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Our team scours the depths of the internet daily in search of all things related to artificial intelligence. We find articles actually worth sharing, then compile them into short lists with digestible summaries you can share with everyone from your boss to your in-laws.
Here are the three top articles you’ll want to read and share this week.
1. Help, I’m Drowning!
Businesses have been collecting mounds of consumer data for years. Now that they’re drowning in it, they are struggling to find the time to analyze and convert it into actionable insights. This is why, according to Inc., 7 out of 10 CMOs, CEOs and marketing experts are expecting AI to be the most impactful technology of 2018.
Adam Howatson, CMO of OpenText, elaborates, “Marketers know the huge amount of data we store is laden with insights about customer behaviors, but its size, diversity, and velocity make it difficult to leverage using traditional predictive analysis tools. To extract value from big data, marketers will soon leverage artificial intelligence."
Marketing has always been focused on “ensuring the right message on the right channel and at the right time gets to the right consumer.” Artificial intelligence excels at analyzing huge datasets, better and faster than humans, which makes it essential to deal with the volumes of information drowning the modern marketer today.
This, in turn, allows AI systems to personalize at scale, tailoring campaigns and messages on a one-to-one basis. But extreme personalization faces an obstacle—privacy. Global regulations and individual concerns over personal data are already prominent. In the near future, marketers will need to gain user consent to unlock AI’s promise.
2. Automated Cars or Automated Advertising?
Digiday informs us that Volkswagen is using AI for more than just automating their vehicles. With the help of Danish media company Blackwood Seven, Volkswagen has been using an algorithm to influence their media-buy spending strategy with tremendous success.
In the fall of 2016, Volkswagen ran a campaign for their up! model based solely on ad recommendations from Blackwood Seven’s AI tool. Over a four-month period, they saw a 14% increase in sales over the number of orders that would have resulted had the campaign run on the recommendations of Volkswagen’s ad agency alone. Some campaigns even resulted in a difference of 20% more car orders from the algorithm’s recommendations versus the agency’s recommendations.
Blackwood Seven’s algorithm uses Volkswagen’s incoming car orders and market data such as gas prices, competitor prices and Nielsen data to recommend specific media channels, audiences and budgets that will result in the highest ROI. This sometimes means spending less than expected on certain campaigns and channels but still seeing a significant increase in sales.
Given that Volkswagen is exclusively using Blackwood Seven for all their German digital media buy in 2018, it is only a matter of time before competing brands start embracing AI to mimic results.
3. “Okay, Alexa… I Mean Google.”
Last week at the 2018 CES conference in Las Vegas, hundreds of brands introduced new products, most featuring some version of AI technology. As reported by CNET, one of the most popular AI integrations was with voice assistants, specifically Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant.
LG did the same with their smart washers, dryers, televisions and more. The difference for LG was the message their Chief Technology Officer left with the audience. CTO Il-pyung Park warned businesses to seriously consider the customer experience for all future AI-powered products.
"You can talk about AI all day, but if the customer doesn't get any value out of it, it becomes useless."
Park used this opportunity to address why some of their new smart products integrate Amazon’s Alexa and others feature Google Assistant. He maintained that LG is open to collaborating with multiple AI platforms as long as it serves a purpose for their customers.
“Peter Kim, who runs AI for LG Electronics, said the company chose to go with Google Assistant for the television because it offered a better service for news and weather updates. As a comparison, he said the company opted to go with Alexa for the refrigerator because there would be more of an intent to purchase things like groceries, and Alexa worked better there.”
With the amount of AI options becoming available, LG serves as a perfect example of why brands must continue to dig deeper to build true value for their customers with artificial intelligence.
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Ashley Sams
Ashley Sams is director of marketing at Ready North. She joined the agency in 2017 with a background in marketing, specifically for higher education and social media. Ashley is a 2015 graduate of The University of Mount Union where she earned a degree in marketing.