Mission A.I.: Ready for Launch in Marketing
Internet of Things (I.O.T.) & Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) are the buzzwords on the internet, much like a topping of cheese on anything & everything nowadays. With I.O.T. & A.I. doing the rounds in almost every field of life in 2017, the marketing area seems to find a new admirer in it as well.
While I.O.T. is about connecting physical objects and smart devices, such that there forms an extensive network of connectivity, which enables us to share, exchange, interact and collect all kinds of information.
But why should you be reading about all this?
Well the answer is – Customer satisfaction & providing people an experience beyond the conventions & their expectations.
And you are a Customer!
I.O.T. & A.I. are success ladders in customer engagement, customer satisfaction, and consumer-brand relations. A.I. & I.O.T. may be just a technological advancement, yet, with an experiential side of marketing, a personal touch is created, which brings the consumer & a brand closer.
A.I. breeds the rise of counter-intuitive data analysis, which means gathering a lot of good data and not just any data; because, as brands & marketeers strive to maximize every single amount spent, the efficiency & effectiveness of the marketing should always remain at peak.
Therefore one can say, that when A.I. steps into marketing, it enables to produce performance, which is an overall expected & wanted benefit from brands & marketeers alike. So, it can be said that it’s all about performance marketing at the end of the day.
“It’s one thing to redesign a digital experience, or make over a website or an app, but it’s quite another to add the power of thinking and cognitive computing into embedded experiences,” said Robert Schwartz, VP-global digital marketing at IBM.
The greater goal for marketeers is using it to make the brand experience more personalized and predictive, and it’s been learned that A.I., can affect & improve the brand experience. For knowing the application of this, marketeers are up for grabs today.
FYI: Today, IBM’s Watson, which is a cloud-based cognitive engine is the most popular face for A.I. It’s been said that “it can think like a human” using natural language processing and machine learning. Watson is working with dozens of brands in 45 industries, across 20 countries.
Is A.I. paving its road in marketing?
Well, A.I. at its core is about helping humans work more efficiently & better themselves in various areas like, customer experience, data analytics, generating insights for optimal targeting, determining what customers want beyond sentiment analysis, and the ability to interact with customers in the same way a human salesperson would. It can be considered that A.I. revolves around the experiential design and with the increasing evolution of technology, it comes down to giving a great experience to the customers. The internet has given us access to on-demand data whenever we wanted it and wherever we wanted it.
Marketing has already started seeing an upsurge in many new innovations, you can have a look at few examples to understand it better.
Chatbots – started reigning on the web after the launch of Facebook’s Messenger Chatbots in 2016. It’s a computer program designed to simulate a conversation with human users, especially over the Internet.
Real-Time Sentiment Analysis – such as the IBM’s Watson platform explained above. It refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjective information. Sentiment analysis is widely applied to the voice of the customer.
Live Event Monetization – such as Ampsy, which tracks all social streams around a live event, such as sporting events or rock concerts, to get a sense of who is most engaged, sentiment around the event and influencers, then intervenes in real time improving the event experiences. The platform rewards influencers, & engages with people having a bad time, and has been proven to push the needle on on-site merchandising.
Media Mix Optimization – an example here is a startup by the name, Marketing Evolution, which is putting together an A.I.-powered attribution & real-time optimization offering for in-flight creative rotation, targeting and media mix changes to the individual level.
Cognitive Commerce – Sentient is an example, which provides a distributed A.I. platform based on deep learning, computation and big data scale being used for digital marketing, shopping and funnel optimization and finance trading strategies.
Cognitive Content – Persado is one of many examples of a platform leveraging A.I. for content production. The platform uses sentiment analysis on keywords to produce content that appeals to different kinds of audience. It uses an emotional ‘wheel’ to segment audiences, then works on content using language that will appeal to those audiences.
Thus, with time many advancements are taking place by leaps & bounds. The discoveries are yet to open this Pandora box of new knowledge. Although people will never trust a self-driving car or speak with an A.I. customer service representative on the phone, but with time & efforts, people will gain more experience, and with that their expectations will start adjusting as the fears start subsiding. Brands just have to be careful about the pace of development and let things fall into place eventually.
