This is the best time in human history to be a consumer. From recommendations via Netflix for great new shows you’re likely to love, to getting sent on a different route to work because there’s traffic ahead, or having your heating come on in your house automatically when it’s a bit chilly out — there are technologies that can help to make your life easier and more enjoyable.
These solutions are powerful cognitive platforms that can learn, adapt and optimise outcomes in real time. Soon even the most mundane tasks like shopping at the supermarket or visiting the doctor will incorporate predictive technology powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and the way we live our lives will be transformed.
All these changes also make it a remarkable time to be a marketer. Brands need adaptive solutions to prepare them for a more intelligent and connected future. Brands that embrace tools that openly connect them to consumers and other ecosystems will have more control, deliver more innovative solutions and continue to achieve the best results. Intelligent brands put both data and decisioning in their hands in order to contribute to the process of building products that consumers want.
Brands of the future will be living services
The vast number of digital interactions completed daily require powerful systems to detect patterns that can be interpreted into meaningful insights. These insights help us build solutions that accelerate progress, improve our quality of life and enable completely personalised experiences that the Fjord design strategy agency calls 'Living Services'.
Living services are the result of two powerful forces: the digitisation of everything and ‘liquid’ consumer expectations. Living services respond by constantly learning more about our needs, intents and preferences, so that they can adapt to make themselves more relevant, engaging and useful. Consumers demand this, as best-of-breed companies in all sectors constantly raise the bar for experiences—hence liquid expectations.
Brands will need to move away from using walled gardens
The rise of Google, Amazon and Facebook have brought us into The Age of Platforms, delivering a wave of innovations like no other time in history and creating tremendous value for both consumers and marketers. Unfortunately, those same companies are now doing marketers a disservice by limiting access to their own data and eliminating opportunities for brands to create value with audience intelligence. Brands increasingly need data to thrive in a connected era, to personalise experiences. By their own nature, walled gardens are a barrier to connectedness and openness. As a result, consumers, marketers and agencies are all negatively affected.
Consumers suffer because stale, immovable data can inhibit relevant advertising and experiences that anticipate their needs. This forces marketing and advertising to use repetition in the absence of relevance. This same issue presents obvious challenges for marketers. If the only technologies and techniques are the same ones available to everyone else while limited to only the publisher’s ecosystem, innovation is stifled.
Connected platforms power the future of brands
Intelligent marketing stacks will soon be the standard, empowering marketers to deliver transformative predictive advertising. The orchestration of media is critical, but marketers of the future will look beyond simplifying workflow to extracting insight, creating knowledge and modelling customer journeys. A new creative process will be seamlessly integrated with media procurement, and will inform each other as new data is captured across intelligent devices that connect with one another. The data that can be accessed will compound exponentially through these connections, creating feedback loops that resemble the brain and body of a brand that extends across any touchpoint in which a customer interacts with it.
Brands that understand the power of AI in driving efficiencies, achieving insights, and enhancing experiences will win. The key is to leverage AI-powered systems that are proven, adaptive, and empowering for marketers so they can not only work smarter and more efficiently–but also so they can access hidden features that are predictive of future outcomes.
Mailee Creacy, Country Manager Rocket Fuel ANZ (now part of Sizmek)
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