and sometimes in the last millisecond when dealing with
someone browsing a website.”
But the AI is only as good as the research behind it,
he says.
“Think about the case where Target fi gured out a girl was
pregnant before she had told her father – in this case, Target
had done painstaking research in determining triggers in its
marketing. AI will help marketers find these trends and act
upon them in the right way in order to help their customers
find the right products just before they need it.
“Like anything, though, poor planning results in poor
results. So all of these tools are for naught if the marketer
doesn’t put in the right amount of the right type of work in
the beginning.”
For Winchester, finding the right tools to work with
their business, and getting a large enough dataset to use in
these tools to use them effectively is paramount to success.
Before any machine learning or AI is implemented in a
business, the business needs to know what to train the
system to do, he says.
“Without actual data to study (and lots of it), it’s
basically guessing.”
What many marketers don’t realise is that most of the
technology doesn’t do “exactly what it says it does on the box.”
Winchester says from problems such as integrating with
existing systems, or being told that the product works in a
particular way when it doesn’t, companies are faced with a
dizzying complexity of tech to negotiate in order to get their
products, first, in the right context and, second, transacted
smoothly with the right logistical back-up to get into
customers’ hands with minimal delay and fuss. As a result,
the current marketing environment – while off ering amazing
opportunities for companies – also presents extreme risks.
“Much of the enterprise level kit can cost millions
and years to integrate into existing systems, while the
actual impacts to the organisation may not be known until
after the integration,” says Winchester. “This means that
companies risk losing months or even years in a market
that changes on a weekly basis.”THE TRUTH ISSUE@marketingmag
You’ve got to find a way to
actually get your customers
to say ‘I want product A’ and
not just allow Amazon to
recommend it.including Google Home, are designed with user privacy
in mind.”
“For Google Home, we only store voice queries after a
physical trigger or after recognising a hot-word trigger like,
‘OK, Google’ or ‘Hey, Google,’” the company has told media.
But while that type of technology may not be quite here
yet, Buckley argues the challenge now is how marketers can
somehow get their brands to supersede the Amazon and
Google marketplace and in doing so invite themselves into
customers’ homes.
“I have an eight-year-old boy and if his remote control
car runs out of batteries, he will just say, ‘Hey, Alexa, can I
order more AA batteries?’ He, like most consumers, doesn’t
request a particular brand of battery, for example Duracell or
Eveready. So instead what arrives in the mail is an Amazon-
branded battery. Is the eight-year-old as the consumer
happy? He’s ecstatic, because it solves the problem of his
non-working toy car. The paradigm then becomes how do
Eveready and Duracell break into that market?”
A key to the answer, says Buckley, is being on the spot
with personalised content. “If you start to order milk
through Amazon, how do you make sure that it’s the brand
that you love and not the brand that Amazon recommends?
You’ve got to fi nd a way to actually get your customers
to say ‘I want product A’ and not just allow Amazon to
recommend it for you.
“I think everyone has now recognised that their brand
needs to become part of the home. It can’t just be the brand
at a retail store or online. The brands that do get into the
home are the ones that will win.”
Human Pixel’s Adam Winchester says it’s possible
for marketers to infl uence the way these algorithms work
to ensure they are in their clients’ favour, but to do so
they must rely on data and trained systems to read and
understand this data.
“Big data and the rise of business intelligence
provides marketers with the tools to get the formula right.
If you really understand your perfect target customer
through buyer persona creation and behaviour mapping,
and you understand the triggers that end in a sale, then
with enough data and the right tools, today’s marketers
can create the ‘perfect storm’ as it were, to supercharge any
marketing campaign.
“The power of AI is the ability to sort through massive
amounts of data and fi nd trends that can be used to deliver
extremely relevant and timely messaging, advertising
or content generally to the right person at the right time