How AI powers the way brands build ideal mobile audiences

In today's brand marketing ecosystem mobile is front and center. The massive disruption of TV consumption, shifting from linear to streaming, combined with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digitalization, has solidified mobile as the most powerful and stable medium for marketers. According to App Annie's State of Mobile 2022 report, mobile use is growing at a record-setting pace. Consumers worldwide spent 3.8 trillion hours on mobile devices in 2021, and advertisers spent $295 billion trying to reach them. This year, ad spend will climb to $350 billion as mobile devices remain inseparable from their owners. The challenges facing mobile marketers To facilitate advertisers' growing interest in mobile audiences, marketing technology has stepped up, advancing rapidly to meet the moment. However the influx of piecemeal solutions has caused more noise and fragmentation for marketers who are expected to stay ahead of current trends to keep their companies competitive. Perhaps one of the most complex challenges marketers face is reaching precise audiences with the highest chance of conversion, and without overspending. Return on ad spend (ROAS) is a key performance metric for any marketer, yet measuring ad spend across platforms, and quantifying the associated business performance, require integrating various tools, leveraging different methods of collecting and analyzing granular data. Artificial intelligence (AI) has proven its value across many other facets of digital marketing: programmatic ad delivery, creating unique customer experiences, optimizing ad bidding strategies and creating data-backed insights. However, the process of audience-building and segmentation, one of the most crucial stages in marketing, has been left out in the cold. If marketers can't reach the right audience, every effort will fail. Browsing thousands of indexed audiences to find the right users is a tedious manual task, yet finding those users is vital when creating intelligent data-backed marketing campaigns. Reconstructing that audience repeatedly on every advertising channel is frustrating for teams and an inefficient use of time. With media budgets on the line, marketers can't afford to waste ad spend or miss opportunities to connect with new or undiscovered audience segments. While brands might have a good sense of basic audience descriptors, such as gender, age, geolocation and language, refining that audience is challenging. Hundreds of thousands of segments exist as data can be sliced in a million different ways. Can we really expect marketers to be able to make connections and ferret through all of those segments to find the nonobvious ones that are interconnected? While employing that nuance is a must, it’s not addressed by most of today's mobile marketing technology. AI and NLP merge to uncover real-time mobile audiences Start.io developed Maia (Mobile AI Audience), the industry's first audience-building platform built strictly on natural language processing (NLP) and AI to address the needs of mobile marketers and simplify audience selection. With the single-frame platform, brand marketers can begin the audience exploration and building process by using general keywords such as "sports fans,” or specific queries such as "recently engaged smart home device users in New York, aged 25-55." Maia's AI-powered algorithm springs into action, sifting through thousands of pre-defined segments. Based on the real-time analysis of user behavior from Start.io's trusted first-party data, Maia recommends broader and more-refined segments, many of which hold massive potential but were unknown to marketers previously. With thousands of combinations at their fingertips, brands can fine-tune or expand their audiences to find and engage their ideal consumers with accuracy and at scale. Marketers can then activate that audience on over 20 media exchanges (demand side platforms, or DSPs) with a few clicks, eliminating the time-consuming and repetitive task of building the audience on each platform. That process saves hours which can be reallocated to more productive, business-critical work. Armed with their ideal audience and the power to reach any segment of Start.io's 2.4 billion global users, marketers can launch highly targeted, high-converting campaigns that deliver results and build brand equity. About Start.IO Start.io is a mobile marketing and audience platform. Start.io (formerly StartApp) empowers the mobile app ecosystem and simplifies mobile marketing, audience building and mobile monetization. Start.io’s direct integration with over 500,000 monthly active mobile apps provides access to unprecedented levels of global first-party data, which can be leveraged to understand and predict behaviors, identify new opportunities and fuel growth.

How AI powers the way brands build ideal mobile audiences

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