Big impact in one month for AAA
An early pilot user of Adobe’s “AI as a service” approach is AAA Northeast, which used it in March to deliver a 28% increase in lead generation for its auto insurance business while reducing advertising spending 16% for the month.
“Our tech stack is primarily Adobe,” said Lisa Melton, senior VP of marketing at AAA Northeast. “And so when they came to us and asked if we wanted to be part of the pilot, we were like, absolutely. It’s every marketer’s goal to make sure your dollars are going where they have the biggest return.”
The AAA Northeast insurance business that was in the pilot uses digital display, search, connected TV, linear TV and a small amount of postcard direct mail, Melton said. Adobe’s AI MMM analysis led her to shift money out of linear TV into display and search.
Melton hopes to continue to testing the AI MMM tool on other lines of business, perhaps including membership acquisition, which has more direct mail in the mix. And she’s now incorporating the Adobe Experience Cloud into her tech stack.
Adobe previously had an AI attribution tool, but in conversations with marketers found that they wanted ROI analytics solutions that cover other media that attribution can’t, including offline cookieless media and social media walled gardens, said Monica Lay, principal product marketing manager for digital experience at Adobe.
Marketing mix modeling can analyze results from those media, but historically took six to 12 months to set up initially and three months to deliver reports on an ongoing basis after that, Lay said. That doesn’t help marketers who want to know how to spend incremental dollars—or cut budgets—within a current budget cycle, she said.
Pressure to deliver more for less
“We’re noticing in customer conversations pressure on senior leadership to deliver more for less,” she said. “We’re seeing budget cuts across marketing spend, but there’s still pressure to deliver the same revenue targets.”
Liz Miller, VP and principal analyst of Constellation Research, who’s tried the AI MMM tool, said she really likes it as “a way of accounting for all that data that can come in as a giant tsunami that no one can really manage. This starts to bring a new layer of what I refer to as decision velocity, which is about making not only good decisions, but making great decisions faster.”
Miller also believes the tool, as part of an Adobe service suite, could open marketing mix modeling to a much wider range of marketers who simply couldn’t afford it before. “Media mix modeling has been cost prohibitive for a lot of organizations,” she said.
Gerry Murray, research director for marketing and sales technologies at IDC, sees Adobe’s move as “an inflection point” for intuitiveness and simplifying how marketers can use models that drive decision-making.