Explore AI vendor companies offering marketing and advertising solutions, including lead scoring, conversion optimization, customer analytics, and more.
Episode Summary: We've interviewed a number of guests on Emerj, but very few who have had a serious part of their career in selling automobiles. But Michael Perry did just that for 5 years before founding Kit, his third startup - an AI-powered Virtual Employee that works in marketing for small businesses and was acquired by Shopify in April 2016. In this episode, Perry speaks about how Kit and Shopify leverage AI on a daily basis, and how a “non-tech” person with no formal background in AI or data science can build a team for an AI project.
Predictive analytics for marketing would have been adopted years ago - if only the compute power were more ubiquitous, the data were more accessible, and the software were easier to use. Now "predictive analytics" itself is almost a buzzword, after nearly 30 years of backward-looking marketing tracking. Today, well over 30 years after the founding of Lotus Software, even medium-sized businesses are often still operating their marketing "scoreboards" in Google Sheets or One Drive... "throw it in a spreadsheet" still works. But businesses with an eye on the future want to know more than just what happened in the past. "Scoreboards" (most analytics tools and tracking) don't tell you what the score will be. Some of our recent "AI for marketing" articles have gained readership because more and more executives are searching for ways to look forward with their numbers, not just back. SAS defines the term well:
Episode Summary: For some companies, big data remains an abstraction; for others, it's an integral part of the lifeblood of a business. Mat Harris is vice president at Sojern, a travel marketing platform that has leveraged big data to grow $3 billion in bookings and 1/3 of a billion traveler profiles across its platform. In this episode, Harris speaks about how Sojern and other businesses are using a combination of their data and other sources of data (what he calls third and "second" data sources) in order to make informed marketing decisions and better market their services to buyers. Harris sheds light on the direct ROI for big data in different businesses, and it's an interesting episode from the perspective of an executive who is using big data to make decisions on business directions.
In the hundreds of researcher and executive interviews we've been fortunate enough to conduct in the last three years, few artificial intelligence applications are brought up more than marketing and advertising. During talks with execs and researchers from companies ranging from Facebook to Baidu, and IBM to AT&T, marketing has been a perennial theme in conversations of AI's hottest applications.
How emotions influence consumer buying habits has long intrigued and evaded the business sector. Face recognition technology, once limited to security and surveillance systems, has made it possible to gauge more specific metrics to allow companies to predict consumer behavior and accelerate revenue growth.
