IBM Watson's Data-Crunching Gains Traction with Marketing Firms
May 18 2016 - 7:29AM
Dow Jones News
By Nathalie Tadena
More marketers are putting Watson to work.
Employing IBM's artificial intelligence technology has become a
popular move for brands seeking to make better use of data in their
marketing efforts.
Havas Group this week is officially unveiling Havas Cognitive, a
new practice in partnership with IBM Watson, to help clients
develop tailored marketing campaigns and products.
Separately, startup Equals 3 on Wednesday is launching a new
software product dubbed Lucy that utilizes Watson's cognitive
computing capabilities to make the media planning process more
efficient for marketers and agencies.
That follows earlier announcements by Turner Broadcasting, which
earlier this year signed a deal to incorporate Watson into its ad
sales efforts, and Kia Motors, which used Watson to select social
media influencers for its Super Bowl ad campaign.
Watson, which gained fame after beating top human competitors on
"Jeopardy" five years ago, analyzes troves of data to uncover
patterns that humans might miss. The computing platform is designed
to understand and reason like humans and is "constantly evolving
and constantly adapting" based on use and new pieces of data, said
IBM Watson Vice President Stephen Gold.
Watson is particularly adept at analyzing "unstructured" data
such as social media posts, videos and images that exist outside of
traditional data warehouses and which now account for the majority
of data within an organization.
"In that data is locked away a tremendous amount of insight into
what we as individuals are looking to do, how we expect to be
treated and the interaction, communication and engagement that we
prefer," Mr. Gold said.
More than 550 different organizations across 17 industries have
partnered with IBM Watson to use the technology to develop
commercial products, apps and services. About 20% of these partners
are working within the "consumer space," including partners focused
on marketing, Mr. Gold said. For marketers, IBM Watson's
data-crunching capabilities can help them create personalized
campaigns and messages for target audiences.
"The holy grail for marketing is really to be able to target a
market of one," Mr. Gold said.
Havas Cognitive has been operating in beta for six months, with
a core team of about 60 employees that has completed 10 projects so
far. The venture uses what it calls "Make" prototyping sessions to
help clients test and build AI-powered products.
Havas and IBM Watson last fall teamed up for a digital marketing
program for TD Ameritrade around the brokerage's sponsorship with
the National Football League. To boost online brand engagement for
TD Ameritrade, IBM Watson used a custom algorithm to analyze social
media posts from football fans to measure the level of confidence
around fans' favorite teams in real time. (Posts using a campaign
hashtag were picked up.) The data was used to rank and reward the
most confident football fans and the algorithm was able to
accurately predict the winner of Super Bowl 50, the Denver Broncos,
before the game, said Jason Jercinovic, Havas' global head of
marketing innovation
"It's about finding insights at scale and how do you find the
needle in the haystack of big data," Mr. Jercinovic said of Havas
Cognitive's mandate. Havas and IBM have been working together for
20 years.
Equals 3, a startup founded last year that is also a developer
partner of IBM Watson, designed its Lucy software to help Fortune
1000 brands and agencies quickly comb through all of an
organization's data to answer marketing questions through one
interface. The software's confidence in answering a marketing
question strengthens the more data it ingests.
"What we're doing is bringing a level of automation to job
functions or roles that previously had not been automated," said
Equals 3 co-founder Scott Litman.
A user, for example, can ask Lucy a question about the type of
consumer who buys a particular car brand and the software will
generate the best response within seconds based on its reading of
structured and unstructured information available.
The software is powered by eight of IBM Watson's services and is
designed to help users conduct deep market and customer research
and analyze data to inform brands' media buys. (Havas Media was a
beta tester of the Lucy product, but Lucy is not affiliated with
the Havas Cognitive practice.)
Write to Nathalie Tadena at nathalie.tadena@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 18, 2016 07:14 ET (11:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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