Towards the tailored ad
Toyota mines Watson for unusual themes to feature in campaigns
Artificial intelligence is finding many use cases in the creative field these days. We’ve had movie trailers and we’ve seen cognitive fashion displays, but now for Toyota’s latest campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi are using Watson to pull together unusual themes for the car manufacturer to feature in their ads. Looking at the top 1,000 activities we perform, the cognitive system was able to identify unusual pairings.
So running a marathon and racing a luge combine to become “win, luge or draw.” As Marketing Dive points out, “In one example, martial arts and barbecue are paired, urging reviewers to try a Tai Kwan Tenderizer recipe.”
Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles developed the highly targeted digital campaign for social media presence thatwill run on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram and on interactive online banners.
The ad script algorithm is a sharp tool for agencies and marketers. To survive in the creative world means to differentiate, but still find relevance to a target audience. So Watson’s power lies in its ability to find those nuggets that are surprising, yet personalized to the viewer. And it does this at speed. Watson’s ad script retrieved two unrelated user activities from a pool of 1,000 interests and produced 300 unexpected matches. This led to the creation of 300 unique videos.
Each video created drives the message “powered by A.I.” But artificial intelligence has also found a role beyond ad personalization. Some parts of the video were created by Watson’s algorithm. Production company Tool, shot some of the components separately and fed the scripts into a dynamic video-rendering platform called Imposium. The platform produced the final versions of the 300 videos.
“The future of programmatic will incorporate a layer of artificial intelligence that will allow for more personalization at scale.” — Chris Pierantozzi, Executive Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles
The digital ad space has been one of the last to fully adopt personalization. Being able to automate video production opens up new realms by releasing a prior constraint: that is the ability to be able to produce enough content to match to every audience segment. With Watson, tailored content is created on the fly.
“RAV4 buyers are one of Toyota’s most active audiences, seeking out new journeys, and we wanted to tap into that adventurous behavior,” says Nancy Inouye, National Media Manager at Toyota. “With the RAVtivity machine, we combined Facebook’s behavioral data with AI-created activities to deliver hyper-relevant content, personalized to their interests.”
