Artificial Intelligence Marketing

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Artificial intelligence Portal

Artificial Intelligence Marketing (AIM) is still at an early stage but the widespread of high performant and affordable technologies and the advance, documentation and approachability of Artificial Intelligence mean that AI is now a more plausible solution to the pursuit of the one to one customer relationship. There is no doubt that this is a growing area and formalisation in this type of marketing activities will occurs in the coming years.

AIM is a form of Direct Marketing leveraging Database Marketing techniques as well as AI concept and model such as Machine Learning and Bayesian Network. The main difference resides in the reasoning part which suggests it is performed by computer and algorithm instead of human.

Contents

[edit] Behavioral Targeting

Artificial Intelligence Marketing provides a set of tools and techniques that enable behavioral targeting.

[edit] Collect, Reason, Act

A simplified view of behavioral targeting is to describe it in three stages :

[edit] Collect

This term relates to all activities which aims at capturing customer or prospect data. Whether taken online or offline these data are then saved into customer or prospect databases.

[edit] Reason

This is the part where data is transformed into information and eventually intelligence. This is the section where Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in particularly have a key role to play.

[edit] Act

With the intelligence gathered from the reason step above you can then act. In Marketing context act would be some sort of communications that would attempt to influence a prospect of customer purchase decision using incentive driven message

Again Artificial Intelligence has a role to play in this stage as well. Ultimately in an unsupervised model the machine would take the decision and act accordingly to the information it receives at the collect stage.

[edit] Aiming

Interestingly and oddly enough Artificial Intelligence Marketing acronym forms the word : Aim. Now if you look further into the meaning of the word in the context of marketing and behavorial targeting it provides amazing insight and relevance.

[edit] Definition

The concept of aiming in Direct Marketing has rarely if at all been used before. One of the verb definition of aim on Wordnet is :

calculate, aim, direct (specifically design a product, event, or activity for a certain public)

If you analyse the word further and especially the 'act of aiming' and how good or not you can be at it, you need to introduce a notion of learning.

Let's take an example : Archery.

[edit] Archery

Archery is the practice of using a bow to shoot arrows. Aiming Methods in archery describes types of methods for aiming and they all have something in common : learning (or practice). To get better at aiming you need to practice (learning method) and practicing is in fact learning. Consequently the 'act of aiming' is based on an 'act of learning'

[edit] Applied to Direct Marketing

So in the context of direct marketing aiming can be defined as the act of reaching a targeted prospect or customer base by using methods and techniques from the Artificial Intelligence and more specifically Machine Learning fields.

[edit] Machine Learning

Machine Learning is concerned with the design and development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to "learn".

As defined above Machine Learning is one of the techniques that can be employed to enable more effective behavioral targeting

[edit] Concerns

As mentioned in the behavioral targeting article :

"Many online users & advocacy groups are concerned about privacy issues around doing this type of targeting. This is an area that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to minimize through education, advocacy & product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable or to use opt-in and permission from end-users (permission marketing)."

[edit] References