Via menus or conversational English queries, a marketer can ask questions of any data from any platform, for research, segmentation or media planning.
Note from Equals 3 - With so much great information and depth in this article, we wanted to remind our readers that the data Lucy uses is specific to each corporation or agency. Lucy digest our clients owned and licensed data and we are diligent in protecting the privacy and rights of all the data Lucy digests.
Suppose that, someday in the future, a data-besieged marketer could use menu commands or plain English text to ask questions about any data.
That future, according to a company called Equals 3, is here, and it’s called Lucy.
Launched recently, she is the first marketing-focus portal built on services provided by IBM’s now-legendary cognitive supercomputer, Watson.
“There is nothing in the marketplace like Lucy,” Equals 3 Managing Partner Scott Litman told me. “She is a user interface for all my marketing systems.”
The name of his company, which was founded last year, derives from the idea that a person plus a computer can equal something bigger than their sum. Lucy’s name is taken from a grandchild of IBM founder Thomas Watson.
Equals 3 doesn’t have an exclusive arrangement with IBM to utilize Watson for marketing, but Litman pointed out that his company has concocted a unique creature among the approximately 100 commercialized solutions based on the cognitive computing system.
Lucy combines 10 computing services from Watson, including Retrieve and Rank, Natural Language Classifier, Personality Insights, a news aggregation service and Tradeoff Analytics. Litman said that these services have not previously worked together as they do in Lucy, plus Equals 3 created its own interface and layered on other unspecified custom software to focus on marketing.
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