IBM said it expanded the IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator for over-the-top video, using artificial intelligence to dynamically optimize ad creative to improve campaign effectiveness.
IBM is working closely with AT&T’s Xandr to help Accelerator scale for buyers, including those using programmatic buying technologies.
“Brands continue to follow their consumers to OTT and CTV, especially now as streaming audiences grow across all age groups," said David Olesnevich, head of product at IBM Watson Advertising. "However, brands are too often faced with creative resource constraints, fragmentation, and measurement and frequency challenges. The market is in need of advanced technology to help deliver optimal creative at scale, and IBM sees AI as the solution.”
“Accelerator is designed to help brands make their campaigns effective, perform against business goals and derive measurable results and insights. All at scale – which requires working together with industry leaders. Using Watson AI, marketers can now develop personalized OTT creative for each user and ultimately help improve campaign performance over time,” he said.
In initial Accelerator for video tests on The Weather Channel’s O&O digital property, IBM exceeded VCR benchmarks by nearly 20%.
The Watson Advertising Accelerator was original designed for display advertising. It uses AI to predict and generate impression-level ad variations. Then Watson Machine Learning analyzes cookie-less data signals to predict and subsequently assemble a customized video creative for each impression based on the likelihood of a consumer converting against a KPI.
“The fragmentation of media consumption habits in an evolving identity landscape underlines the need for intelligent, data-driven technology solutions,” said Doug Hurd, head of corporate strategy and business development at Xandr. “Xandr and IBM’s first-to-market capability will power more relevant ad experiences in Converged Video, Connected TV and OTT environments for brands, publishers and consumers alike.”
