As AI continues to reshape the digital marketing landscape, companies are emerging that harness AI and promise not just incremental improvement but genuine structural change. NDA’s interview series, AI Marketing Pioneers, talks to leaders in this space to discover what they are doing differently.
In the latest installment, New Digital Age sat down with Thomas Ives, Founder of RAAS LAB, and Christian McAlinden, Programmatic Director at dentsu. Their conversation tackled the industry’s deep-seated reliance on legacy metrics, why traditional DSPs fall short on context, and how an innovative programmatic campaign for home improvement giant B&Q delivered 813,000 unique creative variants tailored to real-time consumer intent.
Moving past 2015
For nearly two decades, digital advertising has leaned heavily on easily quantifiable metrics like click-through rates (CTR), reach, CPMs, and viewability. Yet, as both Ives and McAlinden argue, those surface-level indicators belong to an earlier technical era.
“Clicks were a metric for a system which had limitations,” says Thomas Ives, Founder of RAAS LAB. “We should be past it now. We should be thinking more about the quality of the placement, the relevance of the placement, and being a lot more intelligent at that impression level.”
Historically, assessing contextual relevance was treated as a creative judgment rather than a measurable media variable because analysing every impression was humanly impossible.
“If you had a campaign which served nine million impressions, it would take 13 and a half years of one person sat at a desk analysing how well that web page matched each impression,” Ives points out.
Christian McAlinden, Programmatic Director at dentsu, agrees that standard industry habits have held buyers back. “Historically, relevance has been overlooked. Our industry measured what was easiest to measure, reach, CPMs, viewability, frequency, the basic metrics that we’ve always been able to report on,” McAlinden said. “The result was that campaigns could look efficient on paper, but still miss the nuance of whether the message, context, and consumer mindset were actually aligned.”
Speed vs. genuine innovation
While AI is often treated as a fast forward button for existing tasks, true innovation comes from unlocking completely new capabilities. Rather than relying on static site lists or broad keyword rules, RAAS LAB integrates directly into SSPs, scanning hundreds of thousands of incoming URLs per second to evaluate alignment before the ad is served.
“With AI, it’s the first time that we can possibly measure relevance,” Ives said. “There’s two ways that you can use AI. You can do things quicker, which everyone seems to want to use AI for, or you can do new things with it.
What we’re doing here is using AI to do something that wasn’t possible before.”
For agency leaders, evaluating context within the supply path provides a missing layer that standard buying tools can overlook.
“At the moment in the DSPs, we don’t have a relevancy score,” McAlinden said. “I can build out a site list, I can layer targeting in the open exchange, I know where the ads are going to run, but what are we missing? We’re missing a metric for relevancy.”
B&Q and 813,000 creative variants
The real-world value of AI-driven relevance is best illustrated by a recent campaign executed for retailer B&Q in partnership with dentsu.
Retailers with massive product ranges, B&Q carries over 500,000 products, face a major challenge matching creative messaging to diverse customer needs. A consumer researching shed assembly requires a completely different message than someone browsing blue bedroom paints.
“Every user’s needs are very different,” Ives said. “What we’ve deployed for B&Q across multiple campaigns essentially took in 813,000 unique creative variants that were deployed as part of that campaign. It really solves that problem which advertising’s always had: How do you bring together the creative and the targeting thinking?”
The results demonstrated the impact of context over simple reach. The campaign achieved click-through rates 4x higher than standard display benchmarks, maintained a content relevance score over 70%, and drove a statistically significant lift in brand consideration around ‘ease of shopping.’
Previous iterations of this relevance-first approach even generated higher physical store footfall than paid social efforts, said Ives.
The path to adoption
Despite clear performance gains, shifting an entire industry away from legacy habits takes time. Agencies play a critical role in bridging the gap and educating brand marketers who may be hesitant to stray from familiar metrics.
“It’s like everything in advertising, it’s reluctancy. You stick to what you know,” McAlinden said. “The education piece needs to come from the agencies. We need to be taking charge here, encouraging new strategies to move forward.”
With shortening attention spans in a fragmented media environment, Ives believes brands need a new approach to consumer communication.
“To get these attention-poor people to connect with you again is through being relevant,” Ives said. “It’s not just the message itself, it’s a message that matches the moment that the user is currently in.”
