Salesforce Report: Ad Spending Strategies Face Acid-test; Spotlight on CX, Web3 and AI

1. 4 out of 10 Media and Entertainment Companies Would Decrease Ad Spending in the Next 18 Months
2. An Increase in Employee Productivity Biggest Benefit of Adopting Automation
3. Web3 is Now Part of Ad Spending; More Focus on Improving Data Taxonomy, AI and Analytics to Fuel Better Customer Experiences

The next 18 months would be an acid-test for decision makers in the digital-first organizations. According to the latest Salesforce report, 39 percent of the industry leaders may decrease their ad spending to overcome ongoing macro-economic challenges. Despite skeptical future toward ad budget, there would be no slowing down in adding new revenue streams like Web 3 to reshape customer expectations. Almost every organization is investing in automation and AI tools to offload pressure of rising inflation and slowing economy. Salesforce reports a growing onus on AI and Automation capabilities for churn analysis, predictive intelligence and content production.

Here are the key highlights of the Salesforce report stating the role of adding new revenue streams and investing in automation/ AI for better ROI from the existing digital advertising campaigns.

Operating Budgets Continue to Rise

Despite tight economic conditions and contraction in customer budgets, there is no pulling out of the technology investments and operating strategies. 64 percent of the business leaders agree their operating budgets would continue to rise; only 44% state that their priority is to invest in operational efficiency.

Only 35 percent of the respondents are likely to maintain their current budget (30%) or decrease in future (5%). Almost every other business leader would invest in technologies (51%) to improve efficiency, while 40% would increase their hiring budgets by adding more employees in their department.

Process Automation is Important; Manual Processing Still Dominates Advertising Sales

A majority of the business leaders agree on one thing– the role of automation in improving experiences within and outside the organization. Apart from the obvious enhancements in employee productivity, automation of business processes improves both customer as well as employee experiences. 41 percent of the leaders cite the benefit of running their automated digital campaigns to improve customer retention across channels. The highlight of this report is the way automation has been promoted as an enabler and augmentative capability to enhance employee productivity. Automation, when done correctly, not only expands value-adding activities but also accelerates innovation focused at customer satisfaction.

However, a large volume of work is still completed manually, including advertising sales (58%), content production (57%) and churn prediction (39%).

Implementing AI at the Center of Existing Data Management Strategies

Parry Malm, CEO at Phrasee, an AI-powered content platform for marketing, has weighed in below: 

“Advertising is one of the industries that is talking a lot about how AI will affect the way they work, from coming up with ideas for ads to creating visuals. While AI might take away some jobs, it can’t replace the creativity and thinking of humans right now. Sure, AI can be a helpful thinking partner or starting point. Teams can use it to generate loads of content, but how do they know if it’s any good? Or that it’s safe and free of bias or plagiarism?

That said, AI will keep getting better, so the industry needs to adapt. It’s certainly a major shift in the way things can be done and, in such a fast-moving environment, it doesn’t hurt for advertisers to get on the train now rather than later, especially as AI is helping to automate some parts of the ad campaign process that previously were time-consuming. Investing in AI and deep learning models will help generate and optimize the best, safest content to drive better engagement and lifetime customer value – which will help advertisers and marketers reach their business goals.”

Though 47% of the customer data remains siloed, there is immense opportunity for media and entertainment companies utilizing AI capabilities. AI and machine learning help brands create the perfect moment of truth and discoverability with CDP-fed analytics and content.

 

Organizations can build an empathetic customer experience management with AI-fed CDP.  These systems use unified data platform for analytics and segmentation to improve customer support and loyalty with high-level integrations across the entire technology stack.

Creator Economy and Web 3 Emerge as Revenue Streams: Videos and Audio Slide in Popularity

Currently, video content may have a strong presence in the advertising spend. However, 39% of the consumers felt that investing in videos isn’t worth anymore, especially when the budgets are tight and returns are slowing down. The satisfaction scores with other types of content such as audio, digital publication and gaming subscriptions also fared poorly compared to video. In such challenging times, two positives emerged– Influencer-driven user-generated content and Web3. In fact, 38% of media and entertainment professionals surveyed by Salesforce have a fully-developed and clear Web 3 strategy to match current demands of the customer.

Christopher Dean, SVP and GM of Communications, Media & Entertainment at Salesforce explained the urgency with which media and entertainment companies should differentiate themselves with AI and automation, even if it means increasing their operational budgets to meet customer experience benchmarks in the next 18 months. Generative AI and real-time analytics are key to drive operational efficiencies and deliver better CX, especially when advertisers are exploring new revenue streams such as Web 3 and influencer marketing for their businesses.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]