IAG: Marketers must end the blind faith in martech and adtech

Marketers with blind faith in adtech and martech are at risk of putting advertising in front of people who were going to buy anyway and waste time and money on useless personalisation activities. This was the message from IAG's director of media and technology, Dr Willem Paling, and one-to-one marketing director, Jason Ridge, who took to the stage at CeBIT 2018 to discuss where and when to use AI-enabled martech, and why it's vital to set the right goals around it. Ridge said all consumers expect personalised experiences, and marketers can throw data into AI platforms to ensure the content coming out of their tech engines is personalised. But IAG is starting to ask if it really needs the technology to achieve relevance. "No one will say delivering customers' personalisation isn't a good thing. However, Amazon has hundreds of millions of products, and Facebook has millions of advertisers, and given the opportunity to put a product or content in front of customers, they are left with a dilemma of which product or content to put in front of which customer. So of course it makes sense to use AI or ML to do this," Ridge said.