According to Ancient Greek legend, Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war. She was born from the head of Zeus, fully formed and armor clad.
According to AI Marketing Cloud Zeta, the story is a bit different.
Zeta announced “the birth of Athena” on Tuesday. The new voice-activated AI agent integrates with Zeta’s existing marketing platform and can respond to natural-language queries with campaign stats and performance updates.
It also suggests improvements and revisions to in-flight campaigns, allowing marketers to get ahead of potential roadblocks and reach consumers who might otherwise be missed.
Thinking out loud
Zeta’s initial marketing platform launched in 2018 with AI built directly into it. AI was “foundational” to the original product, which allows clients to query data directly within the platform, rather than via a data repository, said David Steinberg, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Zeta.
Hotel chain Red Roof has partnered with Zeta for four years and was part of Athena’s beta phase.
Modern AI tools tend to be “more predictive than reactive,” said Red Roof President Zack Gharib. Predictive AI tends to provide better results without a lot of expensive trial and error, since it doesn’t rely on learnings from unsuccessful past campaigns to develop future ones. Athena allows Red Roof to guide its campaign creation, deployment timing and audience development with simple verbal commands, Gharib said.
Everything Athena can do today technically could have been done on an earlier version of the Zeta Marketing Platform, said Steinberg. “It’s just really complicated.”
Each step – from data analysis to audience building to campaign launch – lived in a different part of Zeta’s platform and had its own workflow, Steinberg explained. Athena brings each step into a single workflow “without all the back and forth.”
Athena’s verbal prompting is meant to provide easier access to preexisting data and suggestions of how to use it. It’s not designed to fix a specific problem, he added, but to make its clients “substantially better at what they’re currently doing.”
For instance, Red Roof’s team can verbally query Athena with questions about spend, performance and ways to improve, and the agent responds with relevant statistics and reports.
In addition to answering questions, Athena also plays the role of a “co-pilot,” said Steinberg, offering guidance and suggestions on spend and campaign deployment that a client might not think to ask about. If Red Roof asked to see how its current campaigns in flight were performing, for example, Athena might respond not just with performance numbers, but also by offering newly optimized channel budget recommendations.
A (red) roof over one’s head
Red Roof uses its first-party data, along with additional data from Zeta (say that five times fast) to figure out who to target and when.
The hotel chain advertises across CTV and social and focuses on showing up in chatbot recommendations (i.e., GEO, or generative engine optimization).
Zeta relies heavily on its data cloud, which features over 550 million people’s data worldwide. It then fuses that data with a client’s first-party data to develop a proprietary algorithm, which constantly evolves as attribution data comes in over time.
Recently, Athena helped Red Roof determine a missed opportunity in Google bookings, by noticing a number of high-intent travelers who hadn’t completed the booking process, Gharib said.
Athena analyzed the paths of travelers who had completed their bookings to determine what messaging and user habits were most correlated to following through on bookings. Red Roof was then able to follow up with and ultimately convert more high-intent travelers who otherwise may have dropped off.
The longer a brand works with Zeta, Steinberg added, the larger its knowledge base grows, thanks to the increase in transaction data.
Long day’s journey into night
Athena also helps Red Roof reach audiences it wouldn’t normally think to target by using the hotel chain’s first-party data, a location-based capability built into Zeta’s marketing platform.
Typically, Red Roof targets people who earn under $100K, said Gharib. “We’re not having people that are more affluent staying at our hotels,” he added.
But Athena has helped it unlock customers outside of its typical audience by targeting based on time and location. Someone who is within a few miles of a Red Roof hotel and has recently searched online for travel tips, for example, might be targeted later in the evening, under the assumption that they’re getting tired and need a place to stay for the night.
Thankfully, targeting based on tiredness isn’t an actual feature – at least, for now.
“I guarantee you Elon Musk knows when they’re tired,” he joked, but “Elon’s not supplying us with that information just yet.”
