What is Next Generation Ad Tech AI?
…or why AMaaS performing 480 budget updates per day matters.
If you’ve been following along you’ll know that we refer to Adext’s Audience Management as a Service (AMaaS) as next generation ad tech AI and while that sounds pretty cool (and it is!) we’d like for you to understand what exactly we mean by that. More specifically, is AMaaS using real AI? What was the previous generation of ad tech AI and how is AMaaS different?
Real AI or Hype?
The hype surrounding Artificial Intelligence in almost every industry seems to be building to a fever pitch and investment in AI by large companies and startups is following suit; AI investment doubled in 2017 to US$12 billion by VCs and to US$3.8 billion by CVCs. While according to Accenture the pay off by 2035 will be epic, to the tune of US$8.3 trillion in the US alone while potentially doubling GVA rates across the globe:
A recent TechEmerge article summarizing the current optimism around investment in AI puts it well, “despite the disagreements about specific industry or domain application and adoption, the rumble on the tracks (from all directions) seems to liken AI not to a specific tool for a few specific jobs, but as an entirely different (and in large part unimaginable) paradigm of work, research, and productivity.”
Fake AI
With all of this optimism comes a virtual gold rush of companies looking to profit from this hype and while there are some companies working on real AI or at least well-intentioned in their efforts, there are many promoting fake AI by outright defrauding investors and their users. A recent Synced article defines fake AI as, “an aggregation of unethical marketing strategies and immature tech solutions.”
This fake AI trend led Robbie Allen to write the tongue-in-cheek article, “How to convince Venture Capitalists you’re an expert in Artificial Intelligence” while Prof. Stewart Russell of UC Berkeley places the blame on misunderstanding, “When I read about AI, 80% of the time it’s just flat out wrong information,” the Synced article then goes on to state “This misunderstanding of what AI really is has largely enabled the emergence of fake AI.”
Yet with the current shortfall of AI talent and VCs making record investments, perhaps the current trend of fake AI is here to stay at least for the near future but there’s an expectation that the winners will shake out as Synced puts it: “because fake AI does not offer a true competitive advantage, and the market is becoming increasingly aware of what real AI can achieve, fake AI products and novelties … are unlikely to stand the test of time.”
AMaaS is Using Real AI
The goal of AMaaS is to find the best audience for any ad and by ‘best’ we mean the audience with the Highest Sustained Conversion Rate (HSCR). AMaaS does this by intelligently setting budgets every hour for up to 20 distinct demographic segments and by ‘intelligently’ we mean using machine learning models that utilize Bayesian inference, simulations and Transfer Learning to continuously explore & exploit the best audience for every ad.
It has taken Adext more than a year and several million dollars to acquire the data and implement the data science environment needed to pull this off. You may be interested to know that when using AMaaS one or more of your ad groups may be managed by different (sometimes competing) variants of our model, each continuously tuned toward taking better decisions. We can do this because we created a way for our data scientists to experiment on real data and then roll out new versions into production on their own, in short we’re doing real data science at scale.
So, What Then is Next Generation Ad Tech AI?
Simply put, it’s real AI that delivers on the hype by intelligently performing high value advertising tasks and is adaptable enough to be applied to almost any advertising campaign in a timely manner.
While we’ve already reviewed the hype, the need for real AI and how AMaaS performs high value advertising tasks, let’s focus in on that last part; adaptable enough to be applied to almost any advertising campaign in a timely manner because that’s what defines the next generation of ad tech AI.
For about the past 5 years, of the few ad tech companies that have created products using real AI, most of them have suffered from not being very adaptable or timely; typically requiring months of upfront work to use and/or useful only in very specific contexts. This has driven the use of ad tech AI by a very exclusive group of advertisers for a limited set of circumstances with varying degrees of success. For this reason, we summarize this sort of ad tech AI as previous generation.
AMaaS is Next Generation Ad Tech AI
AMaaS allows anyone to attach real AI to their existing Adwords and/or Facebook account to make up to 480 audience budget updates per day to each of their ad groups and it should only take about 5 minutes to get started.
Since AMaaS is constantly finding the best audience for any ad, it allows advertisers to then focus on iterating the creative and strategic parts of advertising. Essentially, creating a new ad optimization workflow where advertisers shift their demand-side operating costs toward more and better creative.
AMaaS admittedly has some limitations but it already works with a wide variety of Adwords/Facebook configurations and we’re working to expand that in the near future to support more ad types and demographic targets.
By now we hope that you’re excited and understand what we mean by the next generation of ad tech AI, the high standard we place on it and how AMaaS is meeting it. Our mission is to solve ad optimization in an intellectually honest way and we’re so serious that you’ll only pay a fee when AMaaS increases your conversion rate.
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We want you to love AMaaS so we’re offering a free 30-day trial with no budget limits (launching May 1st, 2018) at: https://www.adext.ai
