Automated strategy – is this the future for media planning?
Hodgkins, right, with Carat’s chief strategy officer Dan Hagen during the planning debate
There’s no doubt about it, computers will eventually start making creative and strategic decisions, writes VisualDNA’s Jim Hodgkins.
Has planning lost its mojo or is it being disintermediated?
Leaving Mediatel’s planning debate I recalled Roy Amara’s quote: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
The esteemed past president of The Institute for The Future’s theory has now become elevated to a “Law”.
Advertising technology is a prime instance of this. Whilst some vary from the view the switch to programmatic buying is an overwhelmingly positive and effective one, there is no denying a lot has changed in the planners’ world and will continue to do so.
Some questions:
– Do many things lose their mojo and regain it these days, or are they mainly technologically disintermediated?
– Are we reaching a tipping point where influence in the CMO and board’s insight to brand and marketing strategy is about to shift dramatically?
– How much will technology change planning in the medium term?
– We know who people are, but we need to ask why they behave as they do.
– Closer to home for me, who will primarily be the buyer of my organisation’s audience understanding, insight and targeting in the future: agency, consultancy or tech business? Man or machine?
Let’s examine some key trends for clues about changes in components of many planning roles.
Strategic planning: The global consultancies are the confidants of CEOs and CFOs and are often best able to successfully satisfy the board question of what will significantly increase the value of a brand or corporation.
Media planning: Comprising both audience planning (who it should sell products and services to) and media planning (which channels to use) is being disrupted by tech companies with large audiences selling direct to clients – Google, Facebook, re-targeters and CRMs, to name a few.
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Creative planning: Short termism (in senior marketing roles) and procurement’s involvement in the selection of a marketing campaign or agency has meant that there is less appetite to execute the big or a high risk idea. Creative planning has become siloed and is no longer aligned with media planning since the demise of the full service agency.
Media buying: The efficient purchasing of media channels is increasingly algorithmic and driven by procurement with precise KPIs.
One view is that planning will combine these ingredients and drive a resurgence in being focal to the strategic ambition and architecture of a brand’s direction – planners as experts – and humans are the key ingredient here.
A contrarian view is that technology and specialists will chip away at each of these until the role of a planner is no longer a key strategic ingredient.
Using Amara’s Law, we have a tendency to underestimate the impact of technology in the long term; so perhaps we are underestimating the opportunity for technical disruption of planning. After all we are on the verge of eliminating the practical requirement for a human to drive a car; planes are already virtually always flown by computers, and to the best of my knowledge there is no regulation preventing automated planning as may be the case with driving a car.
The school of thought that curiosity – a fundamental trait of a planner’s role – has already been stifled by an abundance of data and the efficiencies of programmatic, points to there being a big obstacle to the further automation in the decision making process.
Video: Liz Workman of Workman Partnership, BBH’s Jason Gonsalves and VisualDNA’s Jim Hodgkins give their thoughts on what the future holds for media planning.
How do you code a machine to be curious, to generate more subjective ideas, to analyse culture, be ironic or have a sense of humour? If this AI can be created, which I would bet it can, planners should be shaking in their boots.
VisualDNA profiles audiences by personality and emotive traits, which opens up myriad creative opportunities. It enables planners to answer and act upon ‘the why’ and re-spark their curious nature.
Understanding and targeting of customers with the right message at the right time can and will become an automated (programmatic) decision in the future. Our question is how strategic will these automated decisions become.
We’re at the start of a process where the computationally simplest planning and buying decisions are growing exponentially and the plumbing for complex operational components has already been implemented. What’s up for grabs next are creative and strategic decisions, which are much more complex but I’m sure some VCs and insightful entrepreneurs already have their eyes on the prize: computer control of marketing strategy.
This fits with a lot of big tech companies’ plans to dominate the CMO and marketing agenda as they do for finance, HR, supply chain, sales and more. Until now this has focused on more tactical areas – creative assets, media buying, CRM, workflow – but is this about to change.
Jim Hodgkins is managing director, marketing services at VisualDNA