MAY 20199Consumer data is being generated at an unprece-dented volume and rate across myriad devices. In our family, I count about 25 connected devices around us on a consistent basis. Each of them has a view of part of our daily activity. Piecing all that data together will give a full view of our family daily routine, where we live, work, go to school, shop, dine, browse, search, watch, chat on-line, how much we exercise ­ in general how we live our life. In other words, a goldmine for any advertiser! This sort of detailed view into consumer lives never existed before.Marketers have always chased the consumer--their data more precisely ­ as habits have changed from print to radio to TV to Internet and now to social media and smartphones. Combined with easily codable AI al-gorithms, and computing power on demand, marketing and advertising are surely getting transformed.Many parts of marketing and advertising are already data and algorithm driven: consumer behavior is quanti-fied; segments created based on data; audiences target-ed; content personalized; media buys automated; and analytics available for all campaigns. We at Oracle have a real-time consumer behavioral measurement plat-form called Infinity that can capture and quantify every minute thing a user does on a web page or a mobile app or an IoT device. Even if a user is on different devices, platforms, etc., we can stitch a 360-degree view by cre-ating an ID-graph to reconcile the multiple identities of a single customer. This connected data forms the core of our marketing automationand intelligence software that can then help marketers deliver hyper-personal-ized campaignsthrough email, web, or app channels. Surveys show 8 in 10 consumers have higher purchase intent and loyalty to brands that serve personalized content. Personalized content recommendations make services like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc., sticky and indispensable in our lives. Now even McDonalds wants to create a customized drive-thru experience and per-sonalized menu choices with their recent purchase of a big data and machine learning startup. Taking that to the next level, companies ideally want to be able to pre-dict what I will like (to eat or watch or buy). Among other creative ways that companies are try-ing to get a predictive edge, Disney,for instance,is using facial tracking software to map people's expressions to emotions while watching movie trailers and then us-ing it to predict when audiences might laugh at certain scenes. Overall, they want to understand audience sen-timent and extrapolate to box-office success. Because your face gives away the right feeling you had while watching. Surveys are a thing of the past in trying to understand audience reaction to a movie trailer. Pre-dictive analytics is what will give organizations a com-petitive edge. Marketers can use software such as ours to predict customer journeys and target against antici-pated behavior.Despite all of these advances of AI in marketing, the task of coming up with a creative is still based on intu-ition and is outside the realm of algorithms, but even parts of that are changing. Human intuition can be in-formed by data. Algorithms can look at past campaigns and give the marketer the data insight as to which im-ages/videos performed better in the past and tease out the characteristics that led to better vs. poor per-formance. Knowing the past success drivers will make the marketing process more efficient, and importantly more effective.Organizations that can connect the data-dots on consumer behavior will come out ahead. People who can derive intuition from data and not get lost in it will come out successful.There is aneed to develop the abil-ity to marry science and art. Organizations will need a serious skills upgrade ­ marketers need to train them-selves on how to leverage data science and still not lose their creative touch.Don't expect things to change overnight but know that in few years marketing as you know will change substantially. A quote by Roy Amara, the erstwhile President of the Institute of Future in Palo Alto, California, is appropriate here, "we tend to over-estimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Many parts of marketing and advertising are already data and algorithm driven: consumer behavior is quantified; segments created based on data; audiences targeted; content personalized; media buys automated; and analytics available for all campaigns
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