Marketers urged to target virtual assistants in AI challenge

PHD APAC is part of global communications planning and media buying agency PHD.
Stephenson said recently that PHD had a clear point of view that technology was very important as it changed the way people behaved. One of these is AI, and one of the ways it is changing consumers’ behaviour is through VPAs.
In the consumer sphere, VPA systems have already made their presence felt in two main places. One is in smartphones and the other in the home, such as Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa in the Amazon Echo hand-free speaker or the Google Home speaker powered by Google Assistant. 
The interesting thing about VPAs in the home is that they can wirelessly communicate with a whole range of compatible smart home devices while in turn all of them are connected to commercial retail networks. 
Stephenson said VPAs could also help their users make purchasing decisions, and their use in this regard was expected to become the norm worldwide within five years. 
He added that while people still enjoyed making their own purchasing decisions on what he called “high-interest” products such as cars, they were more willing to outsource the decision to buy “low-interest” products such as toothpaste or detergent to a VPA.
And ad-media and marketing agencies cannot avoid this technological trend, which is disrupting their industries.
Stephenson said that when people voice-activated a VPA to help them buy products, they tended just to mention category of products, such as “Can I get more detergent?” This poses a huge challenge to advertisers, as they will have to make sure that VPA algorithms choose the brands of their clients first.
“That’s the job of the media agencies. The media agencies’ job will be to make sure that the VPA chooses our clients’ brands first. We’re not marketing to the people – we’re marketing to the machine. We’re convincing the VPA to choose our clients’ brands,” he said.
 He suggested that the most effective way to achieve such a goal was for advertising and marketing agencies to design their own algorithms to help their clients’ products be picked up by VPAs, as the only things that can negotiate with VPA algorithms and influence them are other algorithms.
 He said ad-media agencies would also need to begin hiring people from more diverse backgrounds, from data analysts to e-commercial specialists, to ensure that they are leveraging the new possibilities this AI technology presents. 
PHD Thailand managing director Nuvee Pongsathidporn said: “PHD and [its holding company] Omnicom Media Group are very clear on how all the technology such as VPAs, AI, chatbots etc will influence how we work in the near future. As a result we have invested a lot on not only recruiting new skill sets but also creating new specialist products and services such as programmatic [systems] and Annalect to provide data and technology solutions and consultancy to our clients. 
“We also worked alongside with our tech companies and partners to explore the boundaries of these technologies. More details of the technological projects cannot be disclosed at the moment.”
 Nuvee said the gap between the offline and online worlds was quickly closing, influenced by a new world of data and technology. The narrowing of this gap could not be more visible than in Thailand, which has seen unprecedented advancement in technology and a fast adoption of new technologies in everyday life. 
“To ensure we remain at the forefront of this development, PHD Thailand is committed to embracing a daily exploration of the latest technologies and collaboration with industry leaders and innovative partners.” 
He said that as AI and algorithms were replacing traditional tasks and functions, many marketing roles might be recast. But the shifts in technology also create new roles, such as data analytics, social-media management, and marketing optimisation.
PHD Thailand on June 15 held a seminar titled “PHD Predestination: Where We Are All Heading” with a focus on how the new technological trends shape the media, advertising and marketing worlds. Stephenson and Nuvee were among the keynote speakers at the event.