Wavemaker launches AI powered multi-audience planning platform

Wavemaker has completed the global roll out of a new AI-powered media planning platform, Maximize, that allows planners to create media plans that reach multiple audiences and optimise media investments in just a matter of minutes.

Increasing audience fragmentation is adding complexity and time to the media planning process for both the client and the agency. Maximize allows planners to deliver on the industry-wide vision of planning against individuals rather than audience segments. The result is planning at a granular customer level, with the power to simultaneously explore multiple audiences across many attributes and assess the best media partners to create an optimised campaign across channels and market, in record time.

Driven by AI and machine learning, Maximize ingests and analyses data from global and local sources including client 1st party data, GroupM’s LivePanel and Wavemaker’s own Momentum data, and is part of Wavemaker’s global Provocative Planning system, a modular system that fuses machine learning and human intelligence to get the best from both.

Toby Jenner, Global CEO of Wavemaker, explains, “Maximize addresses one of the industry’s longest standing frustrations – that all media plans look the same. Pre-loaded with strong data sources and packed with AI, Maximize produces media plans at incredible speed and has the brainpower to create market-beating growth plans for our clients.  It is already delivering results, producing media plans that are on average 30% more effective for clients and in pitches, helping us reach the ranking of most successful media agency in the COMvergence new business barometer for Q1-Q3 2020.”

Stephan Bruneau, Global Head of Product at Wavemaker, who lead the project, adds, “Creating media plans has become challenging due to the increased number of audience segments that need to be included in a campaign. Some can overlap significantly, with people belonging to multiple audience segments at risk of being ‘over exposed’ to ads and creating an unnecessary waste of money for clients. Maximize uses techniques and technology rarely used in the marketing industry and is effectively the only way to solve the audience fragmentation problem.”

Stephan Pretorius, Global Chief Technology Officer at WPP, commentes, “AI has extended its sphere of influence to many aspects of marketing, but until now not in media planning.  Wavemaker’s exciting new AI-powered planning platform Maximize is set to transform the way its teams work and empower its planners to produce the most effective and efficient media plans yet for clients in an increasingly complex and fragmented media landscape.”

Maximize was developed by a project team of 75 strategists, planners, data architects, data scientists, software developers, testers and designers based at Wavemaker’s campus in Warsaw, with user design support from WPP’s Mirum. 

During development the team did human vs. machine parallel tests, challenging an experienced team of planners to create a plan that would optimise reach across three overlapping audiences, and they could not complete the task. Every time they improved reach for one audience, they lost reach for the other two. In contrast, Maximize solved the problem in just 1.5 minutes. Using Maximize free the Wavemaker planners to work more creatively, focusing on the innovative methods they can also provoke growth for clients.