In 2011, IBM Watson conquered Jeopardy. For the first time a machine had beaten humans in a game was thought impossible for a computer to master. Since then Watson has continued to solve problems that were perceived to be “unsolvable,” especially in healthcare. IBM opened up its platform to allow developers to use Watson APIs to create AI-based solutions.
At Equals 3 we recognized the power of IBM Watson and saw a tremendous potential in what we know best, Marketing. From that initial vision, we created “Lucy,” a cognitive marketing companion able to unlock decades of dark data to make enlightened decisions.
Let us start by understanding what is “dark data.” Leading research firm Gartner describes dark data as the information assets that organizations collect, process and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes (e.g., analytics, business relationships and direct monetizing). Similar to dark matter in physics, dark data often comprises most organizations’ universe of information assets. Thus, organizations often retain dark data for compliance purposes only. In the typical scenario, storing and securing data incurs more expense (and sometimes greater risk) than value.
Dark data residing in marketing departments is growing exponentially. There is an explosion of marketing data across variety of channels. IDC predicts that we are doubling data every two years and that is expected to only increase over time. This dark data in the marketing department comes in a variety both structured and unstructured forms for example, survey results from brand studies, quantitative results from focus groups or highly unstructured data in the form of research/qualitative studies. The format of these data types is also highly fragmented-excel models, power point slides, pdf and word documents, images and video—making it in the past impossible to have a system that can understand such a variety and volume of data. It is not surprising that only one percent of the enterprise data is usually used to make business decisions.
Lucy allows companies to leverage all of their dark data.
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Understand diverse data formats – Data is heterogeneous and comes in variety of formats. A challenge so far has been inability of systems to ingest the large variety of formats in order to be able to derive insights from them. Lucy was built to be able to ingest a variety of formats including video assets, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, and even PDFs. Her appetite for all formats allows for seamless search through the entirety of enterprise data. Her answers always reference a link to the specific source that was used for each result. Answers can be a single number, a sentence, paragraph, a slide or section.
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Centralize organizations IQ – The biggest challenge of making dark data see light is the siloed nature of organizations. Data resides in a multitude of databases, or even on personal laptops, and rarely available across an enterprise to help make best informed decisions. Lucy can digest all of an organization owned and licensed data, both structured and unstructured, and make it available though one simple interface to transcend organizational boundaries.
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Search results in natural language – Lucy speaks marketer’s lingo. To date, search has been keyword oriented. Lucy was created on a conceptual knowledge graph which has been trained to understand marketing terms and built on marketing ontology. The result is the ability for a marketer to find relevant results in seconds rather than traditional methods taking days.
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Single source for understanding your domain across public and dark data – Lucy not only understands your proprietary data (dark data) but has also ingested public information and licensed datasets like Kantar, Similarweb , and US Census data as a few examples. This unique ability allows Lucy to truly become a holistic market intelligence platform for organizations.
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Scalable personalization: A marketers challenge is to provide offers, messages and content that resonate at an individual level. The challenge so far has been the ability to do so at scale. Lucy is able to understand individuals personality and provide a flexible mechanism to create personas based on who the individual is. Lucy drives personalization at scale.
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Turn data into insights – Dark data comes in variety of formats and as a marketer, there is nothing more time consuming than excel sheets where one has to interpret numbers. Lucy converts spreadsheets into charts and interprets the results. Lucy is uniquely positioned to help reduce time to research by almost 75%.
- Monetize Insights – The last few years have shown a transition in the marketing function from being considered a cost center to an expectation of being a revenue generator. Key functions in marketing that drive revenue are demand generation and conversion. Lucy allows a marketer to perform research, build personas, understand media mix, create marketing plans, and build audience segments to drive increased demand generation and conversions.
Lucy is here to tame marketing's dark data.
