How the use of Artificial Intelligence is Impacting the World of Digital Marketing

How intelligent is Artificial Intelligence?

Would you trust a Chat Bot to manage your brand’s customer service?

Some think the automated system will relieve pressure on overburdened customer service teams, while others think that Bots just don’t have the empathy of their human counterparts to do the job effectively. It’s true the AI is advancing at warp speed, last year Google’s DeepMind computer famously learned to play the ancient Chinese board game of “Go” to a superhuman level, beating the world expert.

Algorithms are smarter and faster than the human mind, but they are based and built on numbers. That enables them to solve hugely complex mathematical or strategic problems in fractions of a second, but sit a creative challenge in front of them and they’re stumped.

While machine learning is advancing, it hasn’t yet advanced to effectively pass a Turing Test (a test to find out if you’re talking to a computer or a person) and with that in mind, is it too soon for them to be entrusted with managing brand reputation through customer service? With great power comes great responsibility…

Our apprentice Saba takes a look at AI and its application to marketing campaigns. Have a read...

The multitude of ways artificial intelligence can be used has been spoken about and explored for some time now. It is only in the last few years that it has actually been used to benefit the world of digital marketing. While many brands and businesses remain hesitant to implement AI into their marketing plan, we are also seeing some willing to embrace its advantages.

A great example of this is when the marketing masterminds behind the movie ‘Ex Machina’ used artificial intelligence to create a campaign for the sci-fi film. Tinder hopefuls who swiped right to “Ava” probably felt over the moon once they were matched with the beautiful brunette. Ava would ask questions like “have you ever been in love?”, “what makes you human?” and “what attracts you to me?”, little did they know they would fall victim of nothing more than just a marketing gimmick to promote the film ‘Ex Machina’. Many of these Tinder users may have even fallen for Ava and because of this, some say the strategy was deceptive, an invasion of privacy and even toying with people’s emotions, whereas some argue it just makes it that much better purely based on the fact that the movie itself is about deceptive artificial intelligence. Regardless of its mixed reviews, the campaign went viral therefore gaining awareness, undoubtedly doing exactly what the marketers wanted.

This sort of advanced technology is seen a lot in customer service today. Have you ever had a live chat with a shop rep online? Chances are, he/she is probably a bot. Intelligent chat-bots are proving to be a great form of customer support and user experience and many retailers are now using chat-bots for their businesses.

“Chat-bots have access to millions of customer-centered data points. They can also aggregate location-specific requests to detect patterns, spot repetitive problems, and predict what’s causing issues for a particular user … Often, this makes them more knowledgeable than any human customer service rep.”- Markus Lippus

Take the example of Tommy Hilfiger’s incredibly effective AI customer service. The chat-bots they use have been trained to mimic how people actually speak. Using this technology marketers are now able to take their content marketing to the next level, offering a fully personalised experience. Not only will they give customers an experience tailored to them, but they completely benefit marketer, making their life so much easier. They can handle customer queries in our absence and are very cost-efficient. Best of all, they will never lose patience with even the angriest of customers and can even handle them all simultaneously. AI can learn to target only the most relevant users, they know who is more likely to engage with their ad rather than people who have avoided similar ads in the past. This results in greater efficiency and staying better informed about the audience you want to target. This type of technology will keep developing and become much more advanced.

These are just a couple of examples of numerous ways AI can be used in digital marketing. People wanting to a pursue a career in this industry may want to consider thinking about ways they can utilise AI technology, as 80% of marketing executives predict that AI will revolutionise the industry over the next 5 years.

This is probably because as a marketer, you need to understand data and how to work with it. This is a job that AI can do better than any person. However, what AI lacks is creativity. This is the part that comes from humans. When both these forces work together, it can create some really successful content and marketing campaigns.