Personal Data in Exchange of Relevance: How AI is Masking Its Invasiveness

TRAILER

Bassem
We hate that all the applications we're using are collecting some data about us, but we are happy that we are getting a very personalized message.

Linda
AI is still at the beginning of what it can do. It will become smart enough to disguise how invasive it is.

Bassem
I see AI amazing, but stay in the background, not on the front end of the process.

Neha
Let the consumer decide. See how they react and then make your decision based off that.

Bassem
I'm not doing a campaign for robots. I'm doing it for people.

Linda
There's a lack of us actually catching up to what AI can do. What's really exciting but also quite scary is that we don't know where it's going yet.

EPISODE

Neha
HI! My name is Neha. This is Points of Growth by Yango Ads. Here we unite marketing and business people. We talk about our objections, challenges, all the fun, crazy stuff that happens in our industry. And well, today we're coming back with a bit of a focus on AI. But before we dive into that topic, I would love to introduce my guests. Today I have Linda Kender, Regional Director at MMA for the Middle East, and Bassem Yousri, Head of the Agency Department at Yango Ads. Guys, do you want to give me the most favorite question in the world? Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Linda
Hi. Well, I'm Linda, as you introduced. I am Jordanian. I have lived in Turkey for the past 20 years, and I'm in charge of the Middle East for MMA Mina. But instead of talking about who I am professionally, I'm going to tell you a couple of things about myself personally. I'm a Gemini, non-typical. I have a severe phobia of snakes, so much so that I cannot actually go to bed with switching the lights off because snakes will come out from under the bed. And my nerdy side is an unbelievable love for production. So it's a very different format of who I am, but that's me. From a professional side, working with the MMA, we're bringing marketing expertise to the Middle East and empowering CMOs to do their jobs more efficiently through technology and available marketing tools. Nice to be with you guys today.

Bassem
Nice to meet you, Linda. My name is Bassem Yousry and I'm originally from Egypt and I've been based in Dubai for the past 10 years. At the beginning I thought I want to be Mr. Engineer and I was dedicated everything for this but in reality since I finished university I've been in advertising and media industry for almost the past 17 years and the best place to find me or to have a proper conversation, either we can do it camping somewhere remotely or if you know sign language, we can communicate while diving. So happy to join you guys in some of the adventures.

Neha
Can you briefly tell us about a bit of your career journey and how it led you to focus on marketing and ad tech today?

Linda
I've always been actually on the brand marketing side. I was working in Dubai before Dubai was what it is today. And as young talent at the time were, you know, scooped up and put through a crazy mill of fast development. So I was working with at the time, app tech, it was an IT distributor with 100 vendors. So Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, who you want at the time, all the big techs. Being exposed to so many brand strategies and marketing managers, it led me into this real love of marketing. And then I started working with Jotun Paints and that was really cool. And then I had my own company. And now I basically decided that all of my knowledge about marketing from a brand marketer's point of view and working with agencies and suppliers needed to be brought together into a place where I could strategically affect the market. In MMA, we work globally with agencies, brand marketers, anyone in the marketing ecosystem to create a working environment where people are able to strive and increase their tenure even because CMOs have such a short tenure in the Middle East and globally, actually, it's the shortest C10 year. So we would like to change that.

Bassem
I started working as a designer in a creative agency, and that's why always for me, within marketing, creativity will be the key to everything. This is the core of the industry. Yes, I shifted a bit over years from advertising to media, which is more into the planning, the strategy, the tools, the measurement and everything after the journey of the creative, but I'm always advocating for creativity is the key. I started in Egypt in this creative agency, and then I moved to some media representative in the region. We represent a lot of local publishers and regional publishers and TV networks. And then I moved with them to Dubai with Shweta Group. After a couple of years, I moved to Twitter.

Neha
We're not calling it X, we're calling it Twitter.

Bassem
Yes, I'm from the old people who used to tweet. Now I'm leading the agency department for Yango ads across the MIA region, India and Pakistan. Our role is to educate people, support them, be always on top of all the trends and technology where it can help them achieve the KPI and the client's goal.

Neha
So let's talk a little bit about market specific challenges. From your perspective, what makes marketing in the Middle East, especially in the UAE, unique compared to other regions?

Linda
I think the biggest challenge for UAE specifically is the fact that you're not speaking to just one audience. Even in the past, it used to be a bit easier. There was the Arab population, the local population, the Western population, but it has extended so much since then. The UAE has been attracting investment and companies from all across the globe. And now we have so many little societies living within Dubai and reaching them has always been a challenge for marketers in terms of, you know, you only have one budget, you have one or two visuals that you have to get to them with, and it's not relevant most of the time to everyone. And the fact that it's usually regional offices that are speaking outside of the UAE, they have the double challenge of accommodating the UAE and then talking to the different countries that they are serving. For example, Saudi and Egypt cannot be compared. They're too different. AI now has changed the game in terms of personalization. So now when you need to speak to five different groups, let's say, you can send five different messages through finding out where they are with geolocations, with the data that we have and stuff like that. So it's just personalization as a total concept has changed the way marketers are able to reach their audiences. And it doesn't matter how many audiences now, it might just cost a few more creatives, but you can reach them properly without having to spend massive amounts of budgets like we used to have to in the past.

Bassem
I totally agree with Linda regarding one of the toughest parts when it comes to a market like UAE is the diversity, because we're talking about more than 150 nationalities living together. So try to segment this in a campaign that's literally impossible. Also, you need to balance between the language you're using, the tradition overall as a country and the behavior of these different nationalities. So that's really a complicated case. And on top of all of this, the UAE is a very fast moving technology. So even if you find an amazing equation on how to do this, it always needs to be updated within two to three months because what worked today will not work then. And it makes it really a complex situation for every marketeer in the region. But again, with the support of AI in personalizing, it is helping a lot in some additional layers. I can say that even when we used to target based on a broader segment, so we understand that this is a male age 35 for example a professional worker coming from these nationalities we cannot target on this anymore because even within the same segment the people are different, their interests are different, what trigger them is different. So I think with the support of AI now we're cracking this complexity and we can do more personalized messages and we can be more efficient in our media campaigns and our targeting within the message.

Neha
I think back about 10, 15 years ago in Thailand, all the advertisements you saw, it was just like, okay, for an expat, it's in English. For a Thai person, it's in Thai. If you were riding on the train, everything was in Thai. There was nothing in English. And now you're starting to see other languages come into sort of even at the airports, depending on the tourists, which countries they're coming from, those languages are being added in. So it's been fascinating to watch that transition. But coming back to that conversation about challenges, I know, Linda, you touched upon it a little bit. Before AI and personalization, what were the biggest challenges you faced in reaching diverse audiences there?

Linda
The biggest challenge was actually reaching them. The secondary challenge or problem, let's say, was reaching them with the right message. So before we even could consider, are we reaching them with the right message? It was like, how can we reach them? It was too expensive to try to reach everyone. So I remember with my budgets I used to have to prioritize who I would reach as a brand. It was isolating full sides of a marketing target audience so unless I would have a bigger budget and then I would have to fight for the different segments that I have to reach. Before we could even talk about reaching with the correct message, it was really just reaching people in the UAE specifically. In other countries, it was much more straightforward in terms of, you know, there's a couple of radio stations, a couple of magazines, a couple of this, a couple of that. In the UAE, we had at the time, and this is a good 20 years ago. We had like 30 publications that we used to have to sort of pick and choose from. And our marketing mix was based on reaching different target audiences rather than a marketing mix as we know it today. So, yeah, the biggest challenge was reaching for sure.

Bassem
I was supporting from the other side of Linda. So I was almost on the publisher and the supplier side. So we've been the people trying to collect as much as we can data and information about the audience and the proper target and supporting the marketeers with it. Also it was hard for us to understand more about the behavior and to find the sweet spot of mixing all of this with a limited budget of the marketeers and the brands. So I think it's the other face of the coin of, okay, you want the audience, you want the proper target and how we can make sure that we're delivering you the correct and the proper ones for the marketeers not to misuse their budget and get the KPIs and the result they are looking for.

Neha
Do you have an example of personalization in action? Was there a moment where AI really influenced a consumer's behavior?

Linda
When I joined the MMA, I was exposed to a very cool project that they worked on. Let's call it a cube because it has four sides. So it's the MMA, it's the industry body. Then we have the marketing brand manager, and then we have the agency, and then we have the technology, an AI personalization technology. It's called the CAP study, and it's an MMA trademarked study where the MMA and the brand marketer come together to create a brand lift through AI personalization or a call to action. The brand Shell came to us and said, okay, we need to increase our application downloads and we have some ideas about how to do it, but we would like to see which one is going to work. And it worked into our advantage completely by giving us different ways to go with targeting the audience so we had three different campaigns running and the ai machine would take these campaigns and in real time see who's creating the highest demand or download rate and then it would enhance that message in real time and shoot it further into that target audience. And it was really interesting because there was one that had a promotional side, like get one pound if you download. The other one said get 10% off on your next purchase. And the third one was to share the experience. And it was sent to the F1 audience at the time in Bahrain. And that's where it got the highest downloads. So in real time, AI understood that this is the message. This is where people are willing to engage with Shell as a brand and download the app. And they got a 140% brand lift and application download. So that was a real eye opener. And it's a really interesting way of seeing AI in action, in personalization. It takes it to a very next level.

Neha
I love hearing stories like that, where people are just like, we come together, we kind of figure out a solution. And then you just run a test. And then the results speak for yourself, right? Because what you think is going to work doesn't work, but something else works in your favor. I mean, that's definitely a

Linda
marketer's thing where, you get three, four different creatives from the agency and you have to decide which one is going to work. You don't have to decide that anymore. You don't need to take that responsibility full on. You can give it back to AI and it can help you.

Neha
Yeah. Let the consumer decide. See how they react and then make your decision based off that. best of both worlds. Bassem, from the Yango Ads perspective, how are you seeing AI and personalization being adopted by agencies and brands within the region?

Bassem
We are supporting the agencies and clients from different perspectives. Part of them is helping at least the small and medium-sized clients and agencies when it comes to lowering the cost of the creative using the AI tools available on the ad manager. So it can help them in adjusting the creative, having multiple versions from the text or the visual, and using the AI integrated within the ad manager to reduce the cost of production. But on another part, and this is one of the examples that I enjoyed working on, it was related to combining the visuals with the search queries in real time. So basically what we did is we combined a dynamic set of different creatives for a tourism client, And depending on the search, which keywords the client is using, the visual can be adapted to this, like images appearing next to the search. So if they are searching for, for example, something luxury within their trip, we're only showing them the luxury hotels available within this region. And if they are looking for the seaside or looking for the activities or looking for the culture or for the tradition, the visual is changing based on what actually the user is writing. So the result was this campaign was increasing the engagement level because the audience felt that every image they are seeing on every visual they are seeing is very relevant for their interest, not just traveling enthusiasm, but it's more about what he really liked. And also we noticed improvement in the bounce rate. So even the landing page was connected with the proper visual, taking them to the set of hotels related to this visual and the category of stay they are looking for.

Neha
All this stuff is so fascinating. Imagine having everything personalized to you in in-depth detail,? Like I want spicy food. I don't expect everybody to like spicy food. And then recommendations are being given based on that. Like, I'm looking for a restaurant that's going to give me chilies. I want that!

Linda
Yeah, I think that's where everyone usually is talking about how invasive AI targeting is, but actually it has made our job easier. Just as Bassem was saying, now when I'm researching something to go to a country, it understands very quickly what I'm after and it immediately understands that I have two children. So it starts to give me one activity for the 11 year old, one activity for the 15 year old. That's where it works. That's where even without being targeted, the personalization works.

Bassem
From a user perspective, we always hate that all the application or all the tools we're using is collecting some data about us, but then we are happy that we are getting a very personalized message. So it is like, okay, I need to know you to be able to send you really what is convenient for you. But at the same time, you're not happy that I know about you. And you're not happy if I send you the wrong message. So it's a forever dilemma.

Linda
AI is still at the beginning of what it can do. And I think one of the things it will be able to do is feel less invasive in the future. It will become smart enough to disguise how invasive it is.

Neha
You know what? I just got really sad for a moment. It just hit me really badly.

Linda
Sorry Neha. We'll all be fine.

Neha
Let's talk a little bit about budget optimization. How has AI changed the way budgets are allocated and measured for impact.

Bassem
On some of the real examples that a lot of the agencies are using now is when they integrate AI APIs within our ad managers, they can ask the AI to shift the budget and shuffle it between creative or between market or between target segmentation in the real time. And that saved them a lot of time waiting for the campaign to finish and check the report or even working on a daily basis at the end of the day to check the report and do the adjustment. It saves a lot of cost when you're doing this in real time.

Linda
Yeah, I'll add to that as well. AI is being used primarily right now in the marketing industry as a targeting tool. So all the data, all the personalization, it's targeting. At the MMA, we've come up with a program called the Movable Middles Formula. And it basically, with AI's help, removes for you the top layer of the target audience, which is already your loyal customer. And it peels off your non-likely to ever buy customers and concentrates on the middle segment, which is who you need to target. And that is the movable middle. So for example, if you're living, because of golf balls, you're already a loyal customer. I don't need to target you and waste my budget on you. And just because you live in a golf course, but you actually do not golf, that is identified by all of the AI that we integrate into it. And it says, okay, so don't try to sell this guy golf balls because he's not a golfer. Concentrate on the ones that are actually using, I don't know, B brand. And those are the ones that you need to sway in your direction. So my budget gets optimized to targeting the ones that are relevant to me. So this is called the Movable Middles. And this is a way we're helping brand marketers and agencies concentrate their targeting efforts and thus optimizing their budgets and not spending it incorrectly in places where it doesn't need to. So yeah, AI is taking us to the next level for sure.

Neha
There's a debate around AI in marketing, right? Should AI be staying in the background for targeting or also create ad content itself? What's your take?

Bassem
I think the debate from my point of view is, at least from what we hear in the market and what the feedback we're getting from people in the industry, that the trust of the AI when it comes to the part engaging with the user, when it comes to the creative part is not giving the effect as it is in the background because I feel the more powerful part of the AI when it comes to the helping in the setup of the campaign or the proper targeting or the customized message, it's amazing. But when it comes to the creative aspect of the message or a fully automated message we're having or a full visuals we're using as AI, it loses the human touch, it loses the trust it created with the user and they don't get engaged with this. So yes, I see AI amazing, but stay in the background, not on the front end of the process.

Linda
I'm going to answer in twofold. So yes, I think AI can play, of course, a very big role and it will increase as time goes on and the AI becomes more advanced. So it is definitely a tool that will keep on enhancing all other processes that are happening now and that AI is contributing to. It will be contributing to creativity as well. That does not mean it will replace human creativity because the prompts, the outcomes still need to be human. But I've recently seen an ad that was submitted to the MMA for the Smarties Awards. And the client said, I do not want to use any real pictures. I don't want to use any real archive footage, but I want a 25 year celebration that is done completely in AI. So as a tool, it was used to such an extent that if I showed you the video, you would not actually believe that there was none of it. None of it, not the voiceover, not the accent of the woman, not any part of it was human except the prompt and the production. So AI's capabilities, even when it comes to creativity, is going to be increasing and it will not stay in the background, unfortunately. It is right now from a marketing point of view, that's how it's being used. It's being used for targeting, as we said, and it's taking marketing to the next level in terms of what it can create and reach. But it also will reach creative and we will have future talks about how it is going to affect creative and to what extent will it bother us in the future or will we even understand that it is that ad. So I believe that it is a tool, but a tool that will keep on developing until it is actually used in a way that overtakes what we can imagine right now.

Neha
Interesting. I just keep reading across Reddit and all these social media websites, and I keep seeing people say that they're not going to be supporting that business if all their advertising and marketing is 100% AI and not employing people.

Linda
They will not know. That's the truth. Right now, we can recognize AI because it's still at a very basic form in creative. But I'm telling you, the future will hold ads that you will feel are completely human and that will be able to be more emotionally intelligent than most people on Earth.

Neha
Possibly. I'm looking forward to the changes that we're going to be experiencing and also a bit terrified, honestly.

Bassem
Actually, I want to debate with you on something here. For now, every client is very proud and they go and go publicly say about, look what we did with AI. But do you think in a couple of months when the AI will be the standard to use it on the creative, the client would be the same, proud and say l AI or they would try to hide it because people will be interacting in a different way with the creative. We did a testimonial a couple of months back and a survey regarding how do you feel when you know that the creative is done with AI and in reality, it's going to be hard to hide it later on that is done by AI because this is going to be the standard unless you go and say, guys, I did it 100% human factor, same as that we are proud now is the handmade product. I feel we're going on this shift. Do you feel that you would be happy and interact with the brand the same way?

Linda
Honestly, I'm telling you, they said it so well and they did it so well that like all of us, we have our negative feelings about AI. But if someone does it well, I'm not against it because it would have gone to the extent of shooting and costing that company probably 10 to 15 times what they actually had to invest to create the same visual and give me the right feels. If it's done correctly and if it's done well, we will not know, one. Two, if we know, it doesn't take away from the effort of that brand to communicate their message. And that's what's important. If you just want to be opposing for the sake of opposition, of course, there's very little that you can do to change someone's mind. There will be the purists that want everything human and nothing but, but there will be people and especially in the next generation who are open to the technology and what advantages it will bring and will not necessarily judge a brand positively or negatively for using AI to enhance their messages.

Bassem
Okay, but the question here, in this case, is the use of AI on the execution, right? Not on the strategy and not the creative idea. And that's, I think that's just fine, because again, that's a copilot. We're using it as a tool.

Linda
Exactly.

Bassem
Not building the concept instead of the human connection. And this is the part that I have the struggle with. I totally understand that if I'm doing this to save the cost of production and give me more possibility of creative visuals, that's a brilliant tool. But if I'm using a full fledged campaign from the strategy, the idea, the execution, I'm not doing a campaign for robots. I'm doing it for people that I need to build a connection with.

Linda
I agree with you completely. I'm talking about it as a tool of execution rather than a tool of ideation. But even at ideation, a lot of people run out of good ideas because it's been done. And there's a lot of me too. because it's been done and there's a lot of me too. And yes, AI is fed by things that already exist. They cannot imagine new things, but they might be able to innovate on ideas with the creative directors. And that is an interesting development for most creative directors that I have to rethink the whole thing. But the prompt at the end has to be a creative prompt that wins. So, the prompt is always going to be human. The result should feel human, but as a tool, it will become stronger and stronger.

Bassem
I totally agree with you on this.

Neha
Last but not the least, looking ahead, what excites you the most and what concerns you the most about the role of AI in marketing in the next few years?

Linda
From an industry body point of view, what concerns me most is the speed at which it is moving. Again, there's a lack of us actually catching up to what AI can do. And it's moving at such a speed that no amount of training for even new graduates that have just come out of AI training, tomorrow their information can be obsolete. So, the biggest concern for us as an industry is to keep up with the technology and be able to use it to our advantage. That's my real concern. What's really exciting but also quite scary is that we don't know where it's going yet. It's moving faster than our comprehension and being part of the industry from looking into what it's going to do to us, again, positive or negative, is exciting but at the same time terrifying. So, take it all with a pinch of salt and keep your eyes open for red flags against AI for sure. And trying to recognize the moments where we're actually going to be enhancing our human race through AI is going to be very exciting.

Bassem
I totally agree with the concern of Linda on this part. But in addition to this, I have a bit more concern that people will start to trust AI more than it should be. And they stopped challenging it or checking how good and how real and what is the source of the information people are copy pasting from it and they took it on everything in life now so they are stopping doubting every information and that's a problem because again we are not sure 100% what is the source of the information within the AI because it's fed up from the inputs from around all over the open internet and it could be correct or no it's safe just for the majority so it doesn't test. So all of us, if we agree that one plus one equals three, the AI will tell us that the correct answer is going to be three. And people not doubting it will just trust it and go for it. So that's what concerned me. What I'm excited about is that it is giving us the space to be more creative. It's given us the space to develop stuff that we don't need to learn for a long time. For example, when it comes to creating a new application or developing a new software, I don't need to study programming for four years to be able to create my idea or to develop this app. I just need to understand how to do the proper prompt and start showing the world my idea. So, it opened for a lot of people that didn't have the capability or l the know-how of the design to express themselves to do something new using the tools of the AI. Tthat's the beauty of it.

Neha
So, if there's one piece of advice I could give to anybody using AI is challenge it, question it, be critical of the answers it gives you, because I have seen a lot of the results that are being thrown out are incorrect. And I'm just like, are you sure? And the AI is like, no, actually, no, you're right. Well, that sums up our conversation slash debate for today. Linda, Basim, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate all the thoughts and objections and witty opinions that came in.

Bassem
Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Linda, for this challenging conversation.

Linda
Thank you so much, Neha. It was really interesting. Thank you to both Bassem and Neha and Yango for having us on. We love these kinds of conversations.

Neha
And we'll certainly be having more. To our listeners, hit the subscribe button down below on whatever platform you're using to stay updated for the next episode.