Why Movable Ink wants Da Vinci to kill the marketing campaign
Campaigns have been a part of marketing since the beginning of marketing. Now Vivek Sharma thinks it’s time to let them die, and Da Vinci is his chosen assassin.
Sharma is CEO of Movable Ink, a New York-based martech company that started in 2010 and offers data-driven content personalization solutions. In February this year, the company acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-based personalization and predictive analytics company, Coherent Path. It has since reworked its technology as Da Vinci, a solution that promises personalized content based on individuals, not just segments.
Sharma says the purchase of Coherent Path stemmed from her belief that the current campaign-based nature of marketing did not align with ambitions to deliver personalized interactions.
“The long-term goal is to kill the campaign,” Sharma said CMO. “There will still be campaigns five, six, seven years from now, and there’s still room for the big idea of marketing departments, but that seems to be the majority of what marketers do today. And it misses the mark because everyone is an individual and everyone has different tastes and interests.
It’s around this last point that Sharma thinks the over-reliance on campaigns fails to meet customer needs. The big problem is that campaigns tend to offer generic offers rather than tailoring them to individual needs.
“There would be a message that they [marketers] would like to go out, either on their whole roster or a segment, and then they would filter that out a bit and add a few layers of personalization using Movable Ink or some other technology,” Sharma explains. “For 50 or 60 years, this has been the process. While this was helpful, we also felt it was a fundamental barrier to achieving true customization.
Rethinking the approach to AI
Sharma says Coherent Path’s value comes from its use of a branch of mathematics called hyperbolic geometry, which has proven useful for visualizing big data and modeling hierarchical structures such as social networks. This is used to understand what people are likely to react to and maximize customer lifetime value.
“A lot of existing AI technologies are reinforcement-based, which means they over-index on things that people have done, which means you can get trapped in a bubble,” Sharma says. “What was great about the Coherent Path approach was that it was focused on discovering products and categories that people will love, but may have never engaged with in the past. .
“If you can create a model that understands that someone who bought living room furniture in the past year suddenly bought baby toys, it’s incredibly powerful to get rid of it. Maybe fit- they model a signal that could introduce them to new types of products and categories.And being able to do that for each of the millions of people on your list is an extremely powerful thing.
The Da Vinci AI engine then makes it possible to make these recommendations at scale.
“For the first time, you can get insights into a living system that can sense and understand what’s going on with each of your customers, and it generates the kind of content and messaging that will be most effective not only maximizing revenue from that particular campaign while maximizing the value of that particular customer over the long term,” says Sharma.
“What we do is find the creative that best suits a particular client because it’s relevant to them at the time. All the creatives you’ve created over the years can be reused and you can start add them to this library.”
Sharma says early results have been promising, with users noting an average 16% increase in click-through rates, a 20% increase in conversion rates and a 25% increase in revenue.
“He manages all of the promotional campaigns for some of the biggest brands on the planet,” he says. “Da Vinci helps the brand act more like a personal shopper, where people are surprised and delighted and actually take advantage of those interactions and find things that might interest them.
“In a counter-intuitive way, AI may end up humanizing marketing more by making it more relevant to the individual.”
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