INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightDentsu AegisImage caption
Audrey Kuah says her firm is trying to teach ad copy programs to be more
creative
Machines are now writing advertising copy as well as basic news reports, but are their efforts any good and can
they be taught to be more inventive"Have a suite stay" read an ad for a hotel offering all-suite rooms
A neat - if obvious - pun you might think
But what made this ad noteworthy was that it was created by an automated copywriting programme developed by Dentsu Aegis Network, the
marketing giant.The firm launched its natural language generation algorithm last year to increase output after changes were made to Google's
advertising system, explains Audrey Kuah, the firm's managing director.The programme creates 20 to 25 full ads a second in English and
is "trained" by feeding it thousands of the kind of ads it is meant to produce, she says.But what caught their eye about this ad was that it
Image copyrightDentsu Aegis NetworkImage caption
Dentsu Aegis Network's automated copywriter, launched last year,
creates 20 to 25 full ads a second
Google's "cost-per-click-basis" advertising system, whereby the cost of an ad falls the
more it is clicked on, encourages clients to play it safe, says Ms Kuah, making the ads rather pedestrian
The algorithm couldn't learn to be more creative based on such a back catalogue of humdrum copy
"We got quite fascinated by how we inject this concept of creativity," she says
So they began to "feed" the algorithm with editorial headlines from travel articles and idioms to see if it could learn "more flowery"
language."Our ambition is to train this AI [artificial intelligence] copywriter to learn how to inject a little bit of that human
creativity, which today is taken out of the search advertising system because it may not be so readily rewarded," she says.'Heart-warming'
copyThe idea of making AI more human-like and inventive is already happening to a certain extent in China.Retail giant Alibaba, for example,
enables merchants on its e-commerce ecosystem to dictate the tone of the language when using Alibaba's AI-generated copywriting service, a
company spokesperson tells the TheIndianSubcontinent.On the Taobao shopping site, for example, merchants can choose between descriptive
"short-title" copy, more promotional "selling point" copy, and more emotional "heart-warming" copy.One heart-felt ad for a hoodie read: "A
windbreaker is enough to withstand the autumn wind in England"
The AI copywriter learns from millions of existing samples and can generate 20,000 lines of copy a second in Chinese, the spokesperson
says.Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Alibaba chairman Jack Ma at the Taobao Maker Festival in China
Its merchants want cheap, personalised ads
While the copy created is not necessarily perfect, the service makes life easier
for the many, smaller merchants on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, which do not have the resources to do a marketing push themselves."A single
product might require up to 10 versions of copy for different advertising formats, like posters, web banners, product pages, and event
pages," says Li Mu, director of Alimama Marketing Research and Experience Center
Alimama is Alibaba's digital marketing arm."Many merchants, and especially smaller ones, lack the marketing expertise or resources
We aim to solve this problem with easily-accessible and user-friendly technology." Challenges Companies generally welcome the greater use of
AI, says Parry Malm, chief executive of Phrasee, an AI-powered copywriting firm, headquartered in the UK.An AI-generated email subject line
for a Virgin Holidays campaign continuously outperformed a human-written one over a testing period, he says."Shop the sale - don't hang
around, book today!" proved more popular than the human-written "There's still time to book that dream holiday for less".Image
copyrightLucy Williams PhotographyImage caption
Phrasee boss Parry Malm says his firm creates copy that is consistent
with a brand's "voice"
"Ongoing testing resulted in a revenue increase of several million pounds for their email campaigns
- which Virgin Holidays has confirmed was a direct result of using Phrasee's AI technology for email marketing," says Mr Malm.But the
scope of AI can be limited and making it more "creative" is not without its challenges.Ms Kuah says the Dentsu Aegis algorithm sometimes
gets confused when you give it new information."It will start to go haywire," she says
"You will suddenly have things that don't make sense appear
So it's a little bit like teaching a wayward dog that doesn't want to sit."Image copyrightPhraseeImage caption
Virgin
says Phrasee's software can sometimes produce more adventurous ideas than humans
Phrasee meanwhile seeks to avoid what it
calls "simplistic emotional tagging" altogether, says Mr Malm
Instead, it tries to differentiate itself by allowing clients to create AI-generated copy that adapts to the "voice" of a particular brand
through a "bespoke language model"."The traditional approach for many marketers and providers has been to tag language with certain emotions
- 'happy', 's ad', 's cary' - but such an approach is problematic," argues Mr Malm."It not only limits the language available to use but
is highly susceptible to human error and prejudice
In other words, it's not scientific."Image copyrightGetty ImagesImage caption
Old-fashioned advertising copywriting
wasn't always renowned for its creativity
While the use of AI in advertising copywriting is still very niche, such
automation is widely employed in the selling and distribution of digital ads, and increasingly, in journalism.Broadcasters in Russia and
China have recently introduced robot presenters, for example."The adoption of AI is growing significantly among advertisers with the
increasing use of mass marketing," says Venkata Krishnan Seshadri, industry manager for information and communications technology at market
research company Technavio.More Technology of Business"In 2018, over 40% of advertisers used AI for analyzing their target audience
This is expected to increase in the coming years, as numerous organizations are utilising their AI capabilities to streamline their
marketing and sales process."The bottom line is that if AI produces better responses to adverts than humans manage to achieve - and at lower
cost - marketers will jump at the chance to use it
Follow Technology of Business editor Matthew Wall on Twitter and Facebook
