The digital landscape is rapidly evolving, and AI-driven automation is at the forefront of this transformation. Recognising this shift, dentsu has partnered with Meta to leverage cutting-edge AI, data and experience to revolutionise media and brand activation.
This collaboration, inspired by the Japanese concept of ‘Henshin’ (transformation), is integral to dentsu's commitment to innovation that delivers impactful results for clients, rooted in the philosophy of Sanpo Yoshi: benefiting people, business and society.
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to media buying, here are dentsu’s five top tips for planning transformative paid social campaigns on Meta platforms:
- Get the basics right
- Conduct a thorough account audit to review current targeting, remove flagged interests and evaluate the necessity of granular targeting.
- Consolidate ad sets to avoid overlaps, utilising Advantage+ targeting expansion.
- Test buying strategies
- Experiment with various components of the Advantage+ Suite and Meta's bid multiplier tool. This reduces audience segmentation while maintaining a nuanced bidding strategy within a single ad set.
- Explore Generative AI creative opportunities, testing variants to effectively engage different audiences.
- Embrace advantage detailed targeting
- Utilise this feature, Meta’s AI delivers ads beyond detailed targeting if it predicts better performance.
- Leverage Advantage+ audience
- This optional feature allows Meta's advanced AI to continuously evolve the campaign audience based on past conversions, pixel data and user interactions, creating broader audiences for more efficient results.
- Explore Advantage+
- Advantage+ shopping campaigns focus on lower-funnel objectives, similar to Google's Performance Max.
- Advantage+ creative leverages AI to enhance creative performance.
What's the impact?
Between May 2023 and February 2024, dentsu conducted 19 experiments across various advertiser verticals and regions to evaluate the efficacy of Advantage+ shopping campaigns versus standard setups. With 98% confidence, it found that allocating at least 50% of the campaign budget to Advantage+ typically outperformed traditional campaign configurations. The median Cost-per-Result decreased by 9.3%, and Advantage+ enabled campaigns were the winners 79% of the time.
The importance of tools
Utilising Meta's conversion API for robust data connection is now essential. Dentsu's ecosystem of proprietary tools, developed with support from Meta and its business engineering team, go further and enhances its modern approach to campaign execution, including:
- Performance: Pipes is dentsu’s intelligenceand performance excellence suite, offers automated solutions across the campaign management process, ensuring account hygiene and activation excellence.
- Commerce: Commerce Navigator assesses the robustness of an advertiser's commerce execution and identifies growth opportunities on Meta.
- Creative: Dentsu’s award-winning AI technology, Artemis, predicts the most effective creative variant from more than 100,000 campaigns, reducing wasted media spend by 8-15%.
- Data: Dentsu’s planning teams use Merkury to build audience profiles and then push to Meta, allowing for more accurate audience targeting.
- Measurement: Scenario Planner, dentsu’s cookie-less measurement solution, integrates multiple signals with rigorous statistical modelling to provide media mix and brand equity insights, essential for planning and forecasting media investment.
Embracing these tools with a focus on privacy-enhancing technologies ensures the highest quality data inputs, driving superior business outcomes and keeping clients ahead of the competition.
AI is not a competitor, it’s a partner
Meta's advancements in automation and AI are opening new opportunities for dentsu and its clients. Dentsu is embracing the evolution of digital marketing – moving away from the legacy approach of niche precision targeting – and instead leveraging efficiency at scale, iterative machine learning, personalised creative at scale, dynamic data-driven journeys, and holistic measurement.
As ‘human’ marketers, we must view AI not as a competitor but as a powerful partner that enhances our expertise and human inputs. Our future success depends on embracing AI, leveraging it to our advantage, and staying ahead in this transformative landscape.