You probably recognized the reference to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in the title, so you can probably already guess its connection to this week’s article. The topic is artificial intelligence, which is now making its way into television in the form of a new advertising format. RTL is the first media group in Germany to use this new format, which is called “Contextual Video Tagging”.
Advertising on TV is of course nothing new, but CVT is a completely new algorithm that simply-put works with speech recognition. It is used, for example, in the TV show “Das perfekte Dinner” on the German Vox channel. Commercials are broadcast whenever certain words are used that are associated with a grocery store chain like “Rewe” or are sold by a grocery chain, i.e. “cherry tomatoes”, “fresh” or “healthy”. The system recognizes the term using AI and sends out the ads in segments positively associated with these.
Artificial intelligence, however, has been used by TV broadcasters for some time. At first, AI was only used for the online TV streaming service TV Now. Ad Alliance has also already been using AI for its own channels for 2 years now. Frank Vogel, marketing manager for Ad Alliance, confirmed that contextual video tagging was very well received by their audiences.
In the marketing world, AI plays an important role, as it is no longer the case that advertising is blindly displayed to the masses. On the contrary, target groups are examined ahead of time so that advertising can be individually tailored, reaching precisely those users who are most important to companies.
As of now, the percentage of revenue generated by this new advertising format is not yet particularly high, and the economic significance is also rather low, but it is still considered a format that could become increasingly important in the future.
In addition to contextual video tagging, RTL is also using “emotion-based targeting”. This format is based on emotions such as anger, curiosity, or joy instead of valuing particular keywords. Customer intent and desire are also tracked so that these together with customer emotions are compared and contrasted; then a suitable ad spot is chosen. Companies then book the corresponding emotions for which their commercial should be broadcast.
And although digital advertising has survived the current crisis comparatively well, it is important for them to be independent of the mega-platforms such as Google and Facebook. According to the German advertising industry association’s (ZAW) president Andreas Schubert, the integration of artificial intelligence can help companies achieve this.
