“From Mad Men to Machines: How Has AI Transformed Digital Advertising?”

Everyone is talking about AI – but HOW should you use it?  What platforms work best for digital marketers?  Let’s do a deep dive into how you can practically use AI in your digital marketing.

Key Takeaways from this article:

• How AI can be used effectively in targeting digital ads

• Which AI platforms can be useful in creating digital ads and marketing materials

• Using AI to generate summaries and key insights into digital campaign reports

• The best ways to use AI to be more efficient in your digital marketing

Artificial Intelligence. What comes to mind when you read or say that phrase? It’s been a trendy buzz word that has turned mainstream in the last decade, but we’ve seen it in science fiction movies for closer to a century. It got me thinking, when did we start using AI?

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) formally began in 1956 with the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, where the term “artificial intelligence” was coined. Coincidence this aligns with the “Mad Men” era, as depicted in the hit TV drama that follows a top advertising agency in the 1960s? I don’t think so. Can breakthroughs of machine learning be a genesis for human learning to level up? I think so!

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, refers to computer systems or machines that can perform tasks that typically require human brains to accomplish. These tasks include learning, reasoning, recognizing patterns, and more.

The advertising landscape has evolved dramatically, and AI is at the center of this transformation. At Vici, we utilize AI to free up time for our most valuable assets—our people—so they can focus on strategy, creativity, and value-added tasks.

AI in Targeting: Smarter, More Efficient Ads

Just as Don Draper and his team used data and intuition to craft the perfect campaign, today’s AI-powered targeting does the same—only at an exponential scale. AI-driven targeting ensures that ads reach the right consumers by analyzing real-time engagement data. Instead of relying solely on demographic or behavioral targeting, AI continuously optimizes ad delivery based on live interactions.

With AI, your ad starts out broadly and quickly hones in on the most responsive audience by analyzing:

• Who is clicking and converting
• What devices and browsers they use
• Which ad creatives perform best
• The websites and apps they engage with

This means AI catches potential customers who haven’t actively searched for a product or shown behavioral intent yet, but still have a high likelihood of converting. What? How? Say that again…

Because AI is ingesting millions of pieces of data every minute, it catches the people who haven’t:

• Shown an interest in what you sell (what Behavioral targeting lets us do); or
• Haven’t started looking for it yet (what Keyword targeting lets us do)

But they still have a high likelihood of being a prospect.

Vici has a deep bench of digital products, six of which directly integrate AI as a targeting tactic (and can include On-Site Visit Tracking to client’s business):

• Display – Display ads go across all devices, appearing on websites or apps.
• Native – Native display and video ads go across all devices and match the look, feel and context of the website or app where they are seen.
• Video – Video ads play before or during the content someone has clicked to watch and appear on thousands of websites or apps, across all devices, and are skippable or un-skippable depending on the publisher.
• OTT / CTV – Our Over-The-Top (OTT) video ads are embedded into programming content people stream on their internet Connected TVs, un-skippable inventory only.
• Social Mirror – Social Mirror ads look like your social media display, video, or stories posts but appear on other websites and apps and run across all devices or can be done as OTT on Connected TVs.
• Online Audio – Audio ads served to targeted online listeners who are consuming audio content across all types of devices.

Across all of the above products, Vici ran nearly 400M impressions with AI targeting during 2024 alone! Removing the non-click products from the average (CTV and Online Audio) we saw average CTRs from 0.42% on the “low” end and 1.36% on the high end. These impressions yielded nearly 75,000 conversions!

AI in Digital Ads Creative: The New Art Directors

In the Mad Men era, the secret to successful advertising was a mix of psychology, creativity, and consumer insights. Today, AI helps enhance, rather than replace, that same creative process. AI can assist in:

1. Copywriting Assistance – AI tools like Jasper AI and ChatGPT generate compelling ad copy, headlines, and calls to action. Vici partners can also request an AI generated Ad Copy Report, which provides industry-specific insights into effective messaging.
2. Visual Ad Creation – AI-generated visuals allow advertisers to tailor images to specific demographics, just as a Madison Avenue creative team once sketched out print ads tailored to their target audience.  DALL-E a gpt from Chatgpt is one of our favorites for this.
3. Video Content Generation – Tools like Synthesia and Sora enable the creation of animated video ads, making it easier than ever to produce high-quality video content without a full-scale production team.

The key takeaway? AI is not a replacement for human creativity but a powerful tool to enhance it. The Mad Men of today still need to infuse storytelling, emotion, and brand strategy into every campaign—AI just helps them do it faster and more effectively.

Standard Large Language Model (LLMs) AI platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT are excellent AI resources – but it ALL DEPENDS ON THE PROMPT.  You have to be very specific – pretend you are explaining something to a 5 year old.  For example, you could prompt: “write a 2 sentence ad that describes and summarizes what this company does: https://vicimediainc.com/”, and this is what it returned: “”Vici Media is a cutting-edge digital advertising agency specializing in data-driven marketing strategies that drive real results. From targeted programmatic ads to advanced analytics, we help businesses maximize their online reach and engagement with precision and expertise.” Pretty cool.

You can also use AI platforms for creating visual ads and generate eye-catching images exactly as you describe, to make your client’s ad stand out. For example, AI tools can create interesting graphics that you can add to presentations and proposals, tailored to the client. ChatGPT does this well, as does Microsoft Designer  which is free.

An example prompt for creative might be, “create a compelling graphic that communicates a unique selling proposition for https://vicimediainc.com/” (notice I keep using the website urls in my prompts instead of the spelling the name to avoid confusion) and what I got was nice, but it was very “big city”. So I said, “can you revise it to make it more small, local market?” and it was much more fitting! But it still felt off. So, I followed that with this prompt: “can you make the color scheme a bit more unique and add families with young children?” The key is to keep rinsing, washing, repeating, and remember that the AI is only as strong as the human brain prompting it.

You can also use AI tools to create video ads and video content for social and use on client websites. Many of these tools allow you to enter your own text or generate text based on a business website’s content and then add relevant images. Can you imagine Don Draper with a cigarette, cocktail, but instead of a typewriter, prompting AI for taglines? The volume his agency would have been able put out would have been exponentially higher for certain.

More great tools for creativity (Don Draper approved):

• Video AI generator Synthesia. It has video avatars that will read the ad copy. It is free to try but then you will need a paid plan.
• If you want to make a static image animated or transformed into a video to punch up presentations, you can use Sora. You will need a paid plan.
• If you create an image or video that has a watermark you can use the site Unwatermark which is a free service and will remove it.

Here’s a video we created with Synthesia: