U of Digital Newsletter - 9/18/24 (free)

September 11th-September 17th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. One week of #USvGoogle is in the books, The Trade Desk is “not” building a CTV OS, and the time has finally come to “talk” to your DSP…

Check out the top 7 #DataCleanRooms, with a breakdown of each, in this piece by Andrew Byrd of AdMonsters, featuring our own Myles Younger and U of Digital Expert Therran Oliphant!

Top Stories 👁️ 

New AI Tool Is Offered To Programmatic Advertisers
Source: MediaPost
September 16th, 2024

Summary: Viant is characterizing its new ViantAI solution as the world's first fully autonomous ad platform. Advertisers can use ViantAI to quickly and efficiently manage every stage of their programmatic campaigns, from plan creation to execution and optimization. ViantAI is built on Viant's demand-side platform (DSP), which provided the training data to the AI.

ViantAI needs four pieces of information to create and execute a campaign: the advertiser's identity, campaign timeframe, budget, and objective, such as conversions or brand awareness. In an online demo, Viant co-CEO Tim Vanderhook created a campaign for specialty grocer Sprouts, with a $5M budget for Q4 and a goal to drive in-store visitors. From there, ViantAI identified Sprouts' target audience and the best channels to reach it. The platform allocated the budget across different channels, the optimal daypart, and frequency caps. ViantAI then created the line-by-line media plan including publishers, max CPMs, and number of impressions. Vanderhook acknowledged that it’s not fully autonomous yet, but it can get advertisers most of the way there without human involvement—”zero to 70% in an instant,” said Chris Vanderhook, Viant’s co-CEO. Tim Vanderhook stressed that the user is still in full control. 

Coming soon: Viant will next integrate ViantAI media plans directly into its DSP via API, so that once a media plan is created, it will automatically be built in the DSP. Viant will also make it possible for advertisers to integrate their first-party data and campaign performance metrics directly into ViantAI.

Opinion: They stole our idea!

All kidding aside, this is really smart, and really well done. Sure, AI has been around for a long time in ad tech. But Viant is capitalizing on what first made AI sexy to the masses: conversational AI (AKA LLMs, like ChatGPT).

So what?

Viant is first-to-market with the next generation of AI programmatic ad-buying tools that will be conversational with a focus on outcomes, and will remove a lot of the rote work that goes into digital ad buying today. Sure, you could argue that PMax and Advantage+ already do this kind of thing, but they don’t quite take it to the level that Viant has.

Big picture, Viant AI is where all buying tools are headed, and they’ll all get there relatively fast, given how easy it already is to build AI agents on top of existing LLMs. That leads us to three important questions:

1. How will the AI buying tools from the various players differ? The U of Digital AI Ad Buying Tools KnowledgeScape™ explains the differences of key players in simple terms:
   

   

   
   We believe this trend will continue. Big walled gardens that are able to drive strong performance will continue to build AI tools, but they will be used as a front to obfuscate what they do behind the scenes. Walled gardens will have the leverage to do this, because they perform so well. Meanwhile, others that are more open web-focused will home in on transparency and flexibility for advertisers who aren’t myopically focused on direct response results.
   

2. What limits will these tools push? One way to think about this is the experience level and role type the AI is able to mimic. Right now, Viant’s AI can likely mimic the experience level of a junior trader with a few years of experience. Which means, it can conduct some basic audience planning and discovery, design a campaign, and set it up. Next, it'll be able to mimic a strategist with 5-10 years of experience. Which means it’ll be able to develop campaign strategy, from channels to budget to creative to measurement, and iterate on the fly. Eventually, it will be able to mimic a very seasoned marketing executive, and interface directly with various stakeholders to make sophisticated marketing decisions. By then, various stakeholders (like a CMO and a CTO) will have their own AI too. How soon until Viant’s AI is getting instructions from a client’s AI that has access to all the client’s marketing performance analytics and high-level strategy documents.
   

3. How will this impact / change the industry?

   1. The current version of “managed service” evaporates (trading desks, hands-on-keyboard traders, programmatic agencies, etc.) and industry job descriptions shift from requiring the ability to “do” to the ability to “think”.

   2. Some new form of managed service is born (perhaps the management of the advertising AI), because the ad industry once again spawns more than enough complexity to keep everyone employed. Ad tech gonna ad tech. 🤣🤣 

   3. Creative will be important once again! (OK, maybe this won’t happen, but we can hope!!!)

   POLL: Where will see LLMs applied in advertising next?

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It will be fascinating to watch how quickly all the other ad buying platforms release their own AI chatbots to keep up with Viant—and how the AI wave pushes the boundaries of all things advertising in the coming months and years.

Of course, we all know the end game…

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That’s It For This Week 👋

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