Machine learning is revolutionizing digital marketing and programmatic advertising strategies. Media planners and marketing managers are using it to take their programmatic ad campaigns to the next level.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are fuelling social media campaigns, automating sales and marketing tasks and processes, and reshaping digital advertising across industries. Leading brands, such as Netflix and Sephora, are leveraging the power of AI via chatbots, apps and data analytics into user preferences and behaviour to deliver tailored customer experiences that drive conversions.
While machine learning and artificial intelligence are poised to grow in importance for digital marketers in 2025 and beyond, a recent survey of its members by Digital Marketing Institute shows that 37 per cent don’t have an AI strategy, even though 60 per cent believe they have a handle on AI’s marketing potential.
The case for using AI in digital marketing continues to grow. Thanks to the emergence of generative AI and ChatGPT, AI-powered digital marketing solutions can now process giant data sets and predict future customer behaviour with remarkable accuracy, and create highly personalized content that resonates.
The next frontier? Leveraging machine learning to increase the effectiveness of programmatic ads.
About programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising – the automated buying and selling of digital ads – improves efficiency, lowers costs and provides highly precise targeting, ensuring the right messaging reaches the right audience at the right time. The result? A stronger return on investment.
Machine learning, AI, big data analytics and real-time bidding are at the core of programmatic advertising. They promise to make it even more effective thanks to greater and faster access to actionable insights and the development of AI tools that will further refine targeting, automate processes, optimize marketing initiatives, increase conversion rates and improve customer retention.
How machine learning and programmatic advertising will evolve in 2025
Creating a digital marketing strategy that integrates and leverages machine learning and AI will allow brands to:
Take personalization to the next level
Consumers want personalized experiences. This has been true for some time and will only continue to grow in importance as a key differentiator for brands able to deliver a truly customized experience to their target audiences. Machine learning and AI-empowered marketing tools pave the way for highly targeted personalization at scale based on individual preferences, past behaviours and predictive analytics. This type of enhanced marketing strengthens customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty, and significantly boosts sales.
Better support customers
AI-empowered chatbots are well established as a communication tool and touchpoint. In 2025, they will play an increasingly important role as brands integrate AI digital marketing with customer service. This will improve accuracy and build capacity to deliver fast, relevant support with personalized messaging in response to increasingly complex queries, thereby improving customer service and brand relationships.
Fast fact: Gartner predicts that by 2027, a quarter of organizations will rely on chatbots as their main customer service channel.
Scale the automation of content creation
Brands are already testing and integrating AI technologies such as ChatGPT into existing content creation workflows. So far, the experimentation is proving that these technologies can produce quality content. This year, brands will feel more empowered to use these tools to create blogs, social media posts, ad copy, video scripts and more. They will focus on automation strategies and using AI-powered programmatic advertising platforms to analyze customer data to inform marketing initiatives that align with the interests of their target audiences.
Improve targeting
Programmatic advertising is already a game changer when it comes to targeting and bidding. This will only progress as new machine learning techniques pull insights from user-generated data to create highly effective ads that reach the right audience at the right time, improving engagement rates and ROI.
Up their SEO game
The widespread adoption of smartphones, tablets and voice assistants has led to many advertisers adopting mobile-first strategies, including accommodating voice search in their search engine optimization (SEO) initiatives. Research shows that 58 per cent of users between the ages of 25 and 40 use voice search every day – a number that continues to grow. Machine learning and AI can provide deep insights into how consumers use voice search, providing brands with critical information to create new content and modify existing content to rank high in voice searches.
How to leverage machine learning and AI for digital and programmatic advertising
Make data the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy. Access to clean, structured data is essential to fully leverage the benefits of machine learning and AI.
Select the right tools. Know the AI-based technologies and services already available and on the horizon, and how they can enhance your digital marketing initiatives. These include AI-based content creation tools, supply- and demand-side platforms, and predictive analytics.
Work with data and digital marketing partners. The right technologies are the starting point. Unleashing the power of machine learning and AI to advance digital marketing strategies requires smooth implementation and integration – the most significant challenges to adopting AI. When it comes to digital marketing, programmatic advertising is the future. Machine learning and AI will take the brands who embrace it to new heights. Are you ready?
