By Shota Iyobe

The RSR marketing team has kept a watchful eye on three key digital marketing trends. In our Smarter Consumer Acquisition series, we’ll explore the following:Location-Based Marketing, Cross-Screen Marketing and AI-Driven Audience Targeting. To read Part I, click here. In Part II of our three-part series, we discuss AI-Driven Audience Targeting.

“Big data” continues to be a buzzword in 2014, especially within the digital advertising industry. Up until now, marketers weren’t really sure what to do with it. With the recent emergence of advanced analytics platforms specializing in audience, photo and location analytics, marketers are able to more effectively leverage big data for fine tuning their marketing campaigns.

Ditto is one such company. Ditto is a leading photo analytics platform that analyzes shared photos on social media platforms, Instagram being one of the biggest, for brand recognition to determine consumer sentiment. Brands can now glean important data including brand loyalty and demographics helping to simplify the task of measuring social ROI.

Another example: The Echo Nest. This data-driven music intelligence platform was acquired by Spotify earlier this year to help the popular music streaming service gain insights into listening habits, offer better recommendations, enhance ad targeting for audio ads, tailor content to specific users and more. Echo Nest’s API will also enable brands and marketers to leverage machine learning technology to better reach their audiences. It was a really smart acquisition.

Other noteworthy data-driven platforms:

• AdBrain – Data-driven multi-screen audience buying platform.

• Adometry – Data-driven marketing analytics and optimization platform (recently acquired by Google)

• Placed – A location analytics platform that allows advertisers to measure the impact of their digital campaigns on real-world retail visits.

It will be interesting to see how brands incorporate these big data insights into their future marketing campaigns. As with any effective digital marketing campaign, the focus should be on how to better connect with future audiences, while creating less intrusive, highly personalized ads.