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While the hype around artificial intelligence — specifically of the generative variety — has surged in 2023, AI has been part of our everyday lives for years. It powers the predictive text that pops up when you draft an email, the smart virtual assistants that read you the weather, the facial recognition that suggests which of your friends to tag in recent photos, and much more.
That’s not a statement meant to burst anyone’s bubble. Rather, the fact that AI has existed (and been gradually improved upon) over the years means that sophisticated AI product solutions already exist, and they’re getting better all the time. As we start to conclude ‘the year of AI,’ the question that should be on every marketer’s mind is: How can artificial intelligence solutions maximise end-of-year campaigns?
Why should you use AI this Mega Sales Season?
Kicking off with the 9.9 shopping festival, Mega Sales Season is a prime proving ground for marketers to test AI-powered solutions. With monthly shopping festivals providing regular opportunities to assess performance and the appetite for Mega Sales Day deals in APAC, marketers who use AI to their advantage are poised to have a banner Q4.
According to Meta’s Seasonal Holidays Study, 83% of shoppers in Asia Pacific made an MSD last year, compared to the global average of 70%, while spending in the region also increased by 13% against a global average of 5%.1
When it comes to determining what exactly those shoppers buy, social platforms are key to providing that serendipitous moment of discovery — especially among younger generations like millennials and Gen Z, whose purchasing power remains unabated. Within these platforms, short-form video continues to be a powerful brand awareness tool, with over 70% of millennial and Gen Z shoppers surveyed saying they discovered new brands and products through short-form video content.
As Mega Sales Season continues to grow in both size and scale and consumers increasingly expect personalised, discovery-fuelled (yet privacy-safe) online shopping experiences, AI can help you take the guess- and grunt-work out of your festive strategies. “Just as shoppers are planning early, marketers need to do the same if they are to offer customers value and remain competitive in a tight market,” said Dan Neary, Meta’s VP of Asia Pacific.
How AI can help marketers
While AI isn’t a replacement for human creativity, its value lies in time and resources freed up on the rote parts of marketing — such as audience targeting, asset optimisation, and campaign measurement — all in an efficient and privacy-friendly way. These capabilities have already transformed how many marketers work, helping to streamline their ad creation processes and explore new possibilities.
Though there are new artificial intelligence solutions being developed seemingly every day, perhaps what’s most exciting to marketers is AI’s ability to help measure, iterate, and optimise campaigns at scale and speed. Meta Advantage is a suite of ad automation tools, marketers can optimise creatives to different channels or audiences, find the most effective placements for an ad, and improve targeting in just a few clicks. Marketers can now also use budget scheduling for ad campaigns, a new tool Meta has introduced for the season. Not only can marketers use AI to fine-tune their segments, they can also leverage it to discover new audiences while respecting data privacy choices — which is no small feat in a post-cookie world.
In a time where consumers are swift to experience creative fatigue but expect privacy, being able to create a high volume of diverse creatives is a boon to any digital marketer. In a study of 2,700 ad sets, Meta found that campaigns that utilised a diverse set of creatives saw a performance lift of 32%; a stark comparison to the 2% lift seen in campaigns with identical creatives.2
With dynamic AI-powered measurement tools, marketers can also fine-tune their campaigns based on real-time data, driving more impactful messaging, gaining valuable insights into what works best, and ultimately improving their media efficiency.
Thai digital fashion platform Pomelo discovered this for themselves when they tested an Advantage+ shopping campaign (ASC). The Pomelo team, which had already seen consistent success from Advantage+ catalogue ads, wanted to see whether ASCs could save even more time on ad creation while boosting sales. Over a period of three months, the brand found that the ASC achieved 66% lower cost per order and 2.1x higher return on ad spend compared to its usual catalogue ads. During the test period, a whopping 71% of the purchases made through Meta ads came from the Advantage+ shopping campaign.
Patarasak Manorompatrasal, performance marketing director at Pomelo called the results of the Advantage+ shopping campaign “fantastic,” noting that it had exceeded the brand’s previous performance benchmark “significantly” both in cost per purchase and return on ad spend. “We now can accelerate our revenue growth with minimal effort,” he said.
Theirs is just one of many similar case studies expounding the benefits of campaigns utilising machine learning. As Mega Sales Season ramps up, marketers will be experimenting with AI solutions to enhance the best practices of advertising on Meta and maximise their first AI-powered festival sales season — will you be one of them?
To learn more about how you can supercharge your marketing with AI this holiday season, explore the Meta Advantage suite and holiday marketing guide.
[1] Meta Seasonal Holidays Study by YouGov (online survey of 14,009 people aged 18+ across 12 APAC markets), December 2022.
[2] Meta Internal Data, based on a scaled backend test comparing identical vs. non-identical creatives in 2,703 ad sets from 4 to 26 April 2021.
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