Assessing the Effectiveness of Investments in Implementation of Innovative Technologies in the Digital Marketing Processes (Using the Example of the Company Centra.ai)

The rapid growth of the digital marketing market is leading to the emergence of new players, namely marketplaces for advertising products and services. One such marketplace is Centra, which was the first to enter the market with this business model in 2021. Although Centra is an innovative IT company, it faces a number of challenges expressed in the lack of automation and lack of application of innovative technologies at the level of all processes of the organization, entailing a gap between planned performance and actual situation. In this regard, Centra is considering several ways to implement innovative technologies in its processes: automation of customer management processes, partner management processes or customer support processes. Thus, this paper aims to develop a methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of investment in innovative technologies to provide recommendations to Centra for selecting a financially favorable scenario for process automation. Within the framework of the research the following tasks were performed: the toolkit for financial evaluation of the considered scenarios was determined based on the analysis of the literature on the evaluation of investment projects and the specifics of automation; the digital marketing processes in the company "Centra" were studied and their efficiency was evaluated; the trends of the digital marketing market were analyzed for the application of innovative technologies and the key risks of the project under consideration were identified; the possible scenarios for the introduction of innovative technologies in the company "Centra" were considered. The research model includes literature review, market analysis, risk assessment and financial modeling. The work consists of three chapters: in the first chapter a literature review is conducted, in the second chapter the main financial indicators of the company, the efficiency of its current processes, as well as trends in the digital marketing market for the application of innovative technologies are analyzed, in the final chapter a methodology for financial evaluation of the effectiveness of investment project scenarios is developed and recommendations are formulated. The result of the study are recommendations based on the developed methodology, aimed at solving the applied problem of the company, according to which Centra should initially automate the processes related to customer management, directing efforts to testing the integration of new technologies with existing systems and conducting pilot projects in order to obtain the greatest benefit.