Why AI and predictive content creation is the media industry’s hail mary and how brands can take advantage

In digital media, change is the only constant, and the way forward lies in both learning from missteps and shaking the slow-moving stubbornness that has time and again stymied our best efforts.

Using AI to create content your customers crave

It’s now more viable than ever before to engage users and achieve maximum retention in the ever-changing landscape of social media and the Internet as a whole. Greater internet access, both in the US and globally, allows for strategies and approaches to target specific audiences and markets, such as the underrepresented Hispanic-American audience in the United States.

Brands like L’Oreal, Nike, American Eagle, and Netflix are already utilizing an AI-driven content strategy that enables successful targeting to specific markets and audiences. This success is due largely in part to a new content distribution approach through data crunching and testing.
Through proprietary algorithms, which adjust in real time, media outlets and agencies are able to react immediately to what delivers the best results, creating headlines and content optimized for performance.

With the need to appeal to Millennial and Generation Z audiences— groups with over $44 billion in purchasing power on social media—a sophisticated AI-based approach is able to deliver results and engaging content. Oftentimes this approach can perform up to 30 percent better in terms of engagement than more conventional, top 50 digital media outlets.

Avoiding Reliance on Facebook Analytics, Only

By creating content for customers based on the most current data available, free from relying on other companies’ business decisions, media brands avoid reliance on social media platforms and related risks, such as Facebook’s new de-emphasis of commercial content within the news feed.

Recently, some innovative and forward-thinking companies have realized that it does indeed take more than amazing content to engage audiences.

“The noise out there is intense, and while you have to create meaningful, well-crafted content, you need to use technology to get your signal heard consistently,” says Fernando Márquez, Marketing Technologies & Innovation Director at Ogilvy & Mather Mexico. “This can be done by developing a predictive AI that observes and reacts to new trends before they’re even on the radar of much the rest of the media, resulting in a proactively optimized content strategy.”

This approach has proven successful for many Fortune 500 and startup brands, as well as non-profit organizations such as the United Nations, who have utilized this strategy to advocate environmental conservation.

Data strategy vs. media strategy

Brands have to distinguish themselves from others by not only making leaps in AI-based technology, but also by prioritizing data strategy over media strategy and diversifying content distribution. Remaining competitive in digital media has long been a cat-and-mouse game of chasing and reacting to the latest algorithm changes from Facebook and Google, but many brands are breaking out of that codependency.

Media companies cannot remain at the mercy of algorithm changes, otherwise they aren’t able to promise brands the level of results they are expecting. Diversifying the way that content is shared and engaged with ensures that audiences aren’t completely flattened every time Facebook pulls a 180. Proof positive to this is how engagement numbers for a few innovative digital media companies were virtually unchanged by Facebook’s recent algorithm change—a redesign that was largely seen as a doomsday scenario by the media industry.

It may have once been enough for companies to stay ahead of the curve and deliver on promises to brand partners by relying on audience insight, technological innovation, or adaptive social media practices. But in today’s media landscape, success requires all of the above.