When an A.I. plays Cupid, data and marketers pair up, perfectly.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we have a story of two lonely souls who found happiness against all odds. What brought them together—was it fate? Providence? Or a cutting-edge advancement in machine intelligence deployed as a super-tool for Fortune 1000 marketers and the agencies that serve them?
We hope it doesn’t spoil the ending to reveal: it’s that last one. Lucy is a genius assistant who will change the way marketers work, forever. Tools like Lucy didn’t exist as recently as even a year ago, but early adopters are finding that she transforms the speed and effectiveness of essential tasks. From pulling research out of deep troves of data to automated insight-rich segmentation to highly targeted media planning, she takes over jobs and allows her human partners to concentrate on big-picture thinking.
And sometimes, she even does a little matchmaking.
Lucy reads, remembers, and understands every word, chart, statistic, and graph in a brand’s store of owned and licensed data. Her human team members love her for it—they never have to struggle with remembering the usernames and passwords for different servers and services. They just ask Lucy a question, in natural language, and off she goes. She doesn’t need to be told where to look. She’s so fast and thorough, she can search every possible data source—as if a human looking for an answer asked every coworker in the office, paged through every binder and printout, called up all her ex-coworkers and ran the question past them, and then spent a morning messing with serversearch queries before searching all her company’s subscription services as a grand finale.
That’s how Lucy met the Unused Data Set.
The Unused Data Set was a forgotten, lonely piece of marketing info sitting in the cloud, collecting virtual dust. Nobody ever paid any attention to it, which was a real blow to its self-esteem. The Unused Data Set remembered what it was like to be relevant and proud: it started life on page 23 of an expensively-commissioned, expertly-prepared 70-page report. It was created with no small amount of sweat and toil, and the marketing team made a great fuss over it when it arrived.
But the marketers were very busy, and it seemed to the Unused Data Set that they soon forgot about it. They never checked in with it, the team members who knew about it moved on to other jobs, and other documents, memos, and spreadsheets eventually piled up around it. Eventually, The Unused Data Set realized that even when a marketer was working on something it could help with, it didn’t matter: it would never be found.
Lucy knew about the Unused Data Set, though. She had encountered it when she onboarded, taking in all the information the company had laying around on the companies servers, and from its subscriptions. Lucy knew the data could still be useful, to the right person. And that’s when the Lonely Marketer came along.
The Lonely Marketer had to stay late in the office compiling a report. It was the sort of time-draining, perfunctory task that had the promise of being more meaningful, if only the foundation elements could be assembled quicker. And on this particular night, the Lonely Marketer was particularly frustrated, because she just couldn’t find a piece of information she was absolutely sure her team once created. Was it in one of the 15 thick binders on her shelf? Was it in some obscure location in the company network? She couldn’t just Google it, could she? Nope.
Then she tried the new cognitive marketing pro, Lucy, who’d recently joined the team. She typed her question, using natural language, into Lucy’s search field. And within moments, Lucy remembered the Unused Data Set—it was exactly what the Lonely Marketer needed, and Lucy knew exactly where to find it. She grabbed the report where the Unused Data Set lived, brought up page 23, and put it on the marketer’s screen.
The Lonely Marketer smiled with relief. That was fast….and easy.
The Data Set Formerly Known as Unused rejoiced. I’m relevant again!
As for Lucy? She was just pleased to make another contribution that gave the humans on her team an edge over the competition.
