AI media planning: 6 Expert Tactics You Can’t Ignore

It sounds insane, but whenever I think about the future of AI media planning, I’m struck by the 1999 Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man. OK, fine, whenever I think about artificial intelligence (AI) in general, I have the same problem. But let me explain.

In the film, the robot Andrew is a domestic appliance, purchased finally to help with household chores, but quickly demonstrating to his oblivious owners that he can do more and that he wants to become a human.

(Obviously, this is extreme – I don’t think ChatGPT is about to appeal to Congress for human rights any time soon in the manner of Andrew.)

However, on this particular day, with AI on the daily news agenda, this specialist marketing creative can’t help but think about the future, both professionally and personally.

In a 2022 survey by Pew Research, 55 per cent of Americans reported using AI on at least a daily basis.

According to IBM, 42 per cent of enterprises are also using AI once a day, and another 40 per cent are finding new ways to fit it into their workflows. AI media planning is an opportunity. It is a big one.

Why Use AI for Media Planning

Well, why do we use AI for anything?

According to a Forbes Advisor survey, 64 per cent of businesses believe AI can help them improve productivity – and AI media planning is no exception.

This will help the services that use AI in media planning to be more effective in every aspect and to be more productive.

Benefits of AI Media Planning

Increased Efficiency

Have you asked a question of a chatbot? How long did it take them to answer? If you are like most people, I’m willing to lay odds that your answer is less than a minute. AIs are operative anywhere that data must be processed quickly, analysed, and responded to.

It’s little wonder that, according to research from HubSpot, almost all marketers (90 per cent) say that AI and automation ‘enable them to spend less time conducting manual tasks (80 per cent), focus more on the parts of their jobs they like better (80 per cent), and focus more on the “creative” part of their jobs (79 per cent).’

For media planners, this means we’ll have more accurate reports on market conditions sooner – two things that I’ve always found to be notoriously time-consuming.

Faster Optimization

The point is that, as more information (= data) keeps flowing into the algorithm, it adapts. In the case of a robust algorithm, if you give it or access to your campaign performance data, you click the mouse to adjust recommended outputs and, hey presto, optimisation.

Lower Costs

At the same time, because it is more efficient, executes faster strategic optimisations, and is better at small tasks, it can potentially shave off unnecessary costs in your media-planning budgets.

For example, if you’re hiring a freelancer by the hour to copy-edit your ads, using an AI tool such as Grammarly could help get rid of, or at least cut, such hours.

For my former clients who often work with slim budgets and/or small teams, these savings can make a big difference.

Increased ROI

This sounds obvious, but it bears repeating: the lower the cost, the higher your return on investment. What business wouldn’t welcome that?

Limitations of AI Media Planning

Now for the flip side. AI may be wonderful for media planning, but it’s far from perfect.

Data Quality

Quality data is the greatest concern with any use of AI. Artificial intelligence, by nature, relies on data it’s fed by users and the internet. And, with full disclosure, a lot of that content is rubbish.

That’s fine as long as you know what to look for in the snip of text you’re given But there are instances where AI-given answers might be deemed funded propaganda, coordinated review, corrupted research or even hateful garbage (perhaps a self-promotional online review service). This can be very dangerous since AI is being used and misused all the time by market or platform researchers involved in media planning.

Plagiarism

Compiling information from many sources comes with the risk of plagiarism.

After all, AI-written text is necessarily derivative: it comes from things that already exist. As such, there are always going to be synchronicities with works that exist already, or (even more likely) with the work that comes before or after yours.

How would you feel if a Facebook Ad with the exact same headline or the exact same image ran against you? That’s a lousy look.

Bias

‘AI is biased [because] society is biased,’ says my teammate and senior marketing manager at HubSpot, Flori Needle.

‘Because society is prejudiced, much of the data already has that bias in it. So, if you wanted an image generator which generated images of CEOs, and if you had learned it from say, the historical employment in companies (skewed towards males), you might get only images of white males.’

Unfortunately, this is something I uncovered first-hand.

And bias is so pervasive that Google had to halt human images in its AI Gemini.

Stereotypes and bias are definitely not things you want in your creative. Be careful.

Privacy

As we said above, AI learns from everything you type into it. While AI can truly save time for you, and produce relevant work, you often have to share intimate details to get reasonable results, as well as AI still being unregulated.

It only means it won’t be shared with people other than those to whom you’ve just handed over your information. ‘It’s not necessarily like a bank vault. Non-disclosure agreements don’t grant any special security.’ In other words, it doesn’t mean for sure that your shared information won’t be passed along. It might. So if your secrets are something your competitors would covet, you should still probably keep them to yourself.

How to Use AI for Media Planning

So, armed with the above list of pros and cons, what are some practical and powerful ways that you can apply AI to media planning?

Best AI Media Planning Tactics & Methods

1. Fix spreadsheet formulas (e.g., Budgets).

Take, for instance, my teammate Basha Coleman, who is HubSpot’s principal marketing manager on our Integrated Marketing Campaigns team and someone who works in the creative realm of media planning. She uses spreadsheets as a prime opportunity to further enhance her AI-driven workflow.

‘I use system:AI to solve small problems. For example, there’s a spreadsheet formula that isn’t working.’ 125 words

Rather than spend 30 minutes to an hour looking up and understanding why a spreadsheet formula works the way it does, I can have Chat GPT give me the answer, then come back and figure out the basics of why that answer is correct when I have the time to do so.

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This little hack can save a hell of a lot of time for your media planners when they’re doing budget spreadsheets or calculating performance stats.

Pro tip: The bot Ajelix provides a suite of AI and business intelligence modules to help you leverage your data and your sheets. If you’d rather not fuss with prompting the bigfoot that is ChatGPT, this specialised suite might be just what you need, especially because it has a free plan.

2. Complete campaign research.

AI can also be beneficial for distilling information during campaign research.

Coleman added: ‘If I can input a question such as: “With 10 media platforms in B2B, what is the integrated campaign to generate revenue?” I can then tweak the input and receive the inspiration I require.’

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It can be much easier to collect information if you harness the power of an AI tool rather than a search engine to answer those precise questions. When you enter a search term using an AI, it collects that information for you without the need for page-flipping. Your question, your source, your answer.

Pro tip: The more information you can share about your previous campaigns – including details about performance or outcomes – the better-equipped the AI tool will be to return more bespoke, informed results. If working in a tool, create a spreadsheet including performance data and campaign overviews to upload.

3. Suggest platforms and placement based on data.

Facebook, Instagram, Spotify Retargeting, Google PPC. Ad or media placement: which should you spend your limited time and money truly investing in?

You lean into the data, and AI will help you crunch those for a quicker conclusion, or make suggestions for a specific action.

Upload your spreadsheet to ChatGPT and give it a go. If you’re ads run via your HubSpot Portal, use ChatSpot.

Tip: If you’re not a strong prompter, certain AI media planning tools were built to handle exactly this type of question: ReBid’s AI.

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These you ask by explicitly querying the assistant for ad positions: ‘Where should I put ads?’ ‘What type of ads?’ ‘I have these users – what platforms and device type do you recommend?’ Also use the tools for targeting suggestions and overall strategy.

4. Get inspiration for copy.

Ad copy, anyone? Writing is our second most frequent use case, even though 96 per cent of the time the content isn’t up to snuff for publication.

(Confession: I could’ve told you that even without the report.)

That’s fine. As a content marketer of a decade, I’m not advocating that you copy and paste the first content a tool provides; however, you can definitely use it to:

Get rough drafts for social media captions

Brainstorm headlines for ads

Draft outreach emails

Make these results your starting point – use what the tool gives you, and then set aside some time to use it to create your own final deliverable with your own brand’s style and personality.

Pro tip: HubSpot’s Free AI Content Generator can help you in these situations.

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5. Create original images for ads.

From the perspective of ad creative, artificial intelligence can produce original images and video to the highest standards in less than a minute, based on a brief text description.

Some of my favorite AI image generators include:

You can use these assets in social media ads, traditional print, and emails.

Hint: Once you have written your prompt, make sure that the tool you use has an example of an image you like to work with. The more detail you give the quicker you will get it.

Numerous tools, like Firefly, allow you to upload ‘references’; even if they don’t, it’s likely you can share links to be analysed.

6. Personalize your content.

And now here’s some good news: the AI to which I am here referring is less about the unstoppable generation and more about algorithms and automation. But every bit as momentous.

Brands that excel at personalisation, the consultancy Deloitte Digital says, increase conversion rates by at least 20 per cent over their less personal peers, while increasing customer engagement and average order value by 30 per cent.

And of course – we didn’t know about that until it was discovered – it is a feature. People are responding to their names! You know, I get so many recommendations from Spotify about new music that I like. I’m not rude to my Spotify program.

You can generate a similar feel-good vibe with your advertising and media if you add content personalisation.

What does that mean for media planners? Address each member of the audience by name, or tailor the ad for where someone is, what they just did, who they are and any other personal details.

Through HubSpot’s personalisation tokens (and other similar tools), you can automatically drop CRM information into the body text of site pages, landing pages, or marketing emails.

The key, of course, is to figure out what you can subtly infuse into your media communications to make your message even more relevant, valuable and interesting for your audience.

Data privacy pro tip: Even though people like personalisation, they don’t like it when they have to go on a witch hunt to figure out how you know that their favourite midnight snack is Oreos and peanut butter.

Getting this right requires finding the sweet spot between personal and creepy. Stick with information that’s already public or that has been freely shared with you.

The best media planners are (em)powered by AI.

As there is quite a lot of buzz about jobs being lost to AI today, it’s possible that the AI media planning tips that we shared in this article make you also a little bit anxious. They needn’t, however.

Data-crunching is a speciality of AI. What it isn’t good at is the human experience, your emotion and, crucially, your insight. Rather than resent AI – keep it away from media planning! – embrace it.

Here are six tips to help you harness AI to speed your reporting and to improve your performance as a media planner.