Artificial Intelligence for Marketing

CHAPTER 10Mentoring the Machine

It would be grand if all our problems could be resolved with technology. We could find the right software that would find the right target audience and send the right message to the right person at the right time on the right device in the right context by reversing the polarity, fluctuating the deflector shield to emit tachyon pulses, or using the Fibonacci sequence. It works on television.

But tech doesn't always do what we want; it only does what we tell it to do. We need to get better at telling it what to do. For that, we are all going to become teachers.

• We teach Siri to understand our individual voice.
• We teach [e-mail] how we want our meetings scheduled.
• We teach Pandora what kind of music we like.

To make the most of artificial intelligence and machine learning in marketing, we will have to teach it what we want and what constitutes a good result.

Microsoft's Ian Thomas points out that our jobs as marketers will change, but not disappear.¹

Fortunately for digital marketers, and especially digital marketing analytics professionals, optimization‐driven campaigns don't remove the need for human involvement, though they do change its nature. Instead of creating complex audience segments up front for a campaign, these people will need instead to identify the attributes that campaigns should use for optimization.

Attribute selection (known as feature selection in data science circles) is a crucial step in making optimization work. Select ...