8 | | FEBRUARY 2023July 20208 CIO AdvisorIN MY VIEWWhat if Watson ran your marketing department?By Malte Weyhe, Director, Asia Pacific Marketing, Korn Ferry [NYSE: KFY]In 2018, luxury car manufacturer Lexus partnered with advertising agency The&Partnership, IBM and the University of New South Wales’ MindX division on an ground-breaking project with a simple goal: to produce the first world's first ad scripted entirely by AI. They let IBM’s Watson supercomputer train a bespoke AI with 15 years’ worth of award-winning luxury advertisements and human emotional responses. The result was surprising: “I thought I’d be writing an ad with the assistance of AI,” says Dave Bedwood, creative partner at The&Partnership. “Instead, it took over and wrote the whole script: a machine telling the story of a machine coming to life. A lot of other AI work to date has been interesting because of the process itself. This has been fascinating–maybe scary–because the end product is good in its own right.”I can understand that the experience would have been ‘scary’ for Dave, given that it hints to a future where even imaginative tasks such as marketing messaging and content creation are handled by machines – and advertising agencies will have to add value in different ways.However, for most organisations and marketers who don’t have access to a supercomputer as part of their IT infrastructure this is still just a sign of what’s to come rather than today’s reality. Marketing technology has come a long way in recent years though. If used to its full potential, it can dramatically improve the way we interact with our audience, make us more customer centric and lead to better marketing results -in both, B2B and B2C environments. Technology won’t do all the work for us just yet, but if we use the available technology right, we can:• Contextualise our messages and content down to the individual level;• Send customers and potential customers the right message at the right time – depending on where they are in the buying cycle;• Use the many different types of content that are available today – think: webinars, videos, podcasts, live demos etc;• Setup specific triggers to automatically hand over warm leads (customers in the later stages of the buying cycles) to the sales team, to introduce the ‘human touch’ and close the deal.The above isn’t rocket science or requires Watson-type computing power. It is available through what I would call ‘conventional’ marketing tools that are likely part of your organisation’s MarTech-stack already. And by the way, ‘MarTech-stack’ is an expression that no Artificial Intelligence would ever deem suitable to explain the suite of marketing software a company runs – but rather Malte Weyhe
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