the image itself. 

AI is closely linked with the study of how the human brain works. By understanding how the human brain processes information and learns, we can try creating software that does the same, but in an automated, faster, and hopefully, even better way than we do it.


Different types of AI

The most common and the ones you probably already heard of, are Machine Learning and Deep Learning.

Machine Learning (ML) is one of the subfields of AI. ML systems are designed to take large sets of data to analyze and learn from them. It can learn without being explicitly programmed to complete a specific task.

On the other hand, Deep Learning is a subset of Machine Learning. We feed data into the “Neural Networks,” and they learn the characteristics of something, like recognizing something in a photo.


Artificial Intelligence and Online Advertising

Online advertising is as old as the Internet. It started with simple text links and banners and evolved a lot since. 

When we think about a volume of millions of daily user seeing ads, even a 1% increase in conversion rate is a lot, and so, companies invest heavily in trying to increase this number.

This is where artificial intelligence comes in. If you show the same banner to every visitor on your site, the conversion rate is not going to be great, because it’s not going interest a lot of people.

But with AI and Deep Learning, the system can learn on its own what works best for each visitor in every situation. It can check parameters that even a human wouldn’t notice, and these will make a huge difference. That way, the system can present to the user the best possible add for every situation, making the most profit.

Every marketing company should be focusing on using AI because it yields more revenue with the same amount of traffic.

Artificial Intelligence is not something from the distant future. It’s right here, right now, present in our everyday lives, making things easier for everyone, and is one of the best assets that a company can have. So start investing today.


Posted by @pedro at September 20, 2017