By Purva Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Lily AI
This year is my first time attending and speaking at POSSIBLE Miami, and this show lives up to the hype! I love the conversations and sessions around trends in consumer behaviors, journey mapping techniques, multi-touch attribution and incrementality advancements, and one-on-one personalization. Yet, for all the advertising industry’s focus on the consumer and personalization, there is a glaring blind spot.
Audience Targeting: How We Got Here
As we know, the advertising industry has been hyper-fixated on consumer-oriented data, from cross-channel identity resolution technologies to behavioral and psychographic segments and buyer intent-based signals. The swirl around the not-so-crumbling cookie is just one of many examples!
AdTech and MarTech companies in particular have embraced artificial intelligence as they help brand and retail marketers increasingly emulate frontier firms, deploying AI across the campaign life cycle, from media planning and real-time bidding, to audience segmentation and creative development and personalization, all the way through to measurement and optimization.
For example, today’s capabilities around dynamic creative optimization (DCO) and enabling hyper-personalization are a far cry from early efforts a decade ago! Now, AI is enabling unprecedented progress in tailoring ad content in real time based on user behaviors, to ensure ads are not only reaching the right people but also more personalized and relevant.
Let’s double-click into that operative keyword: personalized.
Personalization = Consumer + Product
When brands and their agencies strategize on how best to connect with their desired audiences and create satisfying experiences that drive sales, too often they forget that the personalization equation is equal parts consumer and product.
Of course, your target audience is an important, perennial topic. I am not disputing that reality! In fact, as someone who founded Lily AI with the vision to bring humanity to shopping, I respect the ‘audience obsession’ – I’m obsessed with consumers too!
Yet any conversation around identity-based targeting, privacy-sensitive first-party data strategies, and AI-driven audience formation and personalization is incomplete without discussing the pivotal role of Product Content Optimization (PCO) in advertising and product discovery.
While the role of product is overshadowed by investments in consumer insights and analytics, the tide is starting to turn.
Take Shutterfly’s recent experiment, in partnership with Rain the Growth Agency, which used a custom algorithm powered by search data instead of traditional ID-based targeting to find new customers in regions with high interest but low brand awareness. The algorithm outperformed other targeting methods by driving more new customer conversions and delivering better cost efficiency. It also identified and targeted smaller, less obvious markets, resulting in a campaign that showed that search-driven, AI-modeled targeting can be more effective than traditional audience-based strategies.
Combining Deeper Consumer and Product Insights
While audience understanding and enrichment is critical, and search-based experimentation is interesting, in both scenarios, optimizing product data remains equally important. To maximize the impact of digital campaigns, advertisers must focus on both.
When they do so, they will achieve:
– Enhanced visibility: Well-optimized product data — optimized by channel — boosts search rankings and discoverability.
– Improved relevance: Accurate product information helps match shopper intent more effectively.
– Higher conversion rates: Clear, comprehensive product data leads to better sell-through.
– Better ad performance: Optimized product feeds improve the results of shopping-specific ad campaigns.
In working with retailers and brands, I am both proud and humbled to collaborate with marketing teams that are taking their audience targeting to the next level by integrating it with optimized product content strategies.
By layering product content optimization into their strategies, these leading marketers are delivering highly individualized ad experiences that drive real results. This more unified approach ensures that not only are they reaching the right people, but they’re also presenting them with the most relevant products at the optimal moment.
In today’s digital landscape, success requires more than advanced audience targeting. It’s about synchronizing audience enrichment efforts with robust product data optimization to create seamless, magical shopping and discovery experiences.
