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In recent years, we have been hearing a lot about the digital transformation in media. Most often, we find these conversations coated with a ‘not-so-happy’ kind of a vibe when it comes to addressing the importance of digital trends, especially from those in mainstream legacy media. This thought thatʼs prevalent is that it seemingly eats into the budgets earmarked for the conventional media. On the other hand, this sounds strange to the younger professionals who are majorly exposed to digital media.

Immanuel Raj Kumar, of Sense 9 Media Solutions, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions provider and business growth partner in Chennai, informed BE, “Quite frankly, the digital media has gotten all the attention and in fact more than what it should by these conversations amongst the conventional media fraternity. Having said that, it is absolutely inevitable to ignore the power of technology and the surging opportunities created in the digital space. It is a matter of fact that we should start accepting this change happily by finding ways to make the best use of it in every aspect of our businesses.”

Digital space and technology for a new world

Kumar added, “As media marketers, the best possible way to look at this scenario, if some of you haven’t yet, is to find out how best we can use the powerful digital transformation and its nuances to our advantage. It is important to open our minds to be aware and fathom a world of opportunities as we are looking to enter a post Covid-19 era in business. Truth be told, the way we did things are not going to be the same. It is only intelligent to expect a big change in the way businesses are conducted the world over. To accept and adapt is the key.”

Vishnu Prasad, a data scientist and an AI expert, told BE, “In the current day and age, AI with its incredible abilities, is impacting every aspect of our lives. It has come to stay in many forms in our mobile devices, chatbots, self-driving cars and ‘who-knows-what-next’. AI is undeniably the most powerful tool that is designed to understand consumer behaviour in terms of their habits, needs, wants, preferences, activity patterns, aspirations and more.”

Through its incredible ability to analyse data, learn from it and to be trained to decode complexities, AI is revolutionising the way businesses are done across industries such as healthcare, retail, banking, in the financial sector, education, image management & election campaign engineering and indeed media marketing. AI and machine learning are incredible tools that help us in every aspect of business and marketing strategies in ways that most of us would have never thought of.

AI & machine learning as game changers                  

Kumar feels that our fundamentals always remind us regarding how well we are equipped to identify the audience, understand the markets, create the winning communication patterns, choose the best possible platforms to reach and influence them in decision making. While these fundamentals remain the same, our approach to master these are now subject to change. Prasad added, “Here is an opportunity to master that approach through AI & ML as it helps every media professional with razor-sharp precision, higher efficiency levels, much deeper analysis, greater data mining, effective performance tracking, all through the valuable insights generated by progressive learning algorithms. It helps us understand the audience better and to provide improved user experience. The use of these tech-driven solutions helps us in effective marketing, increases our overall productivity through result-oriented strategizing patterns based on data-driven analytics and most importantly results in better ROI.”

The internet or the ‘digital space’ as we call it, is a complex matrix for consumer behaviour patterns in the form of data sets that cannot be possibly cracked by human intelligence alone. We find ourselves compelled to look for solutions to effectively analyse these data, from creating the right strategy to successful execution of business plans.

Kumar added, “Specific AI tools that are created for the media industry helps in behaviour analysis and it also enables us to approach our campaign strategy/plan with unbeatable predictive analytics. Media intelligence and social listening tools used in measuring, managing and magnifying the reputation of a brand or a corporate identity in an increasingly connected world becomes very critical. Predictive analytics helps to spot the trends before theyʼre trending.”

Going forward

Many experts are predicting that the effect of Covid-19 will fuel the next big wave of innovation that will shape businesses differently for the decades to come. Keeping in mind that a pandemic impacts us in biological, psychological and economic dimensions, it results in some definitive patterns in the way we humans behave and do things. Based on these facts, e-commerce is a model that is perceived to fare well in the post Covid-19 era. The best use of technology and the digital space is already proving to be a winning e-commerce enabler.

In the healthcare industry, given the current crisis, the best of the medical minds and top research houses around the world are using AI to search for solutions. Interestingly in politics, election campaign engineering is increasingly turning to the effective use of AI driven insights that enables media monitoring, social listening, social media management, PR analytics, and other influencer engagement abilities.

Kumar concludes by saying, “It is clearly evident that apart from media marketing, various other industry categories will increasingly look for tech-driven solutions to stay ahead in the game. We are looking at a big change indeed after this great pause for a better future.”