Adobe Digital Dialogue

October 26, 2017 /Digital Marketing /

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising the global marketing sector

Emerg­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) tech­nolo­gies are already chang­ing the way most indus­tries oper­ate. For mar­keters, the technology’s poten­tial to pre­dict what cus­tomers want in a way that has nev­er exist­ed before is already hav­ing a pro­found effect on the way they do busi­ness.

AI and ML (machine learn­ing) have been around in one form or anoth­er for the past decade, but take-up has been rel­a­tive­ly slow, due in part to the stan­dard of the prod­ucts and ser­vices on offer and the lack of per­ceived ben­e­fits to mar­keters.

How­ev­er, like much in the dig­i­tal world, the tech­nol­o­gy is evolv­ing at a rapid speed and mar­keters need to be pre­pared for the next tech­no­log­i­cal evolution/revolution if they want to ful­ly cap­i­talise on its oppor­tu­ni­ties. This is going to require prepa­ra­tion and those that are think­ing ahead of the curve can cap­i­talise in the same way that brands and mar­keters who were first movers on mobile and app ser­vices have been able to.

Big data con­verges with smarter, faster machines

AI is a poten­tial god­send for mar­keters as it promis­es the abil­i­ty to teach machines to spit out the exact infor­ma­tion they need at any giv­en time, which in turn will great­ly sim­pli­fy and improve the qual­i­ty of the ser­vices their cus­tomers want.

There is much fear mon­ger­ing in the mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ty about the con­se­quences of AI, but machines are not scary, com­plex or expen­sive to imple­ment. AI and ML have super­charged Adobe prod­ucts, such as Adobe Tar­get and Cre­ative Cloud, to sort data and deliv­er action­able insights that are acces­si­ble to the entire busi­ness — not just the ana­lyt­ics team.

Some AI plat­forms have already achieved wide­spread adop­tion, with pro­grams such as Google Assis­tant, SIRI, Ama­zon and Face­book Mes­sen­ger deploy­ing AI-dri­ven bots to antic­i­pate cus­tomer desires and per­son­alise adver­tis­ing to some extent.

Below are just some of the ways AI will infil­trate the world of mar­ket­ing over the next decade. Some of these tech­nolo­gies are still in their for­ma­tive stages and the pos­si­bil­i­ties for improve­ment are bound­less, judg­ing by advances made by things such as hand­set and tablet tech­nol­o­gy in recent years.

Pre­dict­ing what cus­tomers want

One exam­ple of the impact AI is hav­ing is the pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics used by com­pa­nies such as Net­flix to tar­get its cus­tomer rec­om­men­da­tions. Using a clus­ter­ing algo­rithm, it is con­stant­ly fine-tun­ing its sug­ges­tions by analysing thou­sands of fac­tors and match­ing broad cus­tomer behav­iour pat­terns with those of indi­vid­ual mem­bers.

Per­son­al styl­ists now exist online who can offer you cloth­ing rec­om­men­da­tions based on your size, bud­get and tastes. Improve­ments in mes­sag­ing and chat­bots – vir­tu­al styl­ists that use ana­lyt­ics to de-ter­mine a consumer’s tastes and pref­er­ences – are mak­ing this pos­si­ble, and the styl­ist doesn’t even need to be human. Rue21, a spe­cial­ty teen appar­el retail­er, has already launched a chat­bot for its online cus­tomer base. AI tech­nolo­gies such as this will con­tin­ue to great­ly sim­pli­fy and per­son­alise con­sumers’ shop­ping expe­ri­ences going for­ward.

Gen­er­at­ing con­tent, advanced image and voice recog­ni­tion

Gen­er­at­ing con­tent based on data infor­ma­tion is still a bit rough around the edges, but plat­forms such as Word­smith are already being used to gen­er­ate basic news arti­cles from things such as finan­cial and weath­er reports. This type of auto­mat­ed con­tent pro­duc­tion based on struc­tured data is like­ly to evolve into con­tent gen­er­a­tion from unstruc­tured data, allow­ing mar­keters to per­son­alise con­tent and deliv­er their mes­sages across mul­ti­ple plat­forms with rel­a­tive speed and pre­ci­sion.

Sim­i­lar­ly, image recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy, used by Google Pho­tos, Snapchat Face Swap and Face­book, already recog­nis­es faces and in the future will pro­vide the basis for far more sophis­ti­cat­ed con­tent search­ing and per­son­al­i­sa­tion of cus­tomer expe­ri­ences.

Voice recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy has also made great advances over the past few years, and indus­try heavy­weights such as Google and Face­book are awake to its pos­si­bil­i­ties and have invest­ed large amounts into its pro­gram devel­op­ment.

Things such as record­ed voice mes­sages and 1800 num­bers will like­ly go the way of the Walk­man and black and white tele­vi­sions in the not-too-dis­tant future, once again open­ing up a vast array of pos­si­bil­i­ties for mar­keters to per­son­alise their ser­vices.

Digital Marketing

Join the discussion