Embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion can serve as catalysts for innovation in TV advertising, reshaping the landscape with the help of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) applications, according to industry experts who spoke May 22, at the Hollywood Innovation & Transformation Summit (HITS).
During the WiTH @ HITS session “Shattering the Status Quo: AI-Powered Inclusive Innovation in TV Advertising,” industry leaders and visionaries explored groundbreaking strategies and creative approaches that challenge conventional norms in TV advertising.
The speakers provided actionable insights and inspiration as they explored ways to break barriers, spark change, and redefine the narrative in reaching audiences through inclusive practices powered by AI.
Providing some context for the discussion to follow, moderator Filiz Bahmanpour, WiTH Foundation board member, said: “The whole media ecosystem is evolving and advertising is not what it used to be,” noting we’ve gone from linear strategies to digital planning, buying and measuring of advertising being on “everybody’s mind,” she said.
Alena Morris, senior director of product marketing at ad PubMatic, started her comments by noting it was “awesome to see so many women in tech in this room” and “I feel super empowered to be here.”
Next up, Halleh Kianfar, VP of product management for Gracenote inclusive analytics and contextual video data at Nielsen, said she was “very excited to talk about and share with you some of the data that we have … to help inform some of the decision making that everyone’s making and how that plays into advertising, with AI coming in to help.”
She pointed out that the TV ad she liked the most recently was the Doritos spot starring actress Jenna Ortega that aired during the Super Bowl in February. What stood out was that it was the “first time it was a commercial amplifying the Hispanic audience on the main stage because, if you think about the Super Bowl, you know the bias in advertising that exists.”
For David Thompson, founder and CEO of experience design firm Momentum Design Lab, it was an Etsy TV spot from about fall of 2020 that he found especially “inspiring.” The ad featured a teenage girl who was having a hard time fitting in because nobody could say her Asian name, he noted, adding that when she arrived home, her mother gave her a present and, in a twist, started speaking Spanish to her daughter. That was “really interesting because it wasn’t the expectation; you thought you were going to hear Japanese or potentially English, but there was the twist that there was an actual component of cultural diversity mixed in,” he said.
Shifting the focus to AI, Morris said: “When I think about the use cases of AI and [generative] AI, I have to think, first and foremost, from the buyer’s perspective, what does their workflow look like and what are all of the steps that they’re going through when they have a budget and they’re trying to promote a product or piece of content or a movie or a TV show or whatever it might be? And so, from a buyer’s perspective, they’re going through planning, they’re going through forecasting, activation, optimization, reporting, and AI actually is already having an impact on a lot of those different areas, whether that’s planning or whether it’s actually serving the ads.”
She added: “One area that we at PubMatic are particularly focused on is actually how we can shape audiences using AI. And this is all about really helping an advertiser reach the right audience with what they’re doing, the piece of content that we’re trying to target for them, or with their consumer product, or whatever it might be. With this kind of focus on audiences, one thing that we were really looking at is leveraging first-party audiences from an advertiser’s perspective, and using AI to model that out to increase scale.”
HITS Spring was presented by Box, with sponsorship by Fortinet, SHIB, AMD, Brightspot, Grant Thornton, MicroStrategy, the Trusted Partner Network, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and EIDR, and was produced by MESA in partnership with the Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business.