How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Marketing

I came across a really interesting article that focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing. There are so many potential intersections between these disciplines and clearly it is going to transform marketing as we know it. It is hard not to imagine that traditional marketing will further recede into the background because it is hard to apply AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to print ads and billboards. You don’t get the engagement statistics with traditional marketing media that you do with digital.

The article, “3 New Ways Artificial Intelligence is Powering the Future of Marketing,” offers some unique applications of AI, which we’ll discuss in a moment. But first let’s look at how AI is already used in marketing.

Customized ads: Say you search for a BMW and then suddenly you start to get offered related ads on Google. This is AI. There is a pretrained model that understands that your search terms belong to a certain topic, in this case cars, and now it knows how to feed you ads that share those same words.

Sentiment analysis: AI is used to analyze communications for how people feel about products or issues. So if you Tweet something about a product, the system can determine an estimate of your feelings based on the words you use – hate, love, useless, hope, great, etc.

OK – one more really cool example NOT in the article… people perceive and react to words differently depending on your demographic, mindset, experience, etc. People are using machine learning to create language graphs (ontologies) that differentiate interpretation of words by certain groups. Using this, machines can learn to automatically serve up marketing or advertising based on what resonates with that group.

The first of the three new ways artificial intelligence is what they call “video synthesis,” or digital editing through synthetic media and deep learning. The article shows how this was done to create an ad featuring Snoop Dogg for one brand and recreate it for another brand without reshooting.

The second example in the article is a new model of marketing: Business to Robot to Consumer (or B2R2C) business model. Called “the new frontier” in the article, an example of this is when your refrigerator orders food for you. This business model is based on the idea that increasingly there are avatars and robots that are gatekeepers between brands and consumers. What the article does not discuss is what marketing to your robot actual entails.

The third of the three ways is creating digital people, where you create a lifelike interactive avatar using “autonomous animation” and apply it to a variety of use cases – training, entertainment, financial services, etc.

I wonder whether our ethics surrounding the use of AI will keep up with our technological capability.