Automated Marketing Intelligence

Some of the most successful and innovative companies embed analytical wisdom in real time marketing applications instead of relying onto back-end analysis. The last edition of Business 2.0 writes about a new company called Revcube (www.revcube.com), that optimizes banner ads, emails, or text ads based on analyzing in real time over 5,000 attributes to deliver the most relevant Online Marketing experience to consumers. “ “If you analyze data once a month or even every week, you miss something”, says Revcube Bill Schaefer. “We analyze data every 30 second”…Because Revcube automates a process that typically involves a multitude of focus groups and mountains of spreadsheets, its system is seen as the future of Web marketing,” writes Susanne Hamner in Business 2.0.

Does this movement symbolize a dramatic change of where analysts will spend most of their value in the not so distant future? The answer is probably yes. A human being has little chance to compete with machine learning and highly automated algorithms of finding the best success and consumer response correlations of a given marketing challenge. I expect these highly sophisticated automated intelligence generating processes gaining more ground in at least these three important marketing channels:

• Search Optimization Marketing: There is little use for human interference of finding the best search terms for a particular audience.
• Direct Response Marketing like outbound email, Banner Ads: The key human value might be in designing the most efficient test matrix, everything else can be designed and driven by intelligent applications
• TV Media Placement Decisions: Most placement decisions are still done by human beings, this will dramatically change due to the increasing complexity and increasing targeting capabilities of TV channels.
  One common thread amongst all these more marketing areas (that will rely more on automated intelligence) is the increasing importance of auction based platforms that support these marketing channels.

Human analysts are getting much more under pressure to provide higher level strategic value instead of doing the basic number crunching that was (and often still is) the center piece of Database Marketing and even Data Mining. Both disciplines need a serious redefinition and refocus.