By Antoinette Siu • May 31, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
AI and data company FullThrottle.AI is developing an audience targeting tool for media agencies using a generative AI assistant, Digiday has learned.
The audience planner product allows agencies to find and target audiences and create plans by chatting on the platform — in the style of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. The AI tool leverages the user’s first- and third-party data to identify their audiences using their targeted criteria. With the ongoing move to deprecate cookies, platforms like FullThrottle.AI are hoping agencies will use their alternatives to get value out of their data.
FullThrottle.AI, which focuses on generating first-party household data for agencies and brands without using cookies, expects the audience tool will help simplify the media planning process by cutting down on time used to reach household-level audiences. When users input their queries and business goals into the platform, it should generate a draft audience plan based on the content and FullThrottle.AI partners, which include cable provider Spectrum and audio firm iHeartMedia.
“This radically changes the advertising lifecycle that now consists of brief to plan, to activation, to measure to brief again,” said Amol Waishampayan, chief product officer of FullThrottle.AI. “The faster you can make strategic decisions without waiting for a 1950s Ford assembly line process, the more competitive edge you bring.”
The platform lets users segment shoppers and audiences by interest, purchase history, location and precise buying window. Some examples of potential prompts using the AI feature could include: creating a plan to sell more hybrid vehicles, reaching consumers who buy luxury products or even targeting previous customers most likely to book a vacation or repeat another purchase.
Having such media and audience planning tools helps agencies navigate a time-consuming process — especially as they often have to juggle pulling together first-party data, budgets, addressability and match rates to create a plan, explained Tim Pickard, evp of agency strategy at integrated agency Malone Media Group.
“Essentially, you need what feels like a special task force to [accomplish all that],” Pickard said. “If there is any back and forth conversation, it can feel like you have to start the process over. Having generative AI as an assistant to help you do [create the plan in] real-time is a game changer.”
With the AI assistant, planners can now write out the client’s business challenge or goal and draft a first-party audience activation plan “within minutes,” Pickard added. “The result is an immediate and highly effective, targeted audience that previously would have taken us much longer to set up and then deploy.”
Joy Baer, president of Strata and board member at FullThrottle.AI, also noted that these platforms can bring together multiple capabilities, from audience targeting to measurement, into one place. Often, those are siloed functions which can make agencies have to employ multiple tools in the campaign process.
Additionally, as the industry moves away from relying on third-party cookies, Baer said using AI to generate and visualize data is helpful for agencies to find the most relevant audience quickly.
“That kind of interaction with AI is so powerful,” she added. “I can interact with it and ask a question … and pull up and slice and dice segments of my data conversationally, and then activate it.”
Baer also noted these audience platforms offer an advantage to smaller independent agencies, which often don’t have similar resources to holding companies to acquire other platforms or develop proprietary products.
“Medium-sized agencies [and] the mid-market agencies don’t have all those tools necessarily,” Baer said. “It sort of democratizes this really unique planning capability for agencies — and gives everyone access to it.”
https://digiday.com/?p=546434
