Ford’s Marla Skiko on walled gardens, SPO and the latest trends in AI

Ford has always put its drivers at the center of its strategy. In fact, former CEO Donald Petersen once said, “If we are not customer-driven, our cars won’t be either.” More than 35 years later, Ford’s philosophy remains the same — only now its approach is a lot more tech-driven.

Harnessing artificial intelligence, the company is reshaping how it understands and engages with consumers. Led by Marla Skiko, global head of media and marketing intelligence, Ford is developing AI-driven virtual focus groups — digital simulations of potential customers — to test messages before they go live. The goal: more relevant, hyper-personalized, and scalable marketing.

In today’s fast-changing media environment, Skiko explains how Ford is leveraging AI to refine audience targeting, optimize ad placements and even explore in-car entertainment as a potential marketing channel in the future. While embracing technology, Skiko also stresses the need to balance insights with real human connection, the importance of supply path optimization (SPO) and the challenges of advertising in walled gardens.

Tell us a bit about how Ford is experimenting with AI?

We’re working on embedding AI in many of our processes. We’ve been pushing into how we can create virtual focus groups — really simulating consumers — so we can test messaging to help understand if it’s going to be relevant and then use AI and media platforms to make sure that message shows up with the intended audience after defining [our] audience targeting.

We’re iterating and making messages more hyper-personalized than ever with AI, and we need help in understanding if it’s resonating. You know, if somebody is shopping for a truck, we don’t want to start showing them SUVs. The more signals we have, the more we know about what people are interested in.

AI can make us faster, it can make us more nimble and help us connect with audiences in the right ways at scale. But even before we get to that, we want to pressure test and understand the benchmarks: How accurate are we when we’re testing with virtual versus real-life consumers?

Your very own assemblage of car critics. Are you building these focus groups based off existing personas of Ford customers?

Not necessarily, it depends on what we’re trying to learn. What does someone look like who is in market to buy an auto, or whatever it is? Sometimes you want to get broader, and sometimes you want to hone in. It depends on what it is we’re trying to learn.

Are you finding these virtual consumers offer good feedback?

It’s very new, so you’ll have to check back in with me.

With all the new technology avenues, are we moving toward a future where cars will function as an ad platform?

Certainly. There’s a lot of work happening inside the company to talk about the entertainment happening in the vehicle, not necessarily for the driver, but definitely for the passengers. Screens are getting more equipped. It’s about bringing the screens and the digital platforms you spend your time with outside the car, into the car. Advertising within those platforms would be the next stage. Right now, we’re working on the experience itself, thinking about the digital life that somebody leads. Your vehicle should be an extension of that, and it should feel as connected and as easy to operate as when you pick up your mobile device.

There are more platforms than ever before. How are these consumer trends shaping the way brands are approaching media and messaging?

Younger consumers are really important, particularly in auto, because we need to grab people early for a sense of loyalty. We’re really lucky with our brand that we tend to have generational love for the brand, but we need to stay relevant. So, we’re really keeping a close eye on how younger audiences behave in different digital areas, but particularly social. They’re super attuned to influencers and micro-influencers versus celebrities.

Is your social strategy informing your programmatic one?

There should really be crossover for any of the biddable platforms, whether it’s programmatic, search or social. Our social approach is helping us unearth insights that we might not otherwise have, which absolutely can then inform how we’re shaping the audiences we want to reach programmatically. It helps us hone an audience and message.

How are you seeing brands and agencies adjust their approaches to account for increasing media fragmentation?

Supply path optimization is especially crucial, because there’s so much fragmentation, right? That’s on us to really vet different partners from a supply standpoint. Not all supply is created equal, and it’s important for us to know that we’re connecting in the right ways and getting quality inventory. That helps us weigh that cost-benefit equation.

Is it worth the cost?

Absolutely, otherwise you’re flying a little bit blind, and you don’t want to take anything for granted, or assume that what you’re doing is the right mix, or that you have the right number of partners, or that the scale meets the KPIs you’ve set out.

With ongoing challenges in cross-platform measurement, what advancement will solve for attribution?

That is one of the biggest challenges that we’re up against right now. Measurement is absolutely critical, but we know that there are blind spots. How do we see how that data is performing, regardless of what channel we’re in, and whether it’s a walled garden or an open environment? That is what we need to solve.

Could you describe that challenge a bit more?

We’re always trying to understand how to best apply our data, and when you’re activating inside of walled gardens, you can’t. You cannot look at the data within a closed platform and connect it back to other areas to understand how it’s performing so it makes it impossible to get a total view of an audience within any given campaign.

Are we heading toward the future with more walled gardens, or will the internet be more open? There’s a lot of chatter for either side. What do you think?

Yeah, that’s a really hard one. I can’t see the walls coming down. Though, I think there will continue to be a push for how we can have more clarity of how our dollars are being effective within those walls.

What are the biggest disruptions you see shaping the future of advertising in the next five years?

There will continue to be this balance of human and AI and technology, and also just the ability to understand what is truth, because even the concept of what is true is getting really, really hard to discern. Not really understanding even how to define truth is so disruptive because then we see brands embroiled in things and we don’t even know if they’re based in reality.