Marketers are harnessing AI with new Cognitiv technology
Credit: Cognitiv
Cognitiv is the first marketing AI company to offer custom deep learning algorithms to its customers. We spoke to CEO and co-founder, Jeremy Fain.
Personalisation is an interesting concept. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is, simply because it means something different to everyone.
Regardless, a product or service made specifically for you is undeniably appealing. We live in an age where community doesn’t quite mean the same thing it used to. Our communities are online. We don’t have a sense of belonging to our surroundings quite as much as we used to and perhaps in a time where everyone has a voice online, we look to personalised services to feel individual.
It’s a tall task to not only predict consumer behaviour but to offer a product that will excite an individual. Of course, the more data that you have on your customers, the better.
This is where AI usually comes in. AI thrives on the data that you have: it loves nothing more than to produce insights from information. Marketers collect data on us and advertise based on what we want to see. It’s only logical that they would want to harness the power of deep learning to come out with better results.
Cognitiv are offering such services.
“A Fortune 100 company, one of the most recognizable brands in the US, leveraged Cognitiv to achieve an 11x lift in incrementality, the measure of lift on truly new conversions over those that converted without additional advertising, over all other partners,” says co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Fain.
How does Cognitiv use AI?
“Cognitiv is the first marketing AI company to provide marketers with custom autonomous deep learning algorithms,” says Jeremy. Cognitiv tailors marketing for individual brands and KPIs to predict consumer behaviours to improve advertising performance.
Cognitiv uses a platform called NeuralMind™ to predict consumer behaviour. With the aforementioned Fortune 100 client, Cognitiv ran several neural networks at once, in real-time, to predict whether an impression will deliver not just a conversion but an incremental conversion.
As more and more data becomes available to us, marketers will need to rely more heavily on AI to make the data actionable
Jeremy Fain, Cognitiv CEO
“This was the first time ever in digital marketing that more than one neural network has been used in real-time for placing media,” says Jeremy. The way that the networks of NeuralMind™ challenge each other to find an incremental conversion is key: incrementality refers to the likelihood of a consumer to convert, rather than just the conversion itself.
“NeuralMind™ accurately identifies consumers who want to buy or further engage with a company’s products,” says Jeremy. “NeuralMind™ combines a marketer’s own data with deep learning to buy media or build custom audiences.”
Why do marketers need AI?
Data is maybe the most precious commodity of the marketing world. By knowing your consumers inside out, it’s easier to connect with them. This in a nutshell is why Cognitiv is making such a big impression.
“As more and more data becomes available to us, marketers will need to rely more heavily on AI to make the data actionable,” Jeremy explains. “Not all AI is created equal and marketers have very unique and individual needs. Any measurable KPI, such as conversions, test-drive signups, purchases, website visits, and even store visits, can be turned into algorithms that more effectively find new customers, drive incremental sales, and deliver insights into what the algorithms see as favourable attributes, most importantly all at scale.”
Cognitiv offers a service for agencies and marketers. The power of deep learning can be embraced by marketers for amazing results and many companies aren’t fully harnessing their data. Cognitiv looks to change this.
“Cognitiv partners with agencies and marketers to help them understand what their algorithms are doing, educate them on the newest capabilities of deep learning and how their first-party data can be made even more useful for many different types of marketing outcomes,” says Jeremy.
The future of marketing may well be AI-assisted
“The question that every marketer asks themselves daily is ‘How can I find more people that want to buy my products?’ For a decade, the answer has been data,” says Jeremy. “Most marketers, however, have only seen modest gains with data collection because there is too much to make sense of.”
The question of what we do with data is one that the technology industry as a whole is fascinated in, from Facebook to law enforcement. AI’s ability to process this information so much quicker and more intelligently than we could ever manage is both fascinating and concerning. Predicting human behaviour may be a worry for many. Not for marketers, however.
“Thanks to the rise of big data and the development of advanced machine-learning technologies, especially deep learning, predicting human behaviour more accurately has finally become possible,” says Jeremy. “Instead of relying on generalised observations meant to apply to as many people as possible, marketers can use NeuralMind to build their own deep-learning algorithms that allow them to personalize marketing approaches in order to best appeal to all the individuals interested in their products, no matter how diverse. Instead of targeting a specific demographic – males, 18-49, with income over $50,000 – they can now just target ‘People who will buy my product.’”
Jeremy has a podcast in which he discusses artificial intelligence. He believes that at the current speed with which AI is progressing, more marketers will start to embrace deep learning.
“In my podcast, Hidden Layers, I talk to thought leaders using AI in various industries to explore the different facets of deep learning, AI, and data-backed insights to understand the implications of each, how they’re evolving, and how they intersect with the art and science of our everyday lives,” he says.
“There’s no denying that AI and machine learning are going to continue to impact the marketing and advertising industry in a larger way over the next few years. However, we believe every marketer deserves their own, custom-built AI and shouldn’t have to wait years for it, which is why we’ve built technology to make that happen today.”
