The race is on to be the best-in-class ad platform that fully meets needs and expectations of today’s digital advertisers.
Five lessons from this article:
- How to capitalize on dynamic digital advertiser spend
- What it means to meet advertisers’ Gen AI expectations
- How to use Gen AI to empower advertisers with better planning and targeting
- What results advertisers really care about
- The opportunity at stake with Gen AI
If your leadership is asking what moves you’re making to capture more of the $750 billion digital advertising opportunity, among growing competition and demands from ad buyers, we have answers.
Through multiple studies we have assessed where ad platforms are today in terms of meeting digital advertiser expectations around Gen AI. We asked 1,200 ad buyers across four key markets (United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia) to understand their interests, intents, expectations and challenges with gen AI tools to help platforms position themselves as the go-to destination for digital ad budgets. And, we took an outside in view to assess ad platform Gen AI capabilities across the advertiser journey.
MYTH
Digital ad revenue doesn’t change much within 30 days
REALITY
Ad budgets are being reallocated more and faster than ever
Ad spend dollars are up for grabs more often than you might think – with Gen AI fueling new competition, its critical for ad platforms to stay on top of what keeps spend on their platform.
Gen AI is fast-tracking the evolution of digital ad space with new targeting methods, creating opportunities for new entrants to develop unique solutions.
The influx of new entrants such as Walmart leverage their vast customer data and in-store traffic to offer advertisers highly targeted and measurable campaigns. For instance, Walmart's ads platform provides brands with detailed insights into consumer behavior, allowing for more precise audience segmentation and personalized ad experiences. This not only enhances the effectiveness of ad spend but also opens up new opportunities for brands to reach consumers at critical points in their shopping journeys.
As a result, advertisers are increasingly allocating portions of their budgets to these retail media networks, recognizing the unique value they bring in terms of data-driven marketing and direct consumer engagement.
57%
of ad buyers shift their budgets at least monthly
Read more about how retail media networks are forming partnerships and building stronger ecosystems allowing them to combine their first-party data in "data clean rooms" to deliver better-targeted ads.
MYTH
Advertisers are overwhelmed with the growing number of Gen AI tools
REALITY
When it comes to gen AI, advertisers are ready, willing and able
As ad platforms launch a constant stream of gen AI-powered tools for advertisers’ use, advertisers are saying “Bring it on!”
73%
of ad buyers think their teams have the necessary skills to incorporate the barrage of new ad platform offerings into their workflows.
Ad buyers crave automation across seven workflows:
They are eager to embrace what the technology platforms are serving up to drive marketing ROI and team productivity - and lower their cost-to-serve in an environment of continued capacity challenges and margin pressure.
With Gen AI it's easier for businesses of any size, even creators and micro-influencers, to streamline their work, tailor their ads more precisely than ever, and reach new customers. And while many ad platforms are certainly marketing their in-platform Gen AI capabilities (e.g., asset generation), only a limited few ad platforms are applying Gen AI to other aspects of the advertiser journey to enhance the end-to-end experience. For example, there’s a huge opportunity for ad platforms to apply Gen AI to the support or education experiences – such as generating tailored learning plans for the self-service advertiser.
Ad buyers are all-in on AI
85%
of ad buyers are experimenting with or scaling gen AI for their marketing workflows internally as it is seen as a ‘force multiplier’.
30%
Average amount of workflows ad buyers are ready to fully automate across their entire process
MYTH
Media planning and targeting needs to stay with the advertiser
REALITY
Platforms that empower ad buyers with AI-powered campaign planning will gain preference
Ad platforms that strategically apply AI to address advertiser pain points in the ad journey will win. Opportunity area? Campaign planning.
55%
of ad buyers cite communications strategy and market research—often one of the first stages of campaign planning—as a major time and logistical challenge.
They are struggling to answer basic questions fast:
- What is my ideal customer profile?
- Where can I best reach my core target?
- And how can I influence their behavior in the right way?
There is also a huge opportunity for ad platforms to enter at the earlier planning stages of the ad buy, helping craft campaign strategies and design effective differentiated global activation plans. These can drive new campaign ideas at an accelerated speed and scale, increasing ROI to new levels focused on ‘cost-per-result.'
AI agents can distill, analyze and interpret multiple data sets across multiple enterprise sources and return valuable, proprietary insights in a matter of minutes. Using those ‘unified’ signals, along with systematic AI-driven simulations, a platform can now complete audience segmentation tasks and multi-variant testing exercises in minutes—and provide richer propensity, demographic, lifestyle and behavioral insights to advertisers.
80%
of ad buyers would spend more of their budget on an ad platform that has the right gen AI capabilities to meet their needs.
Honing these abilities while embracing responsible and ethical AI protocols and guardrails, is how ad platforms can overdeliver and drive a key growth metric: average revenue per advertiser (ARPA).
MYTH
Click-through rates, shares and views matter
REALITY
The old ad sales script is exactly that: old – Tying to financial value is what advertisers care about
Ad platforms must focus on tying spend to impact for advertisers and AI can help drive this required attribution.
With $750 billion in digital ad spend changing hands at the speed of thought, the competitive edge will go to platforms that drive clear and measurable value for advertisers.
Success is no longer measured by proxy media metrics such as click-through rates, shares and views alone. Increasingly important is measuring real financial returns.
Marketing, long considered a cost center, is now a key performance lever and a powerful enabler of a purpose-driven enterprise. Therefore, marketing functions are being held accountable for the financial outcomes of their work.
Platforms using and scaling AI and agentic computing are delivering better results for advertisers.
If an advertiser isn’t asking you “how much sales did my ad spend deliver?”
Get ready, because it's coming.
How will you answer?
Investing in AI and quickly integrating it to improve ROAS and buyer experiences can be transformative.
MYTH
There are leaders taking full advantage of AI to be the digital ad platform of choice
REALITY
No digital ad platform has fully cracked the code when it comes to AI
With no one platform leading the AI charge – there is ample opportunity for players to step up and differentiate with how they apply AI to uniquely create value for their advertisers.
While some platforms are leading the pack, no single platform is truly wow-ing advertisers with their AI capabilities across the ad journey.
Leading platforms are leveraging advanced AI to offer sophisticated analytics, personalized ad content generation, and real-time optimization, but few platforms are demonstrating outcomes for advertisers in how they use AI in other parts of the ads journey. Think: AI in education, AI in partner identification and navigation, AI in support. AI to drive more personalized interactions and messages.
The use of AI to drive more personalized interactions is a major opportunity area as our outside in analysis showed that across the board ad platforms are missing the mark on talking to advertisers beyond a ‘one size fits all’ model. Sales interactions are a prime example of where AI can drive better personalization:
9 in 10
ad buyers say they value their interactions with their sales reps
55%
say they want more interaction with their reps going forward
Platforms’ salesforce is at the center of ad platform reinvention. Their people, supported by gen AI tools, will have a deep, full-funnel perspective of the buyer’s experience.
By embedding the right gen AI tools, leaders can power their reps to develop the best advertiser solutions, with intimate knowledge of product, sector, audience graphs and algorithms. Training reps to work effectively with these tools, including AI agents, will enable a new level of detailed, tailored and trusted customer advice, brand activation, privacy compliance support and risk mitigation.
The ad platform of choice will be the one that applies AI to truly address advertiser needs and pain points – across the ads journey.
So the question is...
