IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator expands to OTT
May 4, 2021
IBM has confirmed the expansion of its AI technology IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator for OTT and video, designed to help marketers move beyond contextual relevance alone. Accelerator aims to leverage artificial intelligence dynamically to optimise OTT ad creative for improved campaign outcomes at scale, not dependent on traditional advertising identifiers. While compatible with most streaming platforms, IBM is partnering closely with programmatic and converged video solutions specialist Xandr to help scale adoption of Accelerator.
Originally designed for display advertising, IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator now also brings AI-driven capabilities to video and OTT campaigns. It uses IBM Watson AI to process and action real-time data signals and to dynamically assemble ads to help brands improve campaigns and time-to-value three-fold:
- Accelerator takes manual work out of dynamic creative setup. Creative assets such as different music tracks, video sequences, voice overs, and end cards for video, are organised and fed into Accelerator.
- Accelerator leverages AI to predict and generate impression-level ad variations. It uses Watson Machine Learning to analyse cookieless data signals to predict and subsequently assemble a customised video creative for each impression based on the likelihood of a consumer converting against a KPI.
- For OTT, the KPIs span video completion rate (VCR), various brand site actions and app installs.
All these capabilities can help marketing teams to test and derive audience insights from a multitude of different creative variables to improve campaign performance.
“Brands continue to follow their consumers to OTT and CTV, especially now as streaming audiences grow across all age groups,” notes David Olesnevich, Head of Product at IBM Watson Advertising. “However, brands are too often faced with creative resource constraints, fragmentation, and measurement and frequency challenges. The market is in need of advanced technology to help deliver optimal creative at scale, and IBM sees AI as the solution. Accelerator is designed to help brands make their campaigns effective, perform against business goals and derive measurable results and insights. All at scale – which requires working together with industry leaders. Using Watson AI, marketers can now develop personalised OTT creative for each user and ultimately help improve campaign performance over time.”
“The fragmentation of media consumption habits in an evolving identity landscape underlines the need for intelligent, data-driven technology solutions,” adds Doug Hurd, Head of Corporate Strategy and Business Development at Xandr. “Xandr and IBM’s first-to-market capability will power more relevant ad experiences in Converged Video, Connected TV and OTT environments for brands, publishers and consumers alike.”