Marketing Australia – February-March 2019

MARKETING 2019

24 FEATURE

Slaves to the

algorithm

The growth of automated decision-making is explosive. But when algorithms act as

the role of gatekeeper between consumers and brands, how can marketers ensure

their brands are still part of the action? Tracey Porterinvestigates.

A

ndrew Burt, a chief privacy offi cer at data

management platform provider Immuta,

refers to them as the silent failures. That’s

how the legal engineer by trade describes

what he sees as the biggest issue facing a

world where increasingly more people are reliant on the

use of algorithms to make critical decisions. Asked earlier

this year whether he believed algorithms could be trusted,

Burt claimed that as people began to rely more on complex

algorithms, their makers’ ability to explain their inner

workings will get progressively harder.

This isn’t simply because these models are hard to

interpret, rather because the networks they’re being

connected to are becoming more convoluted.

While researchers have long documented the many

occasions in which algorithms outperform humans –

including beating doctors and pathologists in predicting

the survival of cancer patients, occurrence of heart attacks

and severity of diseases – every day the world of IT gets

harder to manage. “We have more endpoints, more data,

more databases and more storage technologies than ever

before,” Burt says.

“I believe our biggest challenge lies in being able to

understand the data environments we are relying on.

Because if we don’t, there’s a very real possibility that we’ll

be constantly confronting silent failures, where something

has gone wrong that we simply don’t know about, with very

real and potentially devastating consequences.”

Some may accuse the Yale Law School fellow of

being alarmist. But from a marketing perspective, the

replacement of digital search mechanisms in favour of

new interfaces powered by artifi cial intelligence (AI) –

such as messaging, chatbots and voice activation – means

customers are increasingly indiff erent to the traditional

branding eff orts that infl uence buying decisions.

Adam Winchester, the global head of projects at

Melbourne-headquartered digital consultancy Human

Pixel, says the ‘new marketing environment’ presents

marketers with a vast array of potential platforms,

add-ons, modules, SaaS (software as a service), PaaS

(Platform as a Service) and various other scripts and cloud

off erings to choose from. Not only is this ‘third space’ able

to help them to understand their market, it can also help

increase content velocity, increase or understand ROI,

improve various metrics and target correct avatars. As a

result, algorithms now control much of the advertising and

remarketing we see and sometimes even the price we pay,

he says.

marketingmag.com.au