• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 21, 2024

LG Ad Solutions chose to work with an AI workflow automation platform. The partnership saved the company 25,000 hours of manual work and increased revenue for the company within four months. It doesn't mean the company doesn't need humans.

Kelly McMahon, senior vice president, global operations, LG Ad Solutions, did not disclose the increase in revenue based on the automation, but said the key is automating data-driven and repetitive manual tasks for the company's advertising channels.

“We always try either to build tools ourselves or find partners that automate some of the manual tasks that take time away from clients,” McMahon said.

The four-month pilot focused on using PilotDesk’s yield optimization tool, YieldPilot, to optimize ad serving. The technology does things that would typically take many manual hours, she said. Ad operations and yield managers, ad traffickers, and ad campaign managers are some of the titles that would use the platform.  

Some of those tasks optimize tools within LG Ad Solutions’ ad server, with the ability to optimize campaign performance and yield to manage the advertiser's priority, which can be contractual. Data that flows through the system needs to understand these elements in real-time and how they influence optimization.

“There are so many calculations that there are not enough time and work hours in a week or a month that this tool can do within an hour,” she said. “It lets us be more hands on with customer service.”

The ad-ops process starts with a reporting task. An ad operator runs a report to get data about their campaign and programmatic partners, then analyzes the campaign performance. If the campaign does not perform as required, they adjust the ad server to change the process to generate more revenue. This triggering event will automate an action.

It’s not all about automation, however. Humans play an important role. “There are things better left to humans that may end up in automation down the road,” McMahon says.

YieldPilot can analyze and change the action continuously the entire time the campaign runs. And it can do it for everything in the ad platform. An ad-ops person is usually limited in capability during a workday by the minutes and hours in a day.

AI supports the automation, and natural language is used to create automation such as “I want to create an automation that adjusts the priority of my campaign if the campaign is pacing ahead or behind schedule,” said Joe Hirsch, CEO of PilotDesk, a company known for its AI no-code workflow platforms.

Hirsch referred to the automation system as Deskie or Desky, an internal name, and said it assists in creating the task that can be changed at any time.

The idea is to automate human actions. In the future it will suggest automations that humans may not have thought of or ask autonomously to improve human behavior.

“But those are forward-looking uses of AI that we have contemplated,” Hirsch said.