Published on

January 14, 2025

Artificial Intelligence
eBook

The Power of Audience Experimentation in Media Agencies

Learn how agencies that embrace a more experimental mindset and expand their measurement frameworks will be able to deliver even more effective campaigns.
Akkio
Artificial Intelligence

The Power of Audience Experimentation in Media Agencies

Modern media agencies have evolved to prioritize agility and continuous optimization in their campaign strategies. Once a campaign is launched, the emphasis shifts to real-time measurement, learning, and adjustment. This involves reallocating budgets from underperforming channels to higher-performing ones, refining partner selections, and fine-tuning ad timing and placement — all with the goal of maximizing the campaign’s effectiveness and ensuring the budget delivers the desired outcomes.

However, one area of campaign execution has remained somewhat static: the audience. Despite heavy optimization in areas like channel selection, budget allocation, and partner choices, the audience definition tends to remain largely unchanged throughout the lifecycle of a campaign. The audience profile that is defined at the start of a campaign is rarely tested or optimized in the same way as other elements, such as media channels. 

This leads to a natural question: Why hasn’t audience experimentation caught up with other aspects of campaign optimization?

Barriers to Audience Experimentation

There are two primary reasons for the stagnation in audience experimentation:

  1. Measurement and ROI Challenges
    One of the main reasons for the lack of audience experimentation is the challenge of measuring its ROI. When shifting budgets between channels or trying out new media strategies, the impact on ROI is easily measurable. Agencies can directly track how moving money from one channel to another affects campaign performance. This clear line of sight makes it easier for agencies to experiment with and optimize media plans. But when it comes to audience targeting, measuring ROI is not as straightforward. How can agencies definitively determine whether changes to audience segments are making a significant impact on campaign success? Without a strong measurement framework, audience experimentation often gets sidelined.
  1. Operational Bottlenecks
    Another reason audience experimentation has lagged is the operational complexity involved in dynamically adjusting audiences. Traditionally, audience creation involves a data scientist working with large datasets to build specific audience segments. This reliance on specialized teams can create a bottleneck when agencies want to experiment with different audience definitions quickly. The process of building and refining audiences is often slow and cumbersome, which limits the ability to iterate and optimize audiences in real-time.

Moreover, agencies often face a knowledge gap regarding which data elements are most predictive of a high-quality audience. While agencies use a wide variety of data sources to build audience profiles, not all data is of equal quality. The lack of clarity about which data elements yield the best results for audience targeting further complicates experimentation.

Breaking Through the Bottleneck: AI-Powered Audience Optimization

This is where Akkio comes in. Akkio offers a solution that helps agencies break through these barriers and embrace a truly dynamic and experimental mindset when it comes to audience targeting. What makes Akkio stand out is its ability to democratize audience building, making it faster, easier, and more accessible for agencies to experiment with different audience definitions.

Akkio is an AI-powered platform designed to streamline the process of audience creation, allowing media agencies to build, test, and optimize audiences at scale. By using AI to automate the process of audience segmentation and analysis, Akkio enables media planners to dynamically adjust their audiences throughout a campaign. This not only accelerates the pace of experimentation, but also ensures that audience definitions can evolve in response to real-time campaign data.

The Benefits of AI-Powered Audience Building

Akkio’s AI-driven platform allows agencies to tap into the power of automation and machine learning, providing a faster, more efficient way to manage audience creation and optimization. Here’s how it works:

  1. Speed and Efficiency
    Building and adjusting audiences becomes much quicker with Akkio. The platform automates the complex data processing required to create accurate, actionable audience segments. Agencies can go from having no audience defined to having an optimized, data-driven audience in a matter of minutes. This drastically reduces the time spent on audience creation, enabling more frequent and granular experimentation.
  2. Dynamic Audience Testing
    Akkio makes it possible to test multiple audience definitions at once, comparing them against one another to see which performs best in real time. This ability to test and optimize dynamically throughout a campaign gives agencies a powerful tool to increase campaign efficiency and effectiveness.
  3. Data Democratization
    One of Akkio’s key advantages is that it democratizes access to audience-building tools. In traditional agency setups, only data scientists or highly specialized teams would have the expertise to build audiences. Akkio allows anyone within the agency to engage in audience building without requiring advanced data science skills. This opens up the opportunity for more experimentation and a more collaborative approach to audience optimization.
  4. Transparency and Traceability
    The platform also ensures full transparency in how audiences are built. Every query is traceable to the original data sources, allowing agencies to maintain control over their data and know exactly where the information is coming from. This is especially important when agencies are working with first-party data or using proprietary data sets.

The Role of Data in Audience Experimentation

Akkio’s platform isn’t just about making audience creation faster; it also empowers agencies to better understand the quality of their data. With AI and machine learning, agencies can explore a wider variety of data sources, from social listening and consumer purchase patterns to first-party data, and assess which elements are most predictive of audience success.

The platform’s flexibility enables agencies to rapidly experiment with new data sets, try out different combinations, and gain a deeper understanding of which data points matter most. This opens up new opportunities to experiment and test data in innovative ways, helping agencies stay ahead of trends and optimize their campaigns with precision.

A Future-Ready Approach to Audience Optimization

To fully unlock the potential of AI-driven audience experimentation, agencies will need to embrace a new mindset. Agencies must recognize that audience optimization is just as critical as channel optimization and that measurement frameworks will need to expand to incorporate the impact of audience changes on campaign performance. This means thinking beyond simple budget shifts and starting to track the ROI of different audience definitions in real-time.

As agencies shift towards a more experimental, data-driven approach to audience building, they will also find that they are better equipped to handle data negotiations with clients. With the ability to test the real-world value of data elements quickly, agencies can move beyond traditional volume-based pricing models and create more dynamic, performance-based conversations with data vendors.

The Future of Media Agencies: A More Experimental and Agile Model

AI-powered tools like Akkio help agencies overcome the traditional barriers to audience experimentation. By streamlining audience creation, democratizing access to data, and enabling rapid experimentation, Akkio opens up new opportunities for agencies to optimize their campaigns in real time. 

As agencies embrace a more experimental mindset and expand their measurement frameworks, they will be able to deliver even more targeted, effective campaigns that align perfectly with their clients' business objectives. This new era of audience experimentation isn’t just about optimizing media — it’s about optimizing the audience itself.

To learn more about smarter audience building and to see Akkio’s audience capabilities in action, check out our recent session from 4A’s Afternoon of Analytics & Reporting.

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