It’s absolutely crazy how advertising has evolved just over the last 20 or so years alone. I remember growing up watching Batman Beyond and DragonBall Z among many other favorite cartoon/anime shows. I’d have to always sit through about 5 minutes of quite irrelevant commercials during the breaks, anxious for the show to continue its next bit.

Fast forward to 2020 and a lot has changed. Not only have we shifted from television to cord-cutting alternatives – such as YouTube – for entertainment, but an interesting phenomenon has emerged, despite these services also serving commercials.

I actually enjoy the commercials

Sometimes. Okay, maybe slightly more than sometimes. But what does this mean? Well, obviously, it means targeted ads work. Based on our behavior on the web, cookies store data points which are then sold to marketing agencies to properly gauge and classify our interests, and then serve us generated ads based on our interest, thereby increasing the likelihood of us getting more engaged to those ads and eventually becoming more likely to make a purchase.

That’s pretty cool, but also pretty dangerous (we’ll get into this in a later thought). What I find interesting, though, is that ads are increasingly becoming more relevant. While this is expected behavior of any new technology, this particular technology is close to becoming mind blowing. What I mean when I say this, is, if in the year 2010, I found 20% of YouTube ads interesting (all hypothetical examples and numbers here), and decided not to skip them, then today, in 2020, I’m finding about 40% of them interesting enough not to skip them. Does this mean it will take an additional 30 years to reach 100% accuracy in targeting if the technology improves 2% per year?

Probably Not

I find the accuracy of ads on YouTube, Instagram, Sponsored Amazon Listings etc., to be improving at an exponential rate. I already find myself, sometimes, becoming shocked at how well these advertisements know exactly what I want to buy – or what I will want to buy, thanks to integration of multiple new technologies such as Internet of Things, which can generate an ad later at night based on a vocal conversation I have with a human sitting in my car about things that interest me earlier that morning.

Conclusion

Not-so-slowly but surely, the lines between our interests, and our acceptance/engagement to targeted ads served to us will converge.

I expect (again, hypothetical but still on a serious note) that within 5 years – by the year 2025 – targeted ads will reach a new norm. A 100% successful “wow, holy smokes I don’t want to skip this ad, and actually will buy this good/service” targeted ad norm.

And just what will not only help drive, but exponentially accelerate IOT and Data Science integration to bring marketing success rates to 100% precision at an unimaginable pace?

Artificial Intelligence.