How AI is transforming the retail marketing industry
The advancements we’ve seen in artificial intelligence (AI) in the last 18 months alone have already made the technology integral to the short-, medium-, and longer-term growth of retail media.
Looking into a crystal ball, we can hazard a guess that consumers’ shopping experience will be very different soon as a result. There’s potential that, as a shopper, before you’ve even thought about the products you need, they’ll be in your basket ready to go. This gives but a taste of the level of intuition that the technology will offer.
Where and why AI is having such a major impact
There are four areas where AI is really driving growth, innovation, and efficiency when it comes to retail media.
Creative efficiency – There’s been a real transition to how retailers and brands can use AI to enhance creative resources, with the aim of being more efficient about where time is being invested when pulling ads together. For example, tools such as Midjourney have already begun to play a critical role in the creative process.
Optimising for personalisation and relevance – In most cases, retailers are now looking at adding customised tag lines, copy, pricing, and layouts, depending on whom they’re trying to reach. These executions can now all be done more efficiently and effectively with the speed and insights AI enables.
The technology’s speed simply cannot be matched by humans. Especially when it comes to retail media, it allows brands to go that step further with their audience planning and not only use their first-party data, but also create predictive audiences who have a greater propensity to buy their products.
Walmart is a great example. A few months ago, they announced their new generative AI functionality. Normally in a search function, you would go in and type individual words like eggs, bread, dog food, etc. Walmart has now introduced the option to be able to type in something like, “cowboy-themed birthday party,” and everything you need for that exact event will come up on that search. It’s really interesting that it’s using AI to be able to pull together and create a full, contextually aligned search page for different customers, depending on their broader needs. Previously, you would have to break this all down.
Data – Yes, we already know that AI is transforming data in terms of the way it’s being used at the backend. But today, brands are now using AI to determine how they can most efficiently target specific audiences they want to reach and how campaigns are measured. AI is only as good as the data that is fed into it, so retail media’s first party data really moves the needle.
Editor's Note: this article is a guest post from: https://www.retail-insight-network.com/features/how-ai-is-transforming-the-retail-marketing-industry/
