How Will AI Change Marketing & Advertising? - Advertising Week 2018 Recap
As a 1st year Bicster, I attended the Advertising Week 2018 with curiosities, excitements and lots of queries. Advertising Week New York is known as a premier conference for marketing, branding, advertising, and technology professionals with 15 years’ history. About 290 seminars and workshops were held Oct 1 through Oct 4 this year, providing the audience cutting-edge industry information and a wide range of observations. This 4-day event opened a window for me to learn about and predict the marketing trends.
It was impossible to attend 290 seminars because 4-10 seminars might be held at the same time slot so as a suggestion, you’d better customize your schedule in advance to make sure you can hear what you most need. As another option, you can watch live stream or replay video on the AWNY app or website as well. For me, I have a big concern about the development of AI (Artificial intelligence) and marketing technology so I picked several seminars in this field.
What impressed me first was the seminar “Survival of the Fittest in an AI World” (By Louis Richardson, chief storyteller, Watson Customer Engagement, IBM). Mr.Richardson was really an amazing storyteller. In his speech, he likened the business to the story of lion and gazelle. You must run and adapt to the fast developing environment, especially in today’s AI world.
(“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.” – Christopher McDougall) If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. It’s cruel but true, I think. This is exactly the survival rule of enterprises - survive or die.
In the 1st class of this semester, we were asked a question: what you see in the world that pains/excites you? My answer was Rapidly developing Artificial Intelligence (AI). From Siri to AlphaGo, from logistic robots to self-driving cars…AI seems to encompass anything in a variety of fields. It is changing the business as well as our life! According to some study, 47% of jobs in America might be hit hard by AI revolution in the coming decades. So what we need to think seriously about is not “if” AI will impact you and your business, but “when” and “how” it will.
“How Media & Brands Are Using Voice AI and Smart Speakers to Connect with Consumers”(By Bret Kinsella, Suzanne Grimes, Pat Higbie, Douglas Rozen and Andreas Westfield) and “Intelligent Search” (By Geoff Ramsey, Vikram Bhaskaran, Dominic Joseph, Christi Olson, Ted Prince) could give you a more specific landscape and empathic experience.
Did you know that smart speakers reach more than 50 million U.S. consumers today and likely grow another 25% before 2018 is over and reach 100 million people worldwide? In “How Media & Brands Are Using Voice AI and Smart Speakers to Connect with Consumers” panel, speakers were from XAPPmedia, 360i and more digital media fields, who have collectively launched over 1,000 voice apps on Amazon Echo and Google Home. They shared their experience on how to approach voice search, what they have done and what they've learned.
In “Intelligent Search” panel, speakers from marketing tech field such as E-marketer, Pinterest, and Microsoft had a deeper and wider discussion on intelligent search including visual and voice search tools. Rapidly growing AI and image recognition softwares provide the customers more options and more convenience in search market. According to the data they mentioned, Global brands rate “AI” as No.2 and “Voice search” as No.3 on their list of “Next Big Marketing Trends”. It didn’t surprise me - totally consistent with my observations and predictions. Compared to voice search, visual search only accounts for just a fraction of text-based searches so far. Only about 27% of internet users are even aware of visual search as a shopping-related tool but I believe the proportion of visual search will increase much faster than we can imagine in the near future.
In my opinion, as a marketing or advertising practitioner, it’s important to understand and measure your customers’ search and consume behavior. AI, at this point, is playing a very important role and will become more and more important in the marketing and advertising field. It is not only relevant to what tools your customers might use in search and shopping, but also able to provide us a big data, which makes you more proactive, provides you superior sight and intellect, helps you make better decision in business strategy.
At the end of this blog, I'd like to share my interesting experience in Google booth. Google built several kiosks in the conference lobby floor. Cooperating with Starbucks, Estee Lauder and H&M Home, Google provides customers voice consulting and purchase experience via Google Home device and Google Assistant App in each kiosk. It indicated the broad prospects of voice AI application. It was tricky that you had to talk to Google in loud enough voice but I believe that the voice search technology will become more mature and user-friendly in amazing speed.
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( by Yimin Wu, 10/08/2018 )
