In the past decade, the online ad industry has grown exponentially from the early days of Online advertisements, when browsing meant traversing a minefield of unwelcome pop-up ads and digital advertising included obnoxious flashing banners, pop-ups and random sidebar ads.

Luckily, online advertisement has matured a lot since then and has now evolved into a large portfolio of opportunities for advertisers covering the entire buying cycle of consumers from initial attention such as rich media, video over creative and engaging ad formats e.g. native advertisement, social media, games and video until conversion focused and hyper targeted ads across search and shopping / price comparison networks and finally including retention creation marketing activities such as e-mail / marketing automation tactics.

While many of today’s selection of ad formats allows for the combination of creative messaging and attention grabbing visual components, the factor which amplified the use of AI across online marketing was the rise of data across audience, performance, bidding and attribution models that changed the task of improving and optimizing ads from a simple, routine based job into a complex endeavor covering multiple data points across audience signals, previous behavior combined with predictions on seasonality changes and buying behavior.

During the evolving years of the online advertisement industry, we’ve developed the ability to learn a great deal about who is or isn’t interested in our products and services. The first breakthroughs came thanks to the likes of Amazon with their recommendation engine technology and Google and Meta/Facebook with their targeted advertising platforms. Today, each of those platforms has been augmented with machine learning technology that allows them to become increasingly effective as they are fed more data on customers and their buying habits.

On top, AI is now becoming an increasingly important factor when developing new content tailored to the preferences of users across different platforms, including social media, native advertisement as well as marketing automation platforms.

AI now an integrated part of the content generation process itself, creating copy and images that it knows are likely to be well-received by its audience based on the users’ preference, thus fueling the path into more personalized content where individual customers are served content that’s specifically tweaked to them, perhaps using information and past reference points that the AI knows are relevant to them.