“From strategy to screen, AI is helping marketers cut through the chaos and focus on what really matters — great thinking, not grunt work.”

Chapter 2

AI is changing how media is done

Media planning and buying can be a messy place where ideas get lost and briefs blur, the creative direction fragments, measurement becomes murky and execution gets bogged down with emails, vendors and reporting.

In last week’s post, I talked about how we all want to go from idea to done without any fuss. So how exactly do marketers navigate through all this messiness? AI tooling up to tidy up

There are already powerful AI tools out there that reduce friction, process data, surface patterns, and streamline choices. Let’s mix it up a bit from the usual Silicon Valley suspects and consider how an advertiser might use some of the homegrown ANZ products to enhance their productivity.

In any business there are years of market research, campaign results and sales data locked away in old decks and forgotten spreadsheets. Before anyone can brief a new campaign, this clutter needs sorting.

Aether can sweep through the archives, reshaping them into dynamic summaries and live reports that gets to a starting point faster so the real thinking can start.

MagicBrief acts like the strategist on the team, laying out the evidence of what has worked in the past. By analysing millions of ads, it might show that Australian audiences respond more to authentic lifestyle content than to glossy product-only spots. The brief becomes sharper and cleaner, built on proof rather than assumption. Then comes the creative studio, usually knee deep in discarded drafts and endless versions.

Springboard. AI can act like a creative provocateur in the room. Instead of starting from a blank page, it sparks new ideas by remixing prompts, perspectives and cultural cues. For a marketer staring down the messy middle of campaign development, it can quickly generate alternative ways in, helping teams overcome creative blockage, explore fresh concepts and consider different creative angles, all at pace. Creativity is a human superpower, but Springboard can help spark & focus it.

Amplified can separate what works from what doesn’t. For example, by uploading variants of video ads and testing them against campaign goals, marketers can see where audience attention peaks or drops and get recommendations on hooks, edits and story arcs.

Even with our well-crafted brief, validated creative and optimised ads, execution logistics can be extremely messy - content coordination, reporting and versioning in particular.

Autohive can help brands by building agents that automate those tasks. They create and deliver performance reports automatically, transcribe content, generate social posts, route content pieces and optimise websites for search and LLMs.

These are just a few examples. Used in a targeted and well planned way, AI has the power to tidy up the mess in the middle to make planning easier, decisions clearer and execution faster.

No going back We all know AI is here to stay. But it isn’t just streamlining the work, it’s changing the way the work itself is being done:

1. From linear to iterative - instead of long planning cycles and lives dates that keep being pushed, AI enables advertisers to get things out there quickly and then to iterate and improve through continuous loops of insight/test/adapt/learn.

2. From manual to automated foundations - Time spent wrangling data, drafting variations, or crunching models is shifting to machines, allowing teams to focus on more valuable strategic and creative work.

3. From siloed to integrated - AI tools connect research, creative, media and measurement into a more seamless system reducing the friction between hand offs.

4. From reactive to proactive - With AI surfacing weak signals and predictive insights earlier, strategists can make moves ahead of market shifts rather than after them.

AI in Outdoor Advertising How can this technology be applied specifically to digital outdoor advertising? There’s a still a lot of physical posters out there but rapid screen digitisation is now making things possible that weren’t before. Most digital screens are connected to marketplaces, buying and selling technology is reaching parity with online media, screen software is advancing rapidly and share of time as standard in ad delivery is guaranteeing availability.

How does AI enhance and augment into a digital first outdoor world? Read more about that in Chapter 3 - What’s next for AI and automation in outdoor advertising?