Artificial intelligence (AI) is reimagining how machines can help humans. It’s changing the game both in the business world and the advertising industry. So much so, that 41 percent of marketers saw an increase in revenue growth and improved performance when using AI in their marketing campaigns. Discover 3 ways you can optimize your use of The Trade Desk's AI, Koa™, to get more out of your campaigns.
Although artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time, after the release of ChatGPT at the beginning of 2023, AI quickly became a buzzword. The sophistication and the pace at which we’re reimagining how machines can help humans is what makes AI a game changer in today’s business world, including for the advertising industry. According to Statista, 41 percent of marketers saw an increase in revenue growth and improved performance owing to the use of AI in their marketing campaigns.
At The Trade Desk, we understand that AI can create efficiencies and improve performance for you, which is why we continue to invest in our AI technology. Recognizing that humans and machines both have tasks that they excel at, we aim to strike a balance between human expertise and machine capabilities. We empower you to focus on strategic activities that can grow the business while our AI technology handles the minute complexities — analyzing robust data sets, finding the most relevant audiences, surfacing data-driven insights, and making informed, user-driven campaign optimizations.
Koa™, our AI, is the culmination of years of research, development, and innovation. We first launched it in 2018 with the goal of creating an AI that acts as your copilot, that truly understands and adapts to your unique needs. Over the years, we have continued to iterate on its performance possibilities, and to that end, our recent Kokai launch marks a significant milestone in our ongoing journey toward delivering exceptional value through AI-powered advertising.
Fun fact: Koa is a reference to the strength and resilience of the koa tree — a native tree of Hawaii. This is the wood that the first surfboard was made from.
3 ways to guide your AI to help you get the most out of every campaign:
1. Data-driven decision-making
Koa is capable of ingesting and analyzing vast amounts of data, providing you with even better insights to help you save time and spend deliberately. With the latest upgrades, Koa can optimize toward more dimensions than ever before — like ad group or inventory. You can provide guidance and allow the AI to focus on extracting actionable insights and identifying trends. To guide and enhance Koa’s performance even further, you can create a “seed” based on your existing knowledge about your most loyal customers. This seed serves as a reference point, enabling Koa to surface the most relevant audiences, strategies, and inventory that align with your goals and are driven by your first-party data.
2. Real-time optimizations
You can employ Koa to identify optimal ways to engage with your audience that align with your key performance indicators (KPIs). The goal could be achieving incremental reach, spend, engagement — or all three. Koa can efficiently optimize toward all three KPIs automatically. Koa continuously monitors campaign performance in real time, allowing for pivoting in response to scenarios. With a cost-saving feature that evaluates and predicts the optimal bid rate, Koa can also save you from overspending in first-price auctions, helping you potentially win bids at the lowest price. And this is only the tip of what Koa can optimize automatically.
3. Audience targeting and segmentation
Effective audience targeting is table stakes when it comes to digital advertising; however, knowing who your valuable audience is and how to target them isn’t always obvious. To that end, Koa can help you understand which consumers you should target or create a way for you to expand your reach to valuable potential audiences. Koa can also evaluate consumer behavior and preferences to create similar customer profiles and segments for you to activate on. It will then surface a relevance score throughout the platform so you can easily see which of these profiles and segments are most likely to perform best based on your seed data. Whether you want to identify your perfect customer or target beyond your known consumers, Koa can provide valuable guidance without imposing hard limitations.
The future of AI
AI holds immense potential for marketers seeking to maximize the impact of their campaigns, and these are only a few examples as to how AI can create efficiencies for you. As AI continues to evolve and improve, it is slated to become an indispensable tool for ongoing optimization. With your AI copilot, Koa, you can drive real business outcomes with the power of data-driven decision-making, real-time optimizations, audience targeting, and more. Embracing Koa in your advertising strategies can enable you to stay ahead in a rapidly changing landscape, and help you unlock new levels of efficiency, effectiveness, and value.
Contact your account manager today to discover how Koa can empower your advertising.