KFC, Taco Bell tap AI, and GAAR is explained: Monday’s daily brief

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Good morning, marketers, and who won?

By the time you read this, you’ll know whether Tom Brady has led his new franchise to his personal seventh SuperBowl victory. Some of you will be happy, some distraught. And I’m sure there are those among you who won’t care at all.

As a New York sports fan, I would not describe myself as in the Brady camp, but I couldn’t resist opening an email from GolfSupport.com, which had been busy querying online analytics tool Ahrefs to identify the most Googled questions about the veteran QB.

Imagine GolfSupport.com’s disappointment when the top question turned out not to be “Does Tom Brady play golf?” but “What is Tom Brady’s net worth?” closely followed by questions about how old he is and the name of his wife — both of which I thought everyone knew the answers to.

My question: how many more Super Bowls is he going to play in?

Kim Davis
Editorial Director

How a KFC and Taco Bell franchisee leverages AI  

Mitra QSR, a leading quick-service restaurant franchisee running more than 500 KFC and Taco Bell locations, deployed an AI solution to help its adjustment to changing consumer habits in the time of the pandemic.

Hypersonix, an AI-powered business intelligence platform with a focus on consumer commerce industries, helped Mitra QSR develop data-driven responses to a range of issues, including analysing changing customer habits, ensuring workplace safety, and aspects of personnel management.

Transformation within the company has been significant during the last year. It changed to take-out only in many locations, which impacted the efficiency of drive-through lanes. It saw increased demand for bundle meals rather than individual orders and an increase in digital sales, putting pressure product availability and staff productivity. The time of day for receiving most orders changed, and there was much greater interaction with delivery services like Door Dash, Postmates and Uber Eats.

The Hypersonix platform surfaced insights and recommendations in support of the large number of rapid decisions required by the changing environment.

Why we care. This is a story about AI helping a non-tech business respond to a potentially crushing amount of transformation in a short amount of time. It suggests the role AI can potentially play in business management as well as in areas like personalization and engagement. 

Google Ads Auto-Applied Recommendations: Every setting, explained

Auto-applied recommendations are Google Ads’s AI-driven recommendations and improvements for text and display ads. The list, which has expanded dramatically over the last few years, now includes 35 options to toggle on or off from the GAAR dashboard.

Chris Boggs details every single option in the dashboard and his recommendations for each setting. Check out what Boggs says about bid, ads and extensions, and keywords and targeting settings. Tidbits include the following:

• “Add descriptions to your sitelinks.” Based on some AI-recommended short-form content I have seen, I would prefer to handle these unless this is a situation with hundreds or thousands of database-driven product-type landing pages. 
• “Add responsive search ads.” As RSAs have gotten better, I still spend time optimizing each of the ad units driving the most traffic. If your scale — based on past ETA or RSA performance — supports the tool’s ability to create “super ads” like these, it will still require manual maintenance for best performance. 
• “Add audience reporting.” This is useful for the audience data you can grow and reuse to optimize across your Google Ads campaign types, and also because it gives you insight into the audiences that are hitting that you may not have thought about.

Read more here.

Getting a handle on soccer’s digital assets

If you were wondering how the NFL manages what must be an extraordinarily extensive library of digital assets — photos, video and text — we’ve got the next best thing. A conversation with Paul Murphy, digital image expert at the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). UEFA represents no fewer than 55 national soccer associations, and organizes international and national soccer competitions, including the UEFA European Championship.

Establishing governance over the huge quantity of images created, by different photographers and for many different purposes, was a taxing challenge. Paul explained to us how he approached the task.

Watch a wide-ranging discussion of DAM, featuring Paul Murphy, here.

We’re looking for a few industry experts

Our spring MarTech event is taking place on March 16-17 and we’re still looking for a few industry experts to fill out our speaker roster. If you have internal expertise in managing CDP or predictive analytics technology for your organization and enjoy sharing your knowledge with others, fill out this short form and let us know.

Read more about the MarTech conference.

Quote of the Day

“You know you work in marketing when you spend 20% of your time doing your job and 80% explaining your job.” Shama Hyder, CEO, Zen Media.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.