AI has the potential to fundamentally reset how this industry works because of the intelligence it can unlock. After years of wrestling with fragmented datasets and slow reporting loops, the ability to interrogate massive volumes of consumer data in seconds and turn that into clear, usable insight is a genuine change for marketers who want to really understand behavior, not just chase clicks.
In practice, those AI-driven insights show up in two main places:
- Audience insights: upfront, before a campaign launches, helping shape who you go after, what you say, and how you show up creatively.
- Campaign insights: during flight and after the fact, telling you how the work actually performed and where to lean in, fix, or rethink the next wave of delivery.
How do marketers feel about campaign insights?
Generally, marketers feel they have adequate campaign reporting and intelligence - 44% of marketers surveyed in our global study strongly agreed that the post-campaign intelligence they receive is useful - but are less enthusiastic about the pre-campaign audience intelligence they receive from tools, partners, and vendors (32%). As an industry, we’re much more comfortable with data that looks backward - comparing the results of A/B tests, optimizing channel mix, and reallocating budgets - than we are using audience insight to build something new.
How can AI in marketing make campaign insights better?
While AI tools offer a potential solution, they’re not necessarily something marketers are confident with yet. Only 45% of marketers in our study said they were fully confident in their team’s ability to use AI to create useful insights and intelligence.
The key reason for this lack of enthusiasm? An inability to use client or brand data in AI tools, hampering marketers’ ability to generate quality signals from large datasets. This disconnect can be a fatal flaw when it comes to using AI tools to drive results - even the best tools need data to function, and internal tools are falling short.
And when marketers have the data connections they need, it’s not guaranteed they’ll be able to use collected intelligence effectively. Only 40% of marketers feel strongly that they’re able to use audience intelligence to drive results. And the same percentage of marketers feel they’re able to effectively use reports and findings from one campaign to improve another - even when recommendations are being made, putting them to meaningful use is difficult.
So what about reporting and campaign measurement?
The reporting itself is part of the problem: end-of-campaign reports and research dashboards look great, but often fail to deliver actionable insights, or can’t clearly be put to real use. All that leads to a lack of confidence when it comes to driving results. But metrics and campaign measurement also play a role here, where easy metrics make for more confidence, even if they don’t actually result in brand outcomes.
Using AI in marketing to effectively optimize against KPIs requires the right mix of data, metrics, and the ability to seamlessly turn the insights you collect into something you can actually use. Every new audience or behavior you discover needs to be turned into a target, then fed back into your campaign strategy. This is where advertisers often get tripped up.
How does MiQ Sigma make campaign measurement easier?
While AI tools can analyze large datasets easily, taking that analysis and converting it into results can be a more complicated process. This is where MiQ Sigma comes in. Its ability to generate custom audience personas for a brand or advertiser, turn those into recommended audience segments for targeting, and perform natural language optimization, ensures that traders are able to make better decisions than ever before. Sigma’s unique infrastructure combines more than 300 datasets, 12 DSPs, dozens of creative format options, and the full campaign process in one platform.
And those insights don’t just sit in Sigma - while it’s powered by the largest connected data ecosystem in programmatic - with over 2.6 petabytes of data flowing through it daily - those new insights on what an audience is watching, browsing, and buying can be seamlessly connected to your reporting. Sigma’s unified campaign insights create actionable reports around creative, reach, frequency, or cross-channel insights, supporting strategic decisions for your programmatic advertising.
