Big Data, Data Mining and Machine Learning in Advertising

The advertising industry has been pretty much on the ball when it comes to exploiting audiences and corporations in the name of spreading a brand message. However Google has eaten their lunch when it come to advertising revenues and the sole reason is that Big Data is the most effective way to target a demographic, and Google is the king of Big Data. Google knows what people want to buy from the searches that the consumers do. They have the stats on what makes someone click, when they click, what best to make them click, where they are predicted to live and pretty much everything that an advertiser wants to know to reach their audience.

The laggards in the industry are the big and small advertising agencies and brokers. I can predict that the biggest, most profitable players that will be big in advertising in the next 5 years just by examining who is adopting data mining, big data and machine learning in the advertising field.

Advertising has been bought and sold using a very large degree of granularity. For example, its a slam dunk that if you want to get a brand message across, the quickest way is to buy a Super Bowl ad. But not everyone is a Fortune 500 company that can afford an ad in the ... the ... well .. Super Bowl of Advertising.

So how will advertising agencies monetize themselves and create huge and diverse revenue streams in the very near future?

Here is an example of how it will work. With Big Data and Machine Learning, the advertising industry can operate like a futures exchange for media placement. They will craft the brand message. Big Data and machine learning will not only tell them what the most effective demographic will be, but it can do it with a fine degree of granularity as well.  Advertising will be more goal oriented. If an advertiser wants to find new markets in a new demographic, Big Data and Machine Learning will tell the advertiser where to do it. It will also outline the optimal time, the optimal vehicle, the optimal message and the optimal leitmotif of the brand message. If they want to expand their market penetration with their current target demographic, they will know where to do that as well.

Finer degree of granularity will mean real time media monitoring with a control room full of Bloomberg-like stock market screens. If Reddit is trending with a million hits per hour with a content classification linked to the 25-35 year old demographic, it may be time to buy a spot from a ad placement futures database and pop the content onto the site within a couple of minutes. Advertising space will be bought in bulk and traded in smaller elements like a commodity exchange in real time.  It is media-adaptive advertising.

If CNN has an exclusive breaking story and millions are flocking to their site, the viewing demographic can be machine-analyzed in real time (a Bayesian probability, again gleaned from millions of training epochs) and a highly effective ad can be placed that will have an instant ROI or return on investment that would be stratospheric compared to a regular buy.

Amazon or Google will develop a real time ad engine platform (RTADS --- or they will buy one from guys like me), and it will be the next big thing. App developers will be paid to incorporated RTADS (Real Time Ad Delivery System) so that trending, topical media events can be exploited with embedded, dynamic advertising based on who is consuming the media.  As a matter of fact, the next Bloomberg millionaire will be the optimal ad monitoring station for advertising insertion. It is a function that is unknown today, and tomorrow the developers and maintainers of the system will have a coherent job description for it..

Machine Learning can predict good wine years and classical vintage. It can predict which films will win the Oscars. It can guide robots and munitions. Once the advertising agencies see the harnessed power of Big Data, Data Mining and Machine Learning, they will convert quickly, and eventually those players operating in the old paradigms will die. It is only a matter of time.

It's a great time to be alive if you are into Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining and Big Data.