Companies with smaller advertising budgets are struggling to compete with larger players, who have been successfully capitalising on the increased e-commerce volumes throughout 2020-2021. Unique Marketing Tech solutions have emerged to provide brands of any size a fighting chance to win the social media advertising game without the need for high-end agencies, expensive data science teams or an army of creatives.
Due to the ongoing disruption of brick-and-mortar retail caused by the pandemic, e-commerce witnessed record growth with online sales going up nearly 44% and steadily increasing at the same pace for the past three quarters. As consumers became increasingly comfortable with digital shopping, the competition for direct response ads amongst brands is now fiercer than ever before, especially for small businesses.
Consequently, brands need to produce more visual content at scale to identify winning content combinations that can deliver efficient Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) metrics at scale. This usually means that, in order to uncover top performers, companies need more content, as well as more budget to A/B test it.
Moreover, recent engagement patterns in online consumer behaviour show that video is the fastest-growing ad format, accounting for 35% of all digital ad spend with yearly volume growth of nearly 30% YoY ($60 billion total). However, it is also the most expensive and time-consuming media to create.
“Small businesses struggle to compete with large teams and big ad spend that established companies can afford,” said Dr. Tadas Jucikas, the CEO and Founder of Genus AI – a San Francisco based AI marketing platform. “This creates an unfair dynamic where the more budget you have to create assets and run expensive A/B tests, the more successful you will be regardless of your product quality, positioning or its impact on the world. Our mission is to erase this divide using AI and help the best teams and products win.”
Fast-growing brands such as Sunday Citizen, Spot Pet Insurance, Cook Unity and others use Genus AI Growth Platform to ensure their creative process is scalable and the creative teams have quantitative insights generated by AI for the purpose of asset selection.
“Artificial Intelligence marketing solutions make a real difference. We are very happy about the consistency, which really stands out when you look at the Genus AI-powered campaigns. All of them exceed ROAS targets at a very similar CPA, which is never the case when we run various tests ourselves. Being able to achieve this with a small team is a game-changer for us” shared Mike Abadi, Co-Founder and CEO of Sunday Citizen.
“The Genus AI platform uses a proprietary deep neural network architecture to evaluate every component of image or video assets, evaluate and score product clips, photoshoots, user-generated content (UGC) and testimonials. It assembles thousands of ads, analyzes and shortlists the ones most likely to convert, then discards the rest. That cuts the production, data analysis, and A/B testing costs sizably, enabling brands of any size to produce and launch more effective campaigns,” Dr. Jucikas said.
The company reports that in addition to lower team costs Genus AI clients have observed up to 3 times improved ROAS and up to 30% CPA decrease on their Facebook and Instagram campaigns.
“It is about time that brands, which normally would not be able to afford highly sought after data science teams, expensive agencies, or large creative resources are able to really make an impact,” Dr. Jucikas concluded. The company is launching the self-service version of the platform on October 27th at the Ad World event with the goal to make AI accessible to everyone, allowing marketing influencers, small brand owners, and CMOs to leverage AI and confidently launch ads that convert audiences to paying customers.