By Alex Kelleher, CMO
Waymo, Google’s self-driving car unit, is poised to become the largest autonomous tech company in the automotive industry. Waymo CEO John Krafcik states: “Our goal at Waymo is to build the world’s most experienced driver.” While this may sound like a glib marketing claim, it’s worth thinking more deeply about. What Waymo is trying to do is combine the knowledge, experience, and expertise of ALL human drivers into one machine: the ultimate driver.
Unfortunately, even the ultimate human driver has some built-in issues – we get tired, we fall asleep, we have road rage…all the things that machines are pretty good at not doing. And ultimately, machines win on raw processing power and reaction speed.
While we’re actually not quite there yet with self-driving cars (though we’re close, and I personally cannot wait), there are industries that are already successfully marrying machine learning and artificial intelligence within an autonomous product. One of those is online media buying.
Force™, Magnetic’s automated media buying platform, is the first platform to fully automate the ad buying life cycle using mature machine learning. Magnetic Force takes on the tedious, time consuming tasks that (to date) we humans have had to labor over. In particular, for deciding WHO to show an ad to. This seemingly simple task is in fact the most complex part of the ad buy – thousands of data sources, millions of decisions per second to decide which individuals are in market for a given product at an exact moment in time.
To achieve this, Magnetic has reimagined the way that an ad is bought, from the very beginnings of supply source optimization, through custom, live audience building, to bid pricing and ultimately post-impression insights.
In fact, decision insights are a crucial part of AI-driven media buying: for the first time, Magnetic is providing real transparency into why every impression was purchased. This explodes the black box, giving our clients the ability to completely understand what the machine is learning, and why it makes its buying decisions.
I remember a time (it wasn’t that long ago) when we laughed at Insertion Orders still being sent by fax, despite being deep into the age of digital media. I don’t think it will be that long before we have a similar reaction to campaigns that are still being manually optimized. The ad industry will be many times more efficient, transparent and automated than it is today. Our time will be freed up again for the more important tasks in marketing – allowing us to settle back into our self-driving cars and focus on the creative, strategic human stuff.
Have questions about Magnetic Force? Want to learn more? Check out what Magnetic Force can do for your campaigns, or contact us to set up a chat!