Elementary My Dear Watson

Many of you will have heard about WATSON – the result of seven years of IBM development to create a new ‘supercomputer’ capable of interpreting the challenges of the English language and playing Jeopardy.  It’s intriguing to watch, a classic man against machine pitting two of the top Jeopardy players against an Avatar from IBM backed with gazillions of MBs and countless propensity models.  

Clearly it’s a huge PR and awareness coup by IBM, although seven years of development for a small army of programmers and analysts and hardware to die for probably means the short term payback in marketing terms isn’t great.  But what is exciting is the potential for the ‘next generation’ of computer capabilities when applied to marketing challenges.  WATSON truly heralds the dawn of what Harris and Davenport’s upcoming book  calls the ‘Age of Analytics’ in marketing.

We believe the challenge for marketers (and corporate executives in all areas, from procurement to operations to HR) is discovering new uses for advanced analytics.  From a marketing perspective, here’s a few initial ideas:

1.  Content Targeting. Better synergy between a ‘social media’ database and customer database, with real time ability to respond to content preferences, CS issues, attitude shifts.  Let’s face it – if WATSON can know how to respond with questions to various ‘puns’ in Jeopardy answers, the potential to analyze sentiment far beyond what we can do today and instantly trigger responses raises huge potential for customer engagement.  And huge issues over transparency of data collection and use.

2.  Customer Acquisition.  Targeting new customers, by ‘listening’ to conversations and targeting based on sophisticated algorithms.  If a computer can work out what a potential customer ‘sounds like’ by analysis of masses of information collected across disparate data points, imagine the potential to target more precisely those who exhibit characteristics which, with sufficient confidence, could be new customers.  Beats dinosaur methods such as geodemographics.

3.  Internal confidence and sentiment.  Imagine the potential if this ‘Age of Analytics’ power is turned towards assessing internal employee feelings towards their employer.  By analysis of email, social media, IM, web interactions of employees, an employer could not only quickly view ‘macro’ indices of how energized a business is, but also spot potential ‘pests’ or disruptors.  Again, issues of personal data vs. company data access and transparency will need addressing.  I can already hear the employment lawyers licking their chops!

Oh, and one more …

4.  Destruction of Mankind.  Yes the machines will rise, man will be forced into a war.  Well Arnold Schwarzenegger IS coming back!