What’s the future of Marketing?

2019 is the year of marketing science catches up to the art. While once revered as more art than science, the discipline of marketing is becoming increasingly technical. As modern day practitioners, it has become table stakes to have some level of technical acumen on how the marketing technology stack plugs together. The more aware and tech-savvy marketers are going to be the ones that win the customer experience battleground.

The roles within marketing organizations are shifting now that AI has arrived. For example - now marketing operations can leave list pulling, campaign execution and reporting to intelligent machines. Now, less burdened with these tasks, they’re shifting themselves to become much more focused on data sciences as it relates to the bigger picture. The evolving role scape is moving away from order taking and execution to requiring that practitioners have a deeper understanding of and influence over the complete business strategy.

As digital marketing savviness is now common amongst modern marketers, there will be less need to work with outside creative and media-buying agencies. This year this shift will bring a significant number of those more specialized discipline in-house, as brands find that they can develop and source high-quality work from within their own department at a lower overall cost, and with a greater level of transparency and control.

What’s old in marketing will become retro again. Consumers are more tuned in to digital marketing manipulation and leery of data privacy abuses – making them more skeptical and hence less responsive to even hyper-targeted digital advertising. The current wave of digital marketing has become overcooked. In response, marketers will look back to more traditional analog and out-of-home strategies with fresh eyes. This resurgent “retro marketing” trend will find an audience with digitally weary consumers looking for a more personalized, human relationship with the brands they engage with.

In this era of data privacy, consumers are empowered to decide not just what brands they do business with, but what brands they are willing to interact at all. The value exchange between vendor and consumer must be crystal clear in any marketing interaction. Anything else and vendors risk the future viability of engaging with their audiences. This not only increases the importance of personalization but also the authenticity of those interactions. Brands must show customers that they respect their data by using it to engage with them in a way that drives real value – not just to drive revenue for their business, but to truly help the consumers in some way.

Marketers will reject any vanity marketing metrics that does little to show the value of marketing, such as attribution KPIs, ROAS etc. Simpler metrics that focus on engagement and outcomes will prevail. Marketers will ask themselves: did we increase engagement with targeted contacts? This approach will become the standard to measure all marketing campaigns. By building a contact engagement model that underpins all interaction channels, marketing departments can then measure spend increases against engaged contacts within the customer organization.

The Man who created India’s First-ever Budget

It’s that time of the year again when the entire country waits keenly for the single piece of document that will determine many of their financial decisions in the year ahead. The general budget 2019 will be here in a matter of days and while there is no dearth of information about the annual government exercise, not much is known about the man who had brought India’s first-ever budget.

It was a Scotsman named James Wilson, the founder of what is today the global behemoth Standard Chartered Bank, who created India’s first ever budget in 1860. Wilson was also the founder of the widely read magazine ‘The Economist’.

Having begun his career as a humble hat-maker, Wilson taught himself enough about finance and economics as the years passed, and eventually rose to the position of finance member in Viceroy Lord Canning’s Council in undivided India. He was also a member of the British Parliament, besides being Finance Secretary to the UK Treasury and Vice-President of the Board of Trade.

Wilson first arrived in India in 1859, at a time when the British government here was hard beset by Financial stress in the wake of what the British called the Sepoy Mutiny and Indians their first War of Independence. Increased military expenditure had drained the government’s resources, leaving with huge debts. Wilson, with his deep knowledge of how the market worked, was seen as the man who could salvage the situation.

He introduced for the first time in India a financial budget framed upon the English model – inspired the public mind with fresh confidence – brought together with the threads of finance which had been broken and scattered by a military and political convulsion – stimulated the operations of the Military Finance Commission to review the numerous branches of civil expenditure – reviewed the existing system of audit and account – besides discharging the multifarious duties developing on a Finance minister and a member of the general government.

James Wilson was also the man behind the introduction of the income tax act – a hated move that gave rise to a huge controversy. While he gave India an invaluable financial governance tool by way of his budget, his income tax act deeply dismayed businesses as well as zamindars, the landed class. His argument was that because the British government provided Indians with a safe environment for trade, they were justified in charging a fee in the form of an income tax. It, however, cut little ice. Aversion to pay income tax in India has persisted to this day.

Wilson was a liberal and strong proponent of the policy of laissez-faire. His magazine, The Economist was doubtful about imperialism – it argued in 1862 that colonies would be just as valuable to us if they were independent. It, however, did believe in the idea of the white’s man burden basically the essence of colonialism saying that “uncivilized races” were owed “guidance, guardianship and teaching”.

A 2016 article by two Canadian researchers analyzed the Economist’s writings on India from 1843 till the 1860s. It argued: “Despite the adherence of the paper to the ideas of laissez-faire nineteenth-century liberal ideas of political economy, it's writing on India – and the political career of its founder and editor, James Wilson – demonstrate a ready embrace of an empire, government intervention in the economy, and increased taxation. The article suggests this difference can be explained by the expression of colonial difference and attitudes to race.

Essential factors for Amazon Marketing Strategy

The right Amazon strategy is critical to scaling your Business on the world’s fastest growing e-commerce channel where millions of active shoppers search and browse products. While it has become more competitive, there is more opportunity than ever to grow your business on Amazon. Here’s a look at Amazon strategy that accounts for the essential factors to drive your business growth on the Marketplace.

Amazon Operations – You can spend all the time and resources on your product listings, content and advertising – and still fall short if your operations aren’t in order. Your approach to operations will differ if you are a first-party vendor that sells products wholesale to Amazon, a third-party seller using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), or a third-party seller using an alternative fulfillment service. Regardless of your model, the objective remains the same: identify and minimize operational gaps that slow performance and cost money.

This becomes more important when you consider that all operational factors impact one another. Your inventory and order fulfillment impact your in-stock rate, which influences control of the Buy Box, which impacts your Sponsored Products Advertising, which in turn affects sales and your organic product rankings.

Amazon Creative Content – You can drive all the traffic in the world to your listings but if your creative content is lacking or not congruent with the rest of the brand’s assets across the web, you will lose out on visibility and sales. Amazon is making a concentrated effort to empower brands with the creative tools and features they need to establish their brand equity and promote shopper loyalty. Amazon currently offers a multitude of branding features including Amazon Stores, A+ Content, Premium A+ content and Enhanced Brand content.

Not only do these creative features help to improve the aesthetics of brands on the Marketplace but they also provide new opportunities to drive traffic to a brand’s entire catalog and increase detail page conversion rates. Building out your product pages and storefront can contribute to a seamless customer experience that resonates with shoppers across your website, social channels, and Amazon.

Amazon Advertising – Your operations are dialed in, your product pages and stores feature visually compelling creative, now it’s time to power up the advertising machine to get more eyeballs on your product listings and store pages.

The failure to leverage a comprehensive advertising strategy on Amazon significantly limits the ability of brands to reach customers. Because over 70% of Amazon shoppers do not click past the first page results. That means if your products aren’t displaying on page one, you have little chance of shoppers landing on your page. Even brands that have a strong organic ranking need a paid media strategy because, without it, they will fall behind in traffic, sales velocity and ranking. When it comes to generating paid traffic that powers your Amazon flywheel you have several options: Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, Sponsored Brands, and Amazon DSP.

Amazon Sponsored Products – These are pay-per-click ads based on keywords that drive traffic to a desired product detail page within the Amazon platform. SP is particularly important because you can create auto campaigns for keyword harvesting and manual campaigns for more granular targeting. These ads are great for driving traffic and showing up for important keywords that you otherwise wouldn’t display for on the first page organically.

Amazon Sponsored Brands – These are keyword-driven ads that can appear across the top of the SERP. In 2018, Amazon opened up Sponsored Brands to 3 new ad placements including the middle of the SERP and at the very bottom of the SERP. Sponsored Brands are great for driving awareness or branding around a particular keyword.

Amazon DSP – Formerly known as Amazon Advertising Platform (AAP), the Amazon DSP is Amazon’s display offering that can be used to target Amazon audiences across webpages and apps that are connected to Amazon Display network. From home page banner placements to HTML offerings, Amazon DSP is a premium advertising offer available within Amazon vendor services.

One of the major perks of DSP advertising is the ability to leverage Amazon customer data to serve ads to past purchases and other shoppers likely to purchase your products on Amazon-owned network sites. Amazon DSP targeting spans the entire marketing funnel: lifestyle segments, in-market segments and retargeting segments – all based on Amazon’s first party shopper data.

Amazon is only going to grow more competitive, which is why it’s important to leverage on Amazon strategy that accounts for the main factors that drive success on the marketplace. These factors call for mastering your operational efficiency, creative content to build brand equity and tell your story, and Amazon advertising to drive visibility and traffic to your optimized listings.

Paid Search vs. Paid Social

When it comes to online marketing, PPC advertising is one of the most powerful tools you can use. Year after year, it gets easier and easier to reach your target market on Facebook Ads, Google Ads and like.

Unfortunately, with all of the features and options we now have available, it can be overwhelming to find the right way to market your business. Even on a single platform like Google Ads, you have options for manual ads, automated text ads, click-to-call ads, banner ads, video ads and much, much more. Then, throw in half-a-dozen or more additional platforms and it can simply be too much to wrap your head around.

While the array of marketing opportunities at your disposal may be dizzying, most of them can be placed in one of two categories: paid search and paid social. There are a few other options, like display ads, but since paid search and paid social are the powerhouses of PPC, I’m going to focus on them here.

When you look at your PPC advertising options this way, it becomes a lot easier to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and where they fit into your marketing strategy. So, in this article, I’m going to compare these two marketing channels and tell you what you need to know to make better marketing decisions for your business.

Paid search advertising platforms show ads in response to search queries. Google Ads is the best-known paid search platform, but most search engines (Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.) offer paid search advertising options. What makes paid search great is the fact that it is intent-based advertising. People see your ads because they are actively looking for a solution to a problem. This sort of audience is usually ready (or almost ready) to make a purchase, which is good news for you and your business.

In contrast, paid social ads show up when people are on a social media platform like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or even Reddit. Unlike paid search, your audience isn’t actively looking for a solution to a problem. In fact, they may not even realize that they have a problem. On the surface, paid social advertising is a lot like many classic forms of advertising such as radio ads, billboards or TV commercials. Instead of waiting for customers to come to you, you are highlighting a need and offering your business as the solution.

The hope is that people will resonate with your message and decide to buy from you, but that can be a bit of an uphill battle. Fortunately, unlike radio or TV ads, you can actually track the performance of your paid social ads. This makes it much easier to determine how people are responding and adjust your messaging or targeting. If you can get your paid social campaigns dialed in, you can drive business from a very large group of people, many of whom may never have bought from you otherwise.

In an ideal world, you’d market everywhere, on every platform, all of the time. However, for most companies, that isn’t very practical. Time and financial limitations make it hard to take advantage of every advertising opportunity. With that in mind, let’s take a look at these two marketing channels and ask the question: should you focus on paid search or paid social? The right answer for your business depends on what you’re trying to market, who you’re trying to market to, and what your marketing goals are. So, let’s take a look at three different scenarios to help you decide on the right marketing channel for you.

Fast Results - When you’re starved for sales and need to get leads in or merchandise out, paid search is hard to beat. Your audience may not be huge, but you’re targeting a market that is ready to buy, so running paid search ads is a great way to get at people who already at the bottom of your marketing funnel. Most of the time, paid search really isn’t a long-term play. People see your ad and they either click…or they don’t. If they click, they either convert…or they don’t. Retargeting can help you capture some lost sales, but most of the time, people who click on your paid search ads are very close to making a purchase.

The good news is, most paid search platforms are well-designed to help facilitate rapid decision-making. After all, that’s the whole point of paid search advertising: to get in front of a high-intent audience and convince them to convert before that intent fades. In contrast, because paid social is advertiser-initiated, rather than user-initiated, the intent is much lower and it can often take longer to see results. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t get a good return on a paid social campaign, but it doesn’t always happen right away.

Lower Costs - We all know that you have to spend money to make money, but some of us have more money to spend than others. If funds are tight, it’s natural to want to look for the cheaper advertising option. If you look at things purely in terms of cost-per-click (CPC), paid social is a lot more accessible than paid search. As a general rule, the lower in the funnel a click is, the more you can expect to pay for it. And, as we’ve just discussed, clicks don’t get much lower-funnel than paid search. So, if all you care about is CPC, paid social is the easy winner.

Awareness - As important as sales and profitability are, there are only so many people conducting online searches that are relevant to your business at any given time. To grow beyond that point, you have to start building awareness. This is where paid social really shines. If you are selling something that people don’t realize that they need, paid social can be a great way to build awareness for that need.

Alternatively, if you are trying to build a loyal following so that people will buy from you when they have a problem instead of searching online, paid social is a great way to build awareness for your brand. In either of these cases, you’re trying to target people further up the funnel than paid search can reach. With paid social ads, you can tell a product or brand story using imagery, reviews or video content that gets people excited about your business, products and vision. So, whether you’re trying to sell something people have never heard of before, want to bulk out your sales funnel, or simply want to build a loyal following online, when it comes to building awareness, it’s hard to beat paid social advertising.

So, should you advertise on paid search or paid social? Obviously, it’s ideal to use both of these marketing channels, but most businesses find that emphasizing a specific channel works better for their business. The right channel for your business depends a lot on the products or services you’re marketing, your business model, and the audience you’re trying to reach and what your marketing goals are. That’s why it’s so important to understand how each marketing channel works, its strengths and weaknesses and what it can do for your business.

At this point, it should hopefully be obvious what channel you should be emphasizing in your marketing. You’ll still need to test and figure things out, of course, but picking the right marketing channel is the first step on the road to PPC advertising success.

What ‘Calibra’ mean for Marketers?

Facebook announced it is launching a financial subsidiary in 2020 called Calibra that will include a digital wallet offered as a standalone app and built into WhatsApp and Messenger. The digital wallet will enable global users to make financial transactions using Libra, the newly formed currency powered by Blockchain technology backed by Facebook and a number of leading financial, technology and venture capital organizations, including Mastercard, Uber, PayPal and Andreessen Horowitz. Libra will be governed by the Libra Association, formed to promote adoption of the currency and developer platform.

Facebook is still in the early stages of this effort. Addressing privacy concerns, the company has said it will not share user account information or financial data with a third party without a user’s consent. Facebook also said Calibra’s user data would not be used for ad targeting on Facebook’s platforms. That doesn’t mean there won’t be implications for an advertiser. Even without using Calibra’s data for ad targeting purposes, Facebook expects its move into the cryptocurrency market will have a positive impact on ad revenue.

Marketers are paying attention to the cross-border payment capabilities Facebook’s Calibra will offer. It’s a way for Facebook to bring e-commerce into developing countries, where they don’t have stable currencies or means to pay. Whether or not Facebook will be able to drive global e-commerce within its apps via Calibra depends entirely on the success of the Libra cryptocurrency it is helping to develop.

Data privacy issues, customer trust issues, regulatory uncertainty, the absence of China and many other strict Cryptocurrencies regulated countries, other competing but more mature ‘good enough’ technologies are all great barriers that Facebook needs to overcome. Creating a way for worldwide users to engage with brands — and purchase from them regardless of their geographic location — could dramatically impact Facebook’s business model and further cement its dominance as a social platform. But, it’s not going to be smooth sailing for Facebook in the coming months.

Much is riding on the success of the Libra cryptocurrency for Facebook. But, should it succeeds, marketers are ready for the added e-commerce and customer experience possibilities it could provide. It’s a way Facebook can keep users inside of its platforms — Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp — longer, while, at the same time, increasing conversion rates for e-commerce advertisers because of the expectation will be that consumers will be checking out using the Libra coins, and it will be all one seamless experience.

Book Review: Sapiens – A Brief history of Humankind

I much enjoyed Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens. It is a brilliant, thought-provoking odyssey through human history with its huge confident brush strokes painting enormous scenarios across time. It is massively engaging and continuously interesting. The book covers a mind-boggling 13.5 Billion years of pre-history and history.

From the outset, Harari seeks to establish the multifold forces that made Homo (‘Man’) into Homo sapiens (‘Wise Man’) exploring the impact of a large brain, tool use, complex social structures and more. He brings the picture up to date by drawing conclusions from mapping the Neanderthal genome, which he thinks indicates that Sapiens did not merge with Neanderthals but pretty much wiped them out.

Throughout Sapiens, there’s a persistent theme about how humans continue to allow their luxuries to become necessities. Wheat farming was beneficial for sedentary lifestyles — but after humans established sedentary lifestyles, they had no choice but to continue farming, else return to their nomad days. In this manner, wheat farming, which was meant to be an advantage, became a necessity for Homo sapiens, since they no longer wanted to return to their older lifestyle.

Similarly, writing allowed humans to store ideas and thoughts outside of their brains. This is greatly helpful to pass information from generation to generation and to record financial transactions. However, as writing’s popularity grew, it not only became a necessity for all transactions and information storage, but it also has actually changed the way Homo sapiens think. A similar effect occurs today in the Google Era, where we no longer remember information snippets, instead of remembering where to obtain the information.

Sapiens doesn’t read like a textbook. It entices the readers from the first page and flows well, connecting lots of information in an interesting way. The book is split into four different sections, starting with the Cognitive Revolution. We were not always the only humans roaming the Earth. In fact, our singularity is unique. Sapiens encourages the reader to rethink our conceptions about humanity and tends to take a more objective scientific approach, focusing on our development as animals rather than some ‘high being.’ Harari addresses different theories of why we survived while our other fellow Homo family members didn’t. The book does a good job of explaining the “fictions” that people create in order to work together and create a functioning, forever evolving society.

The second part of the book is focused on the Agricultural Revolution and takes a different tone I’ve read before when it comes to the positive or negative impact of humanity’s move to farming. In fact, Harari thinks its history’s “biggest fraud.” He makes the argument that while the agricultural revolution was good for our species in the sense that we “created more copies of our DNA,” but bad in terms of quality of life and human suffering. It also contributed to the suffering of animals and the deterioration of entire ecosystems.

This section also talks about the rise of the elite and the development of writing and mathematics. But the most interesting part of this section was chapter eight when Harari writes about the different “fictions’ in our society that organize us as well as the reality that “human rights” aren’t exactly what we think they are. A lot of this section is devoted to talking about the concept of “purity” in different cultures and how humans use it to segment themselves from other groups. He also delves into the subject of sex and gender, exploring the possibilities as to why many societies have developed into patriarchies. This section is a lot less about the events that took place during the Agricultural revolution and more about the reasons different societies developed the way that they did through different lenses like race, sex, and social status.

Section three is called the Unification of Humankind and focuses primarily on the growing unity between parts of the globe. Harari questions the modern political order, asking How American politics can both support the individual and equality? And how do you believe in one God and also a dualistic Devil? Most of the section is focused on addressing the different ways in which humanity has used our cognitive dissonance and duelling cultural values in order to move forward and the different major forces that have unified the globe in the modern era. The most interesting parts of this section had to do with the creation of money and the development of religion and ideology. I also thought that his argument as to why different ideologies such as communism are religions was fascinating and that he does an excellent job of explaining the different kinds of Humanisms.

Part four evaluates the world in terms of money, imperialism, capitalism, and modern science. So much of this book is focused on the importance of environmentalism and encourages the reader to think about their place in our ecological environment on this Earth and not just as a part of humanity. He also asks the reader to evaluate the last 200 years of history and the oddity of our exponential growth compared to the rest of our history. The reframing of the Industrial Revolution as a drastic change in the structure of our communities and families is well done. His view of the modern age feels optimistic, pointing out that while sometimes things feel bleak, humanity is also much less violent and connected to global interests than ever before.

Sapiens is different than a traditional history book in the way that it seeks to explain history through the lens of different significant ideologies and concepts rather than events. It asks why things happened in relation to various forces and questions them thoroughly rather than merely saying that they happened.

Counting Happiness

In recent decades, psychologists and biologists have taken up the challenge of studying scientifically what really makes people happy. Is it money, family, genetics or perhaps virtue? The first step is to define what is to be measured. The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’. Happiness, according to this view is something I feel inside myself, a sense of either immediate pleasure or long-term contentment with the way my life is going.

Many questionnaires are used in order to correlate happiness with various objective factors. One study might compare a thousand people who earn $100,000 a year with a thousand people who earn $50,000. If the study discovers that the first group has an average subjective well-being level of 8.7, while the latter has an average of only 7.3, the researcher may reasonably conclude that there is a positive correlation between wealth and subjective well-being. To put in simple English, money brings happiness.

One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point and beyond that point it has little significance. For people stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder, more money means greater happiness. If you are an American single mother earning $12,000 a year cleaning houses and you suddenly win $500,000 on the lottery, you will probably experience a significant and long-term surge in your subjective well-being. However, if you are a top executive earning $250,000 a year and you win $1 Million on the lottery, or your company board suddenly decides to double your salary, your surge is likely to last only a few weeks.

Family and community seem to have more impact on your happiness than money and health. People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found a community to be part of.

Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. If you want an iPhone and get an iPhone, you are content. If you want a brand-new Mercedes and get only a second-hand Fiat you feel deprived. This is why winning the lottery has, over time, the same impact on people’s happiness as a debilitating car accident. When things improve, expectations balloon and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied. When things deteriorate, expectations shrink, and consequently, even a severe illness might leave you pretty much as happy as you were before.

The crucial importance of human expectations has far-reaching implications for understanding the history of happiness. If happiness depended only on objective conditions such as wealth, health and social relations, it would have been relatively easy to investigate its history. The finding that it depends on subjective expectations makes the task of historians far harder. We moderns have an arsenal of tranquillizers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did.

Source - Sapiens

Components of Mobile Audience Marketing

The birth of digital advertising brought with it the sophisticated use of data for audience targeting. While the cookie has served as the de facto mechanism for building audiences across desktop advertising, privacy-compliant location data now serves as the primary component of mobile audience marketing, through the use of location-based marketing strategies like geo-targeting and geo-conquesting.

However, marketers primarily focus on one component of mobile audience-marketing today – reaching the right audience. There’s growing attention on attribution, a second element, which shows that online ads result in physical retail sales. There’s also a third element to successful audience marketing which receives little attention today – understanding that audience before the sale of the campaign even occurs. Marketers looking to build out mobile marketing are missing roughly two-thirds of the picture that’s available to them today.

When creating the initial concept for a campaign, we’ve seen the most successful companies use location-based analytics to inform their sales pitches and presentations before the campaign even begins. They’re using data to learn how frequently customers visit their locations to segment their audience based upon loyalty. They’re evaluating which competitive locations their audience also visits to influence that audience and increase the efficiency of their ad spend. One of the most effective use cases is agencies and sales teams using this data early in the sales cycle to help their clients visualize and understand their audience, which boosts not only their credibility but also their ability to win the business.

The second component of mobile audience-marketing involves building and reaching the audience. There are numerous platforms available today that provide a black-box approach to buying very broad location-based audiences, such as Target shoppers or coffee drinkers. There is an elegant simplicity in choosing a pre-built audience, and there are always campaigns that are a great fit for this tactic.

On the flip side, if there’s one thing that Facebook and Google have proven when it comes to audience targeting; marketers absolutely love to see high degrees of transparency, flexibility and customizability as to how those audiences are made. They love taking control of the creation of the audience. Marketers that plan the most effective mobile campaigns spend a few extra minutes customizing the specific locations and date ranges that comprise their audience. They’re using the data and the visualizations they generated in the first step to increase their return-on-investment.

The last component of mobile audience marketing, and easily the most difficult, is attributing digital campaigns to in-store foot traffic and purchases. Advertisers increasingly ask for this, but there is still no holistic solution that can provide the answer. Fundamentally, this problem remains unsolved because of all of the various data silos that aren’t able to communicate with one another. The ad seen on TV can’t inform your phone or laptop that it’s also seen the ad, while the point-of-sale system or online checkout can’t notify those previous touch points to confirm the sale occurred.

Despite these challenges, true attribution will be available someday. In the meantime, marketers owe it to themselves to test multiple approaches to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. When considered from the “audience” perspective, we see companies looking to evaluate how this audience behaved after the campaign. They’re looking to answer questions like “Did the frequency of visitation increase?” “Did my foot traffic increase against my competitors with this audience?” “From which competitors am I winning market share?” Reporting that provides insight into how a campaign influenced a digital audience’s behavior in the physical world wins bonus points within marketing teams and with clients. There are also benefits to using different solutions that provide audience building, media spend, activation and attribution. By working with various companies, there is limited opportunity for bias in the results, and therefore, marketers can have more trust in the data.

The ability to reach and understand audiences across desktop advertising is mature. As mobile marketing increasingly dominates ad spend, and the use of geo-targeting strategies rises, the use cases and techniques also evolve. Mobile marketing initially adopted many of the tried-and-true approaches from the desktop ecosystem. As mobile advertising begins to mature, so does the ability for marketers to use data before, during and after campaigns. This comprehensive approach ultimately increases the effectiveness and credibility of campaigns.

How AI is Changing Marketing?

In the summer of 1956, 10 scientists and mathematicians gathered at New Hampshire Dartmouth College to brainstorm a new concept assistant profession John McCarthy called “artificial intelligence”. According to the original proposal for the research project, McCarthy along with fellow organizers from Harvard, Bell Labs and IBM wanted to explore the idea of programming machines to use language and solve problems for humans while improving over time.

It would be years before these lofty objectives were met, but the summer workshop is credited with launching the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sixty years later, cognitive scientists, data analysts, UX designers, and countless others are doing everything those pioneering scientists hoped for and more. With deep learning, companies can make extraordinary progress in industries ranging from cyber security to marketing.

Think of AI as a machine-powered version of mankind’s cognitive skills. These machines have the ability to interact with humans in a way that feels natural, and just like humans they can grasp complex concepts and extract insights from the information they’re given. Artificial intelligence can understand, learn, interpret, and reason. The difference is that AI can do all of these things faster and on a much bigger scale. AI has the capacity to create richer, more personalized digital experiences for consumers, and meet customers increasingly high brand expectations.

The knowledge companies stand to gain by using AI seems to have no bounds. In healthcare, medical professionals are applying it to analyze patient data, explain lab results, and support busy physicians. In the security industry, AI helps firms detect potential threats like malicious software in real time. Marketers, meanwhile, can use AI to synthesize data and identify key audience and performance insights, thus freeing them up to be more strategic and creative with their campaigns.

There’s something else AI is very good at, and that’s improving the relationship between companies and consumers. Over the past 50 years, advances like speech technology, automated attendants, virtual assistants, and websites have opened a chasm between companies and customer engagement while also multiplying consumer touchpoints. But AI has the potential to close that gap.

By helping marketers collect data, identify new customer segments, and create a more unified marketing and analytics system, AI can scale customer personalization and precision in ways that didn’t exist before. Connecting customer data from sources like websites and social media enables companies to craft marketing messages that are more relevant to consumers’ current needs. AI can deliver an ad experience that is more personalized for each user, shapes the customer journey, influences purchasing decisions, and builds brand loyalty.

IBM’s Watson Marketing is leading the charge with a platform that capitalizes on all that AI has to offer. Products like lets marketers visualize the customer journey and identify areas where consumers might be experiencing fiction. Companies get a more complete view of the customer journey, which they can then optimize to improve customer engagement and conversion rates. Since it is delivered through a single, unified interface, IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics makes gaining actionable intelligence a seamless process for brands.

We’ve entered the age of deep learning and with human guidance AI is finally reaching its true potential. Today, the technology McCarthy and his colleagues dreamed about in 1956 takes the form of AI platforms like and now is the right time to truly harness the power of AI and put it to work for business success.