Leah Pope is CMO of data management and marketing analytics platform Datorama.
What are the main ways AI/machine learning will impact marketers and their work in the next year or two?
Marketers now have a higher calling. They’re shouldering more responsibility as they must get their arms around delivering a customer experience strategy, and according to Gartner, they’ve outpaced CIOs in their tech spend. In the short-term, AI will allow them to drive better marketing performance, have better insight on the entire customer journey and do something unprecedented – truly and accurately understand marketing’s ROI and its contributing factors.
In summary, what will be the long-term impact of AI/machine learning on marketing?
With the influx of data in the past handful of years, the pendulum swung toward technical, analytics-focused work. As the power of AI is making data more accessible and now able to help elevate critical business insights, data-driven marketing will essentially become the new normal, or standard for doing business in the modern era. I believe the pendulum will then swing back toward the art of marketing, buoyed by science that can be acted on down to an individual customer level — segment of one marketing.
How is AI/machine learning incorporated in the work you’re doing?
Currently, Datorama is using AI to do the heavy lifting when it comes to data. Some would call this the “janitorial work.” Our unique application of AI is able to integrate and cleanse/prepare marketing data wherever it lives, which is one of the modern marketer’s most significant challenges. In addition, we have some exciting AI-related news just around the corner. Stay tuned.
In your experience, is AI/machine learning already affecting what brands do, or are awareness and adoption still very limited?
It absolutely is. Take, for example, some customers we’re engaged with that are trying to market to customers as a segment of one. If it was not for more processing power, which is more easily available due to more aggressive pricing thanks to the cloud, and the advancement of AI technology, this would not be possible. We’re getting to the point where determining marketing’s true ROI is outweighing the cost of sitting on the sidelines due to fear and uncertainty.
