Will AI Power Your Social Media Advertising?

At the Marketing AI Institute, we read dozens of articles on artificial intelligence every week to uncover the most valuable ones for our subscribers (become a subscriber today), and we curate them for you here. We call it 3 Links in 3 Minutes. Enjoy!

1. How Facebook Could Own AI Advertising

One of the most useful strengths of artificial intelligence is personalization. By marrying technology and data, AI can transform users’ online experiences. For example, when searching for a restaurant in a particular city, AI can generate personalized matches based on past searches, browser history, Facebook check-ins and likes, and prior reservations. This ability is why AI will be the driving force behind Facebook’s changes in content production, target marketing and advertising, says an opinion piece in Adweek.

Facebook is the ideal advertising platform for brands because of its wealth of data and cost-effective targeting. With AI and machine learning, brands can connect with the right consumers, at the right time, with the right content. This is important as consumers’ tolerance for irrelevant advertisements is at an all-time low.

Traditionally, advertising takes a lot of resources. However, the amount of data Facebook has on its users makes the process more effective and efficient at a low cost. Instead of having to manually A/B test content, Facebook’s AI-powered insights can reveal customer content preferences, like whether they prefer video, pictures or written content.

Overall, AI makes managing Facebook campaigns easier and more efficient, leaving marketers more time and money to focus on strategy and growing other areas of their business.

As artificial intelligence progresses, more hype builds around the so-called “AI apocalypse,” where machines replace humans in many functions in our society. Venture capital funding in AI startups has increased significantly and more studies are predicting human jobs will be replaced by robots.

However, academia sees a different picture. Observer recently sat down with Kyunghyun Cho, Facebook AI research scientist and New York University data science professor, to discuss the hype building around artificial intelligence.

“The progress we’ve made in machine translation is exciting. But, it’s not that exciting.” Cho said. “Let’s say you want to build a sophisticated software that has very complex intelligence like a human does, you need to design a set of algorithms to enable it to see, hear, speak and touch. Once a machine knows how to perceive the world, there are still so many complicated things on top of that. For example, it needs to be able to reason things, to plan and even to imagine. We’ve only just taken a very, very small step.”

The same is true for AI as a whole. Exaggerated claims of human-like behavior, such as natural dialogue, are feeding the hype and hurting the field. We must understand that science moves in small steps and builds on work from many other discoveries and projects. As of right now, we are still far from human-level AI and mass replacement by robots.

Nonetheless, AI technology is currently being used to its maximum extent and there will always be users who exploit the technology, such as using facial recognition to surveil citizens or use AI to power military drones. Cho believes that inventors are not to blame for these applications, and doing so would kill innovation. Additionally, he believes that research output has accelerated because of the increased amount of funding and researchers involved.

Cho added, “Machine learning is like computers in the 1970s. Even Bill Gates and IBM didn’t think computers would be as popular as they are today. So, it’s going to be everywhere. The infusion of venture capital is definitely good, and venture capitalists should invest more in this sector.”

3. Work Smarter, Not Harder 

As we’ve shared in countless articles before this, a number of today’s brands are investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, Inc. shares that these same forward-thinking brands may be missing the boat on intelligent content.

Simply, intelligent content is content that can be adapted, changed and/or released on different channels, to different audiences, without needing a human to touch it. To do this, content must be organized in a manner where it can be mixed and matched. By breaking content into properly tagged fragments, it can be automated, recombined, personalized and distributed seamlessly.

Before you start panicking because your business isn’t using intelligent content, it is important to note that it isn’t necessary for every company. Brands that can benefit most from intelligent content are those that sell lots of products to lots of different audiences such as a software company that sells five different software packages in three different industries, each with seven different buyer personas.

Constantly recreating content is time-consuming and inefficient. While intelligent content may not be right for every brand, it is an important glimpse into the future of content marketing.

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