Dive Brief:

• The New York Times' Advertising & Marketing Solutions Group has launched NytDEMO, a team that creates data and technology solutions for brands, a news release announced. NytDEMO, which stands for data, engineering, measurement and optimization, brings together members of the Times' data, product and design, technology and advertising groups, and is creating a number of new products and tools this year. 
• NytDEMO rolls out with a new ad product called "perspective targeting," which allows marketers to target their ads against content predicted to evoke specific emotions in readers, such as self-confidence or adventurousness. The product was informed by Project Feels, a data-driven predictor of how emotions and engagement connect, where researchers measured readers' emotional responses to Times articles and identified meaningful associations between content, keywords and emotions. They created an artificial intelligence model to predict emotional response to any published content. 
• Readerscope, an AI-driven data insights tool that summarizes what Times audiences are reading to identify topics they are interested in and where they are, is another soon-to-launch NytDEMO tool. It's intended to help brands develop creative ideas or campaigns. Brands can also find the right audience for their message by searching for specific topics, like travel or human rights, which are identified using algorithms that crawl the Times' archives. 

Dive Insight:

With the launch of NytDEMO, the Times looks to help ease one of marketers' top challenges in the digital era: targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time. Consumers increasingly crave personalization from brands, but marketers struggle with meeting these demands. A lack of personalization cost businesses as much $756 billion in 2016 and 41% of consumers reported switching companies due to lack of personalization, according to Accenture. An additional 31% of respondents said they find great value in services that automatically learn about their needs and tailor recommendations accordingly.

AI-driven solutions provide more reliable insights that marketers can use to achieve higher levels of personalization, create higher-quality content and deploy more transparent campaigns. Tools like those offered by NytDEMO play an increasingly vital role in helping marketers understand their customers on a deeper level, including what they care about now and in the future. Machine learning can go beyond what content people have engaged with or products they have purchased by measuring emotional response, which is an important purchase driver.

Traditional print media companies like the Times have struggled with declining ad dollars over the past several years amid digital disruption. Daily newspaper advertising revenue dropped 10% in 2016 to $18 billion, about one-third of what it was 10 years ago, according to the Pew Research Center. For the Times, the NytDEMO initiative could boost its business, as other projects intended for advertisers, such as its T Brand Studio, have done in the past. In December, News Corp, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and other verticals, similarly launched a programmatic platform called News IQ that merges first-party data from partners like Fox Broadcasting Co. and Dentsu Aegis with its own global data to help advertisers segment and target audiences.