How we’re using AI to revolutionise content creation and delivery of marketing assets: to meet consumer entertainment needs.

By Bea STRAUSS

Africa’s creative entertainment and film industry continues to be a dynamic space for both content creators and audiences alike. It is prime with opportunities to share and create content at a much faster rate.

As audiences’ realities, preferences and social media experiences evolve, tailored content that meets their needs while also peaking their interest continues to be one of the most valuable purposes of DStv, GOtv and Showmax, the platform brands of Africa’s most loved storyteller – MultiChoice.

Generative AI has been a creative catalyst for the Marketing team at MultiChoice in this regard. Consumer messaging and visual ads, much like broadcast content are tailored ever more, delivered faster to meet the consumers wherever they are.

It starts with understanding your audience

As an organisation whose roots are founded in keeping enriching the lives of customers, MultiChoice’s approach to creating and investing in entertainment engagement platforms is firstly rooted in localising content based on audience-driven data and insights.

If content is king, then adapting content to local contexts is queen. From Kopala Queens in Zambia and Amoanimaa’s Era in Ghana, our top series and films are steeped in creating a narrative carried by language, culture and nuances that make for storytelling that resonates with generations.

Together, products and services are used by over 23.5 million households in 50 markets across sub-Saharan Africa. Over the years, our personaliastion journey has shifted, and the demand to enrich the viewer experience in unprecedented ways has grown.

In response, we’re leading the charge in delivering engaging creative messaging and visual ads to customers in unprecedented ways. More recently, this has been through generative AI.

Partnership as a leapfrog strategy

In a groundbreaking move for the African continent, we partnered with Jivox earlier this year to revolutionise our digital marketing messaging and creative ad assets during our UEFA Euro 2024 coverage.

This pioneering collaboration has allowed the team to leverage AI to deliver enhanced marketing assets and content, enabling us to localise our offerings for our diverse markets with unprecedented speed and nuance.

Using Jivox’s platform, we created various dynamic AI images and visual ads throughout the match season, marketing an adaptable digital campaign with the changing match results that was repeatedly customised based on how our viewers and online audiences interacted with the content.

Jivox’s software integration was a game-changer for us. By feeding our audience data into the campaign decisioning process, we’ve been able to dynamically update ads multiple times in a single day, seamlessly pushing creatives into media platforms. This level of agility was simply impossible with our previous manual methods.

Generative AI, particularly through Jivox’s platform, has empowered us to iterate faster, serve our audience higher-quality content, measure performance in real time and customise ad content with unprecedented ease. It’s a true transformation in how we approach digital marketing.

Our EURO 2024 ad personalisation on digital platforms was executed in real time, and was adapted based on individual user data reaching our already established audience as well as potential viewers.

The ability to convert potential users increased [by 158 percent], with our dynamic ads in comparison to the previous year, a significant improvement in click through rate. ?Our EURO 2024 ad personalisation on digital platforms was just the beginning.

Using Jivox, we’ve seen click through rates improvement up to 3000 X of industry standards. We’ve successfully applied this strategy to other campaigns like Big Brother, football and the launch of Showmax on the rest of the continent; and we’re excited to explore even more benefits in the future.

There’s an opportunity for marketers and organisations to use AI not just to generate and replicate all creative and messaging, but to also direct it toward bolstering the overall creative process.

For us, generative AI is increasingly instrumental to the world of marketing, messaging and creativity if used for more than just a time resource – it’s a creative collaborator and enabler.

Creating your own mold

Generative AI offers our organisation the ability to be responsive in-market, and its comprehensive integration into social media platforms means that our ads are custom-made and served based on individual user data, all while leveraging AI’s ability to scale campaigns to our exact specifications with minimal manual effort.

In a continent that is home to more than 3,000 languages, we’re able to create language and region-specific creative ads that resonate with our audiences in the same way our TV and film content does.

Generative AI platforms like Jivox provide the added advantage of analysing vast volumes of data to map out the trends that can feed into marketing messaging and visuals. It’s still commonplace to serve ads that have to manually be customised to take into account core insights such as user behaviour, interests, demographics and location, but AI-driven tools and platforms can automate much of this legwork and decide who sees which creative. This is a win for marketers and consumers alike.

At the heart of creating your own mould in the generative AI space are ethical considerations that must anchor the work. MultiChoice has an AI governance policy that ensures that our agility is always at par with ethics. Our policies must move at the pace of development.

Policy and ways of working also extend to our partnerships with generative AI platforms, where it’s important that their AI models are trained on copyright-free data and where the people building and feeding the algorithms understand the importance of building models that mitigate bias.

The human touch is still needed and will be needed for some time. Even as we set new standards for highly personalised content for our audiences, it’s our partnerships with dynamic platforms in the generative AI space that have helped us deliver an enriched experience for our viewers and audiences.

>>>the writer is Multichoice Africa Head of Digital Marketing and Matt Sharratt, VP Product Marketing, Jivox ?

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