Mastering the Machine

Marketers, breathe a sigh of relief, because the machines aren’t coming after your jobs. The mechanised backbone of programmatic advertising – machine learning – still needs you like a shark needs blood.

We need only look to the ‘awkward’ exit of Microsoft’s chat bot, Tay, to see how AI, when left unaccompanied, can malfunction big time in the real world. And when we use tech to sell products to actual people, whose behaviour is unpredictable and only subtly suggestive, the human touch is indispensable.

Just as a little secret between us, the learning algorithms on offer in the DSP marketplace are all but indistinguishable (gasp!) – there is little or no competition between them. It’s the human element that makes or breaks the performance of the technology and consequent insight.

MASTERING THE MACHINE

What does the man + machine relationship look like in practice?

Start out right: When kicking-off a programmatic campaign, machine learning benefits from the pre-loading of comprehensive, well-managed data sets and a selection of instructions that enable it to deliver quality insights and conversions, without going off on a tangent. It’s up to you or your third-party account managers to guide outcomes without restraining the learning process. Machine learning starts wide, gradually tightening around the most valuable opportunities, but only the human element can ‘shave off’ any ineffectual insights, so the tech stays on track.

Strategise: Machine learning doesn’t get your creative messaging. The only thing it knows is how different creatives impact conversion rate, so human intervention is needed to steer the correct messages and visuals towards the right people. This manipulation also applies to campaigns where there is an exclusive target audience and outcome; rather than letting the tech simply target people who appear likely to convert, human strategy and input guide it towards these specifics.

Pace Yourself: Machine learning can be a bit of an eager beaver when it finds a conversion hotspot, so bid pacing needs regulation. Machine learning over time is the key to success, and over-delivery forfeits the insight gathered through a steady and controlled campaign. Unless you’re delivering something last-minute (for a flash sale, let’s say), a surplus of delivery that consumes budget prematurely, will leave the latter part of your campaign without sufficient learnings to expand.

The human role as a guide to the machine is nonstop, reacting to unforeseen events and countering the black & white objectivity that automation brings. And these examples are only a partial representation of how we influence the success, or failure, of that automation.

SERVICING THE MACHINE

Like any machine, programmatic tech needs to be serviced. Adopted on its technological merit alone, a crucial ingredient of the programmatic mix is sacrificed. As you’re hopefully starting to understand, the human aspect is a necessity, not an option.

Assessing the calibre of the tech is still a vital exercise, of course. Marketers need an arsenal of tools for programmatic to work at its maximum, and DSP providers should be able to explicitly express the functionality of their platform and machine learning capabilities. But for those marketers, the value of finding a dedicated partner who walks you through the process of ‘servicing’ the machine, and who will customise solutions around your team, outweighs hyped-up tech specs and pet-named algorithms.

If you oversee your programmatic advertising in-house, choose a provider where guidance is a given, and when working with an agency partner, demand full insight into how their account management team actually manage your campaigns on a day-to-day basis. Programmatic advertising is a service, not just a product.

Machine learning has transformed online advertising, but it’s nothing without the right people working behind the scenes. Marketers need to be savvy when selecting the right DSP, evaluating levels of service and customisation, not the technology alone, because at least for now, it’s the machines that can’t live without us.

IMAGE COURTESY OF DJHUGHMAN, VIA FLICKR.