StackAdapt’s Liam McCarten: AI Will Deliver Results for Marketers

AI is ushering in a sweeping transformation of digital advertising, writes Liam McCarten (pictured), VP of Sales APAC at StackAdapt, but while many dance around the topic his team are putting it to work, helping its clients manage the transition to cookieless while also improving the targeting and frequency of their digital campaigns.

The world is becoming increasingly complex for a variety of reasons – not least the emergence of AI. Consumers have multiple devices to consume content and now demand instant gratification, whether querying a search engine or finding the best content.

Liam McCarten, VP of Sales APAC, StackAdapt

The digital marketing world is rapidly maturing, too. Governments around the world are introducing, iterating upon and enforcing privacy laws clamping down on previously tolerated, though perhaps not encouraged, practices and the Australian government may introduce a draft version of new Privacy Act legislation this year. What’s more, Google has finally started the process of making changes to the third-party cookie, reducing the signals that digital advertisers see and making audiences harder to find.

This proliferation of channels has led to an explosion in data points for agencies and marketers to use in their digital campaigns. But it is becoming harder to spot patterns – especially as consumers flit between devices and third-party cookies deprecate to help keep tabs on users as they move around the digital world. AI can make sense of the chaos.

Demand-side platforms (DSPs), with the right AI technology and engineering teams, will make billions of calculations every second to help advertisers make the right buying decision and optimise their budgets. AI-powered machine learning can also learn to spot hidden patterns and signals across the seemingly innumerable data points that companies have.

Of course, while many in the adtech world will tell you that they are putting AI to use with robust, privacy-first strategies and actionable tools, at StackAdapt, we’re walking the walk. For example, we’re on a hiring spree for data scientists as well as machine learning and AI engineers to unlock the potential of this new tech for our customers. In fact, the size of our Data Science function has increased five-fold since January 2022.

What’s more, we’re developing new tools to help advertisers find the audiences that matter to them at the right time. Our Page Context AI solution allows advertisers to build contextual audiences by controlling in- and out-of-context phrases and letting our patent-pending algorithm – yes, it’s that new – determine the best ad placements based on a publisher or site’s context.

But contextual advertising is not new and you know that. What is new, however, is the scale with which AI allows you to target contextually. Page Context AI analyses web pages to work out what’s on the page and put your ads in the best context to achieve your campaign goals. Just imagine how many planners you’d need to analyse that many pages. One leading StackAdapt customer in Australia put our AI tools to work on one campaign, the agency set a KPI of $60 CPA for its client and reached a CPA of $4.07 after only four months of investment. This meant that the overall CPL dropped by nearly 1,000 per cent compared to their previous partner – something that would certainly look good come account review time.

If AI is deployed correctly, it can inform every part of the campaign process. It can help to collect data about potential customers (while maintaining their privacy, of course) to help you create lookalike audiences or retargeting segments to target at different times, whether to continue driving top-of-funnel awareness or hit bottom-of-funnel performance numbers.

In fact, AI can even give you a pretty good understanding of how your campaigns will perform before you press go – giving marketers and agencies the next best thing to a crystal ball. It can, should you have the requisite know-how (we’re always here to help if you don’t) predict the scale and reach of a particular campaign and effectiveness in hitting your target audience. You can estimate your audience size, unique user pool, and daily available impressions all before the campaign starts.

The digital marketing world is changing like never before but in a good way. Skilled marketers and advertisers will be able to make the most of the new tools to maximise reach, minimise cost and actually hit the right person, with the right message at the right time.

To find out more about the latest trends in APAC digital advertising and learn how AI can transform your work, watch StackAdapt’s premiere live APAC webinar.