Inside Quantum Technology’s Inside Scoop: Quantum and Advertising
If a company is considered a fire, then its advertising may be equivalent to the smoke, as it helps to attract the attention of others over great distances. Advertising is essential for nearly all businesses to succeed, and yet it can be difficult to do effectively. Around 75% of marketers fail to utilize behavioral data for developing the right online advertisement targeting, which can lead to missed opportunities. Advertising can also be expensive, whether a company is using a marketing firm or doing it themselves. Knowing how to balance the advertising budget while hitting the highest impressions is the key to good advertising, and it may be possible to achieve with quantum computing.
This next-generation technology offers a whole variety of benefits for digital marketing. “AI and machine learning, coupled with the power of quantum’s qubits, are likely to revolutionize the way digital advertising is handled,” explained Hilary Kaye, CEO of HKA Marketing Communications, a PR firm for quantum computing companies that also does some occasional digital marketing. Kaye added that “While digital ads already rely on far greater technology than the previous world of print advertising, adding AI, machine learning and quantum tech can bring digital ad targeting to a whole new level. It’s clear that as quantum computers continue to advance, the data that digital ads draw from can be crunched faster and with greater accuracy, ultimately delivering a more personalized, and thus successful, campaign.”
Looking at Market Data
For those in digital marketing, the internet provides a wealth of resources about potential target audiences. According to a 2021 article: “It has never been easier to collect data about your own potential customers and evaluate it.” This data varies from geotagging customers in local areas near a store to survey answers from online polls. Many computers work to juggle these different types of data, but sometimes, this can be a limiting factor in giving a marketer all the options for creating a successful advertisement. As good marketing campaigns utilize data to understand which types of people to target and what type of content to create based on behavior, this process can get rather long and complicated. As a quantum computer can analyze more data at faster speeds, it can help to make this process more streamlined. “One very specific way that quantum computers may benefit digital advertisers is the creation of new ways to track successful ad campaigns,” Kaye said. “The cookies that track user activity will soon be blocked by the large browsers, including Google. This will leave advertisers with a gaping hole as they strive to target their ads ever more carefully. Quantum’s significant compute power could be part of a replacement.”
Quantum computers can also use this market data to create simulations, showing advertisers which ad might get more views if set up in different locations. Additionally, quantum computers can use market data to predict or detect patterns. This in turn gives advertisers more options for real-time decisions. As advertising is a fast-paced industry and seems to change instantaneously, quantum computers can give companies a helpful advantage in analyzing these trends and predicting shifts to match this rapid pace.
Balancing the Advertising Budget
According to Zapata, a leading quantum computing company: “Most online advertising is done programmatically with real-time bidding (RTB), where advertisers bid on consumer impressions in real-time with the goal of maximizing click-through rates.” Because of this bidding process, and the costs involved in creating other advertising campaigns (such as paid social media ads), the advertising budget can quickly get overspent. For a small business alone, to use Google Ads as part of an advertising strategy, the average cost alone is $9,000-$10,000 per month. This is just one advertising channel, and it already costs a significant amount of money, especially for a small business. Using a quantum computer, companies can help to maximize their budget in more effective ways by seeing which advertising channels will get the most impressions and cost the least amount of money. This may be especially helpful for startups or other companies with varying budgets.
Creating Advertising Content
As around 84% of people expect brands to create their own content, the stakes are high for companies to develop unique and eye-catching ads. Quantum computing can also be helpful in this situation, as quantum machine learning (QML) algorithms can help produce unique content based on data analysis. AI is already being used to generate many types of creative content, and later with quantum computing, it can do it at a much faster and more efficient pace.
Better Public Relations
Quantum computing also offers benefits for public relations (PR). According to Kaye, “While the impact on advertising is more obvious, we also see potential benefits coming in the world of public relations. PR professionals make decisions every day that can be aided through faster and more powerful analysis. Currently, we use a combination of time-consuming review of media databases and personal know-how based on years of experience to guide our choices of which media outlets, and which reporters, will be interested in our clients’ stories. Just think how much faster – and potentially more effective – our work could be if we had the power of quantum computers at our fingertips.” As many quantum computing companies don’t have their own PR firms, companies like HKA can offer essential services for expanding the reach of press releases to outside industries and news offices. Quantum computing, in time, should hopefully take this process even further.
While many companies are looking into the benefits of quantum computing for things like security or finance, perhaps they should also focus on something much more simpler, using this next-generation technology to keep all eyes on them.
Kenna Hughes-Castleberry is a staff writer at Inside Quantum Technology and the Science Communicator at JILA (a partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder and NIST). Her writing beats include deep tech, the metaverse, and quantum technology.
