The AI Augmented Planning Future Already Available to Us Today

The one and only constant in media is change.  The elephant in the proverbial room driving that change today is two little letters you can’t escape and maybe even use every day.  AI is omnipresent in culture and on the lips of tech and media leaders across the industry.  At CMI Media Group it has become an integral part of our business that has helped us drive change in the larger industry.

The future of media planning and activation will be driven by striking the right balance between AI automation, human expertise, and technology solutions that streamline complex processes. CMI Media Group and Compas, in turn, have made significant investments in all three areas, betting on a future where marketers are empowered with the technology solutions to manage customer experiences at scale instead of simply advertising to them.

This new paradigm, available to our strategists, planners, analysts, and buyers today is built on three foundational components – direct supply connectivity, AI assisted decision support, and orchestrated experience management. It promises to cut through the noise littered across the adtech landscape, simplify processes, provide value to the customer in every moment, and drive better performance for the brands we support.  The components are like three legs of a stool, stronger when used together to drive impact for future oriented marketers.

Direct Supply Connectivity

The current programmatic supply chain from an advertiser to a user is teeming with intermediaries — ad exchanges, SSPs, and various curation platforms all sit between the brand and the publisher. This complexity not only drives up costs but also obscures transparency, making it difficult to assess the quality and effectiveness of media.

The next generation of supply management lies in creating, developing, and nurturing direct publisher relationships that index highly for audiences our customers are interested in reaching and engaging to activate and measure within a scalable programmatic context.  This approach ensures a focus on high-quality inventory, removal of unnecessary steps, avoidance of adtech taxes from intermediaries, and ensures more ad spend goes directly to publishers that directly manage relationships with shared customers.  The result is a simplified, transparent set of curated connections to quality media partners that truly deliver results.

AI Supported Planning

A simplified, high quality supply chain is the foundation of media planning, while the strategic intelligence layered on top is what unlocks its true potential. This is where leveraging AI to quickly assess large datasets and assist planners with insights that they may otherwise have not been aware of augments deep and specialized human expertise.  Media planners are tasked with the monumental challenge of navigating a sea of data to make informed decisions. AI support systems are designed to work with planners, not replace them, by shouldering the heavy lifting of data analysis.

Within CMI and Compas we’ve built an assistant that analyzes past campaigns, evaluates historic performance metrics, understands the value of different media properties to targetable audiences and segments, and simply surfaces media supplier value scores for different parts of the marketing funnel. It finds the valuable signals in the noise, allowing planners to identify new opportunities and simplify an otherwise overwhelmingly complex process.  It solves for the roughly 70% of a media plan that will rely on tactics and partners that are supported by robust data, while investments dedicated to innovative opportunities not yet supported by as much data get folded into the assistant over time as more is known about performance and customer value.

This assistant supports a continuous cycle of testing, learning, data, and intuition in a symbiotic relationship between expert planners and machine intelligence that enables teams smarter and faster work that drives results.

Orchestrated Experience Management

The component that unites direct supply and AI assisted planning to complete the three-legged stool of AI media planning is technology (Automated Marketing Orchestrator, “AMO”) that orchestrates media in narrative form and optimizes next best actions, engagements, and experiences of target customers. This unifying technology allows marketers to move beyond siloed campaigns to deliver a holistic omnichannel experience.

It sequences media activations, reacts to real-time customer and geo signals, and has been designed to integrate within a brand’s omnichannel technology stack that also supports owned media, personal relationship management, and customer data platforms.  Like the AI planning assistant, it has embedded tools and capabilities that augments and builds on the user’s expertise to include AI sequence optimization, embeds dynamic creative optimization (DCO) within message steps and channels, and provides a feedback loop to client production systems that drives the development of derivative and new assets.

The future of AI in media planning hinges on these three legs of the stool working in conjunction with each other to manage customer experience while also driving bottom line results for brands. It simplifies the connection to media suppliers and drives more value to those organizations that have a direct relationship with customers most valuable to the clients we serve.  It augments the capabilities of any human to see around corners and understand the relative value of those supplier partners in different parts of the marketing funnel.

And finally, orchestration allows planners to manage customer experiences at scale and continuously optimize based on a variety of desired outcomes.  In practice, any planner can directly access a high value pool of supply, work closely to develop opportunities, evaluate those opportunities with the help of AI, then deliver on the brand brief through orchestrated experience management.  It’s a future of media where the right message at the right time is here and available to implement for healthcare brands and will soon also be available across any vertical and audience set.   This evolution marks a pivotal shift away from the chaotic complexity of the past and toward a future where technology enables us to connect with customers with unparalleled precision and purpose.

This piece was written by José Ferreira, Chief Product Officer, CMI Media Group