AI to create $32.6trn in marketing performance – and telemedia will see the benefits

AI is impacting every facet of life, everywhere. In telemedia, the change it brings is the glue that now brings all areas of the sector together – and it makes for interesting times.

There has been a growing consolidation in telemedia in the past three years, with messaging, payments and marketing – and cyber security (see page 18) – all coming together to create a single compelling service. And that is all bound up in AI.

The impact of AI on data collection, handling and subsequent marketing action cannot be overstated. Pre-2021, data platforms could collect and gather data and, with manual intervention, crudely segment it to produce a spreadsheet for the marketing department. It was slow, it was inaccurate and it led to rubbish marketing.

AI changed all that in an instant. As businesses saw that ChatGPT and its ilk actually worked, AI became a very powerful tool – but not for creating content, though it does that too –but to process all this data.

AI and Machine Learning are on track to generate between $1.4trn to $2.6trn in value by solving marketing and sales problems over the next three years, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.

The analyst believes that, through automating processes such as data analysis, campaign development, along with certain content creation tasks, marketers get back more time to focus on things requiring human discernment—like strategy implementation—which leads to increased performance of the business’s marketing activities overall.

Now AI can sift through data at a rapid rate and spot groupings and subgrouping trends that no human could.

And it can write the marketing copy to go with it.

This clearly impacts marketing and promotion of VAS services (see below), but it also impacts messaging and payments.

Improved data leads to better marketing, which in turn needs a better and more immediate marketing channels – which makes rich business messaging services suddenly much more compelling. Better, more individual data means more personalised marketing, which needs to come through a ‘personal’ channel such as a mobile messaging.

This is just what will drive the uptake of RCS (see page 8). While Apple’s buy-in to the Googlefounded messaging tech helps make it more compelling, it is the need for ubiquitous rich business messaging derived from this improved, AI-backed understanding of data that will really drive its uptake and that of all other rich messaging formats.

The rich messages that this spawns also have another telemedia trick up their sleeve: the message can be transactional. Shoppable messages – with perfectly AI-honed marketing copy – can lead directly to sales. In theory, it should be so compelling as to drive the recipient to immediately engage and buy. Making that shoppable experience part of the message is the ultimate goal.

And one of the emerging ways in which to make this happen is to add DCB into the mix. For digital content and VAS sales this is a no-brainer, as it works already and is quick and easy to do. However, moves in Europe to make DCB a tool for buying physical goods too (see page 1 and 4) opens this up still further.

THE COOKIES CRUMBLE

AI is also driving a change in search and performance marketing, which telemedia is also set to be impacted by. Cookies are crumbling as a means of garnering data, so brands, service providers and merchants are having to rely on other ways to gather data.

Many retailers and other customer facing platforms – be they B2C or B2B or B2B2C – have a wealth of first party data and many are starting to use that to develop their own media networks, selling advertising on their own sites. This has become the beginnings of a new trend among large retailers, which are creating their own retail media networks to capitalise on this. For VAS providers this is like affiliate marketing on steroids, giving them access to well segmented and analysed first party data. It might be more expensive than ‘traditional’ affiliate marketing, but in theory it could well be much more accurate.

This is also being compounded by AI’s role in search. Gone are the days of consumers putting in key words into search engines. Now we all type in questions –often very specific ones, such as “what are the best sunglasses for playing golf in the Bahamas” –rather than looking for a brand. This has a profound effect on how all companies can have their offerings discovered, making ‘search’ a long-tail business, not one that relies on who can pay the most for key words.

This – which will be the subject of a special Google-backed session at Telemedia8.1 LIVE – is going to be something that anyone looking to generate traffic needs to be aware of and something that is going to totally reshape the marketing of telemedia entertainment services. Again, this relies on AI.

And there you have it: AI is no longer a thing we need to talk about, it is the bedrock on which the whole sector will soon be operating and it is what will power a revolution in data management, marketing, messaging, advertising, search, traffic generation, customer services and probably even authentication.