IBM Watson Advertising Accelerator is expanding beyond display ads and jumping into the OTT video space with an eye toward using AI to optimize OTT ad creative.
IBM said it’s compatible with most streaming platforms but that it’s partnering closely with Xandr to drive faster adoption of Accelerator. The platform will tap into IBM Watson to process data and to dynamically assemble ads to help brands improve campaigns. That means creative assets such as different music tracks, video sequences, voice overs, and end cards for video, are organized and fed into Accelerator.
IBM said Accelerator will be able to predict and generate impression-level ad variations and use machine learning to analyze data signals to predict and subsequently assemble a customized video creative for each impression based on the likelihood of a consumer converting against KPIs like video completion rate (VCR), various brand site actions and app installs.
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"Brands continue to follow their consumers to OTT and CTV, especially now as streaming audiences grow across all age groups. 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," said David Olesnevich, head of product at IBM Watson Advertising, in a statement. "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 personalized 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," said Doug Hurd, head of corporate strategy and business development at Xandr, in a statement. "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."