Jessica Miles is the Country Manager ANZ at Integral Ad Science (IAS). Here, she explains why hyperautomation is adtech’s top priority.
Automation is a term for technology applications where human input is minimised. Many businesses already use at least one common form of automation, not just for the sake of efficiency but also to provide a more personalised experience for their customers.
Hyper-automation, on the other hand, is an infrastructure of advanced technologies that are used to scale automation capabilities in an organisation. It further automates already automated processes, taking business operations beyond individual input. Gartner pegged hyper-automation as one of the key trends to watch in 2021.
Many organisations have partly jumped on the automation bandwagon, but the technology is still not connected or optimised to provide data sharing or synergies across functions. As pointed out by Bill Gates, an important caveat to remember is that when automation is applied to an efficient operation, it will magnify efficiency. When applied to an inefficient operation, it will magnify the inefficiency. This might be counterproductive. For businesses to remain agile, efficient, and future-ready, acceleration of digital transformation is required. Organisations that don’t focus on efficiency, efficacy, and business agility will be left behind. This is true for the vast majority of the industries, including digital advertising.
Marketers are leaning towards automation in digital marketing.
Investments in marketing technology continue to be a priority for businesses across the board. According to the 2020 Gartner CMO Spend Survey, Gartner found that marketers are prioritising martech over other resources (agencies/services, paid media, labour), spending the largest chunk of their budget on technology.
Today’s marketers are looking at the process and campaign hyper-automation from a whole new angle that reflects more than just guiding and converting the customer through the sales funnel. Automation today also concerns designing comprehensive campaigns to engage meaningfully with customers at every step of their decision journey and through the entire customer lifecycle.
As technology continues to evolve, automation will transform the digital marketing industry. Like so many technological advancements, this will improve the way humans can do their jobs, so they can spend less time pressing buttons and focus more on vital components that require a human touch, like image creation, storytelling, and ad testing.
Automation enables data-backed optimisation
Automated systems are constantly making data-backed decisions, and the best systems would use data to help buyers secure placements and help users build effective creatives and headlines. This would take away the hassle of manual media buying, allowing buyers to buy more and better placements. With automation to help ease the challenges of repetitive tasks, media buying will shift from an analytical role to a creative role- sure to find favours in the adtech industry.
Programmatic ad buying is another example of marketing automation; it saves marketers a lot of time and effort in purchasing online ad space. It enables them to focus on more essential tasks around optimising business revenues. Programmatic buying and selling have increased efficiencies, generating real-time signals and data sets that can be further used to optimise the process, creating a smarter and efficient system overall via machine learning and AI. Marketers’ goal is to connect their brands with the desired audiences better. Programmatic is helping us get there. It provides a path to greater operational efficiency so marketers can dedicate more time to creative strategy and innovation.
Closer to home, the IAS Automated Tag with Google has helped advertisers accelerate, automate, and streamline the traditionally time-consuming tag wrapping processes required to get campaigns live. The automation helped the tag wrapping time reduce by 50 per cent and positively impact the ROI. Marketers are constantly striving to find efficiencies that enhance their workflow, automation allows them to reduce the people-hours on essential tasks and invest those hours back into high-quality services that benefit clients. Automation also enables scale, which is quintessential in accelerating growth and efficiencies.
Hyper automation is a long-term and ongoing commitment that requires cross-functional collaboration and stakeholders’ buy-in. If done in bits and pieces, the technology won’t have the desired impact and will counterproductively magnify inefficiencies. The great news is that marketing automation is still evolving and improving. New-age technologies and innovations are reshaping the future of automation while creating better opportunities for marketers to improve CX with data-backed decision-making and strategies.
