AI's Role in the Partnership of Data + Creativity

Blog - June 30, 2023

AI's Role in the Partnership of Data + Creativity

Rachel Gantz

Managing Director Proximic by Comscore The merging of data and creativity has long been a north star at Comscore. Now, with the help of artificial intelligence technology, the intersection of art and science is expanding to include new possibilities such as helping marketers shape or create video, images and text content, or predicting a consumer’s digital behavior. While marketing executives gathered in Cannes expressed differing levels of excitement around the possibilities of AI, there are undoubtedly hurdles and concerns that come along with the opportunities. AI presents the potential for a paradigm shift in how the advertising industry reaches and measures users, as well as how ad creative is generated. At the same time, there is some anxiety surrounding the risks associated with job security, misinformation, copyright violations and much more that need to be taken seriously. If there is one thing marketing executives seem to agree on it’s that with great power comes great responsibility. The dialogue at Cannes delved heavily into the need to harness the power of AI in responsible ways that benefit the industry ecosystem as a whole.

Comscore’s use of AI

Comscore’s programmatic targeting division, , uses AI to power its targeting solutions, including its Predictive Audience offering, which originated from the need for marketers to continue effectively reaching their target consumers in a privacy-safe manner that combats compounding signal loss. At Comscore, we see the shift towards consumer privacy and data protections as a net gain for the industry and a clear opportunity to use our technology, including AI, to play a role in this evolution. The foundation of the technology used to create Predictive Audiences stems from:

1. Comscore’s extensive owned datasets of more than 1 million people who have double opted in to be part of its digital panels
2. A sophisticated contextual engine backed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence and deep machine learning models

The result is an ID-less, privacy-friendly way to reach an audience that will drive outcomes for a brand, without the scale limitations that come with leveraging IDs for targeting. During many AI-focused panels at Cannes, panelists surfaced concerns around the right applications for AI and the associated responsibility. AI models are only as good as their inputs, so at Proximic, we fuel our machine-learning models with the top-caliber datasets from Comscore’s measurement business and combine these with a contextual engine that understands over 350,000 proprietary topics and processes 3-5 trillion requests each month. AI drives our pattern profiling technologies which in turn produce superior content categorization – an increasingly important industry element as focus turns to better accuracy and transparency with video and streaming content. AI drives our ability to transform directly observed behaviors across search, website visitation, streaming and TV viewership into performative scaled programmatic audiences. In an industry that is often driven by the mantra "done is better than perfect", we at Proximic put a greater focus on the methods used in our products rather than a simple checkbox of capabilities. We believe deeply in the responsibility to ensure human QA processes along with leveraging machine learning and AI technologies that drive scale. With these elements at the core of what we do, it has enabled us to strengthen targeting accuracy, performance, and reach while avoiding the unforeseen side effects of inherent bias, over-blocking content or inaccurately overreaching users that unchecked AI can produce. Beyond using AI in all of Proximic by Comscore’s targeting solutions, Comscore is continually exploring how AI and other emerging technologies support its mission of providing the most complete view of audiences across platforms and devices. The future of data in an effective cross platform world requires new innovations and ways of thinking, and that includes the need to responsibly harness the power of AI to tackle the industry’s biggest challenges. It is at this critical intersection between the massive datasets that fuel our digital world and the creativity and pioneering thought that powers new technologies where the industry will experience its biggest breakthroughs. To learn more about Proximic by Comscore’s AI-powered Predictive Audience solution and its benefits for media buyers and sellers today.