Last week, IBM announced three new marketing products at the start of the Advertising Week in New York. Those products all make use of Watson, the all-knowing computer that was mostly used for medical research in the past. The Watson technology has been used for some time to help pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and doctors to treat diseases like cancer for example.
IBM hopes that the knowledge of Watson could be useful to obtain more profit from marketing budgets, that are usually around 12 percent of the annual turnover of large and small companies. But only a small part of the marketing efforts also actually yields something. According to IBM, with the current explosion of data it will be more difficult to reach the right audience. To bring some more personalisation to marketing campaigns, IBM recruited the help of AI and unveiled three new marketing solutions: IBM Watson Ads Omni, IBM Media Optimizer and Predictive Audiences.
Watson Ads Omni is an AI-powered interactive ad unit that enables marketeers to deploy AI-powered interactive placements on any digital site. Watson Ads Omni is an extension of the Watson Ads platform, which was launched two years ago, but was only used by the Weather Channel. From now on the product is available for every marketing agency. Lego will become the first client that makes use of artificial intelligence during Black Friday. Watson is fed with knowledge about 35 different Lego products and asks questions to users like a kind of chatbot, for example about the age of interest of children.
The IBM Media Optimizer is what the name suggests: a tool developed together with MediaPath to increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and optimize the customer journey. The Intelligent Bidder calculates a user’s bid probability by analysing the channel, time and bid value of a given placement.
With Predictive Audiences models are made to approach the right target group. In this case IBM works together with LiveRamp, which can bring together data such as weather forecasts and location. Integrations with relationship management suppliers are also possible.
In my opinion, all very interesting tools for marketeers to build campaigns, enhance customer experience and improve conversion rates with the use of AI.
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IBM’s new Watson AI marketing suite personalizes ads for individual customers
