WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

Copywriting to get people to look at your ads is hard, and now AI is mastering it so humans don’t have to.

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A revolutionary Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool from Phrasee is shaking up the world of global advertising, and it’s coming hot on the heels of another AI that recently auto-generated the script and “plot” for Lexus’ most recent award winning advert. When it comes to social media advertising, there are all sorts of factors to consider but mainly it boils down to one key issue – where will you get the most bang for your buck? At 2.23 billion users, Facebook has more monthly active users than Instagram, at 1 billion, and Twitter, at 336 million, growing 11% since last year. But as Instagram launches its new business profile pages and IGTV, it seems to be giving the top dog a run for its money.

High CTRs alongside low CTMs and CTLs are the holy grails in these ad-serving communities. And now a new product launched by marketing technology company Phrasee has managed to achieve the dream with the launch of its high-performing new copywriting tool for Facebook and Instagram – the first of its kind on the market.

Already leading the industry in supplying optimised AI-generated marketing copy for substantially improved customer engagement – as demonstrated in campaigns for brands such as Virgin Holidays, Gumtree and Dominos – stats on the new product speak for themselves. Trialled by Wowcher and three other leading household names, the product allowed the brands to test AI-generated language in their social media advertising. Early results for Wowcher confirm a 31% reduction in cost-per-lead compared to the copy written by humans.

“I can honestly say when we embarked on this latest initiative with Phrasee, we didn’t expect a cost-per-lead reduction of over 31%”, said Alexis Harrison, Head of External Media at Wowcher. “We’ve always been impressed by the ability of Phrasee’s AI tech to deliver human sounding, brand-compliant E-Mail subject lines that generate amazing business results. Its new Facebook and Instagram product takes things to a whole new level.”

The outstanding performance comes as no surprise to Phrasee’s co-founder and CEO Parry Malm. This after all is a man who has helped Dominos achieve a staggering 753% return on investment, following a campaign that delivered a 57% increase in email open rates using Phrasee’s AI-generated email subject lines. He’s also enabled Virgin Holidays to increase its revenues by several million pounds using Phrasee subject lines AI technology.

“Our vision and goal from day one was to transform how brands speak to their customers online and we’re well on the way to doing that,” says Parry. “We specialise in both language and marketing copy, so if language is being used to make businesses’ marketing more effective, it makes sense to use Phrasee.”

The latest product came about as a response to customer need – in the same way that Phrasee’s very first AI tool was created.

“We started by building for a very specific domain, that being E-Mail subject lines, but the technology used is scalable and transferable and was always intended to be applied to multiple platforms,” explains Parry. “Customers specifically asked us to develop our products for Facebook and Instagram, so our progression is solving their problems and not just throwing stuff at a wall in the hope that it will stick.”

Already, agencies such as Tomorrow TTH and Social Chain, winner of the UK Agency Awards 2018 Social Media Agency of The Year and Digiday’s Best Live Moment Award 2018, are using the product as a catalyst for their campaigns. Social marketers can create AI-powered copy for campaigns in minutes and the product uses past campaign results to train its deep learning engine, ensuring continued and progressive performance.

With the entire industry starting to wake up to the possibilities of AI for innovative marketing campaigns, “what’s next” is shaping up to be highly exciting. In the past year, there has been a cohesive shift in marketing approaches to AI, with companies taking a lead from the ‘big boys’ who are embracing the technology. With Amazon and Apple leveraging AI to conduct voice-based marketing through their Alexa and Siri platforms, and Associated Press and the Washington Post using it to publish creative copy, the emerging trends are clear to see.