When Is Your Targeting Creepy?
Issue 3: CognitionX — The Future of Marketing — a weekly briefing on AI and emerging tech
Oracle’s CEO Mark Hurd sees just two cloud application providers controlling 80% of the market within 10 years. The current leaders’ (Adobe, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle) appetite for data analytics and AI startups is ravenous, as each vie for a better product suite — watch this space.
Read on for…
- 💰 AI products scooping up funding. Can these tools be of use to your business?
- 📊 3.8B marketing interactions analysed by Blueshift
- 🕵 Targeting crossing the ‘creepy line’
- 💡 Predictions from the Global Head of TCS Interactive — keep ahead of the curve
Don’t forget to check out cognitionx.com for more articles, research papers, and insights.
Fundraising
This week saw a slew of fundraising, our picks of the bunch being…
Anymind — Singapore based ad planning and optimisation platform, $13.4m
LoopMe — British ad placement platform, $13m
Conversica — USA text based sales automation tool, $31m
As the big exits this year keep coming (think Datorama, Datascience, DataFox and Grapeshot), the capital keeps flowing into marketing startups using AI/ML. See the chart below.
Product News
New AI-powered solutions from Return Path
Return Path have added two super useful features to their product suite as the ‘Dynamic Optimisation’ solution. An AI classifier predicts i. low inbox placement and ii. subscriber list fatigue.
i. Sending Priority classifies subscribers based on engagement and sets priorities.
ii. Engagement Assurance temporarily suppresses fatigued subscribers.
The solution is however currently only available for their clients using Salesforce Marketing Cloud as their email service provider.
Research
AI-driven marketing boosts engagement and ROI
Key takeaways from marketing platform Blueshift’s ‘first of a kind’ analysis of 3.5B marketing interactions worldwide:
AI-powered campaigns can achieve
- 3x average revenue increase
- 3.1x-7.2x lift in customer engagement
- Nearly 2x greater impact on engagement for mobile
- Continuously improving campaign performance as the AI engine trains
While Blueshift have commercial incentives to produce such research, the number of data points is encouraging and the results certainly reflect industry sentiment.
Pick a color and this AI system will craft a logo
A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) built by researchers at Maastricht University has been producing some convincing logos. Scroll to the bottom of the article for productised examples of AI creativity.
Brand Safety
Why AI is the best defence for brand safety
In an incredibly complex media landscape, content placement is a worry for brands and platforms — both of whom face backlash if it goes wrong. With 85% of marketers saying that improving brand safety is a high or critical priority, Andrew Morsy argues that:
Semantic analysis and natural language processing will be used to develop a human-like understanding of the meaning of content — helping brands identify fake news or damaging content and avoid brand safety issues.
Targeting
How to personalise without crossing the ‘creepy line’ — Marketing Land
75% of consumers find personalised brand experiences ‘somewhat creepy’ according to InMoment’s reportpublished earlier this year.
Four tips for less creepy campaigns (expanded on in the article):
- Keep it simple — don’t collect data for data’s sake
- Be honest
- Show value
- Don’t exploit consumers’ trust
Do you know a lot about this subject?
Futurism
The future of Martech — and what it means today
Sunil Karkera, Global Head, TCS Interactive at Tata Consultancy Services, looks back on the history of MarTech, recommends three things marketers needs to focus on, and predicts four developments that will take place in the MarTech space in the near future.
Technology will be central to the future, of course. But success will demand that alchemical mixture of insight and creativity that marketers can and must provide.
Trends
Is there a place for CRMs in a CDP world?
Barry Levine writes about the changing requirements of the CRM and brings together a case that customer data platforms, more optimised for personalisation and account-based marketing will become a more fundamental tool.
“It used to be, you pick up the phone and [the results of the conversation] get recorded into Salesforce,” he said. “Now, it’s 8 to 10, maybe more, touches [between the brand and the customer] before Salesforce.”- Raviv Turner, CEO CaliberMind
