Contextual AI Enables Advertisers to Craft Personalized Stories: Zenith’s Adam Hancox

In a fragmented media landscape, advertisers face significant challenges in delivering personalized stories to consumers. However, contextual AI offers a powerful solution by allowing advertisers to stitch together a wealth of data and context from various sources. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Adam Hancox, SVP of Precision at Zenith, says he is excited because “we can utilize a lot more signals than we ever could before”. Getting Granular with Context “So how do we take all the wealth of data and context that lives online and in a variety of different kind of places and actually stitch that all together and make something that’s a bit more nuanced and a bit more ready for advertising today?,” Hancox asks Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein. While first-party data is valuable, contextual AI can be particularly beneficial for advertisers who struggle with data ownership, such as FMCG clients with offline conversions. “Contextual AI allows still those advertisers to take in complex signals, rich data sets and build a story around that rather than necessarily just having to rely on their first party data,” Hancox explains. Leveraging AI for Resource Management and Data Stitching Agencies often find it challenging to manage resources and stitch together data from various sources. But AI can handle much of the heavy lifting, such as scoring inputs and managing data systems at scale. “The ability to kind of do that at scale is super, super exciting,” Hancox says. Contextual AI can significantly improve the relevance of advertising in connected TV (CTV) environments, where understanding video context is particularly challenging. “AI … enables us within CTV to really drive a lot more of a contextually relevant experience than we could before because we’re previously just limited by what we had access to,” Hancox explains. Democratization of AI and New Use Cases Looking ahead, Hancox is excited about the democratization of AI in advertising, with companies providing more insight into the decisions made by AI systems and allowing advertisers to influence those decisions. He also anticipates the discovery of new use cases and ways of operating as the industry continues to evolve rapidly. “I think that just being in an industry where you’re seeing rapid growth and … new use cases, new ways of operating, just new challenges, I think is super exciting,” Hancox says. You’re watching ‘The Power of Context: Driving Attention to Intention in a Privacy-First Era,’ a Beet.TV Leadership Series, presented by Seedtag. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.