Talking Robots, Exciting Startups and Big Data. This is DX32016.

If haven’t heard about DX3, it’s Canada’s leading technology, digital marketing and retail event. This event is held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto. It was big and impressive! This year, we had a chance to attend and bring you some of the highlights:

What is all the buzz with big data and marketing?

This session was led by Gale’s CEO Brad Simms. The ultimate goal of a marketer is to use patterns and insights from data to understanding customers better and to market more effectively. Often big data projects big beaches, it’s too complex and expensive.

The alternative approach is to start with an MVP to prove the model. That’s right: Minimum Viable Product. This approach was adopted by lean mythology from the startup world. Once you’ve got the right approach it’s time to focus on the right types of data. These include:

• Demographic — this can include: age, gender, location
• Transactional — spending, basket size
• Behavioural — digital interaction, website analytics
• Enrichment data — third party data sources

What do with data? Once you’ve got all the data. Consider these:

• View the unstructured data from the customers’ point of view.
• Segment on salient marketing features
• Analyze, strategize but don’t paralyze. Bring on the marketing strategist, economist and data scientists to dig deeper.

This was indeed a fascinating talk indeed! Next up were some startups!

Let’s talk Startups.

We had a chance to see some of the exciting startups from Canada. Some notable startups we saw include:

Urbery — Our friends from Urbery are currently disrupting the grocery delivery marketing. Dreading to go to groceries next time? Order from Urbery!

Wriber — It’s a new platform that inspires writers and uses artificial intelligence to help companies create targeted content efficiently.

Conference Cloud — Helping event planners to broadcast their events. The motto is “Virtual Attendance. Made Simple.”

Granify — This startup automatically maximizes revenue for online retailers by identifying shoppers that aren’t going to buy and changing their mind — before they leave the site — by harnessing the power of real-time big data and machine learning.

Future of Retail: Pepper Robot?

Pepper Robot is a talking robotic that understands your commands and follows it. Is this perhaps the future of retail? As you walk into the store you are greeted by a robot who understand your size dimensions and the requirements for buying that perfect outfit. This remains to be seen!