Artificial Intelligence

TGI Fridays has a growing appetite for artificial intelligence (AI) and personalization. AI tech is a strategic investment area for the casual dining restaurant chain this year, said James Washington, TGIF’s product manager for digital platforms. Top-of-the-agenda use cases include improving the dining experience and enhancing the brand’s cross-channel messaging strategy, both of which hinge […]

The interactive video ad server Innovid has acquired Taykey, a company that uses machine learning to extract contextual information about video, text and images to help inform ad buys. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed. Innovid, which has 220 employees, will take on half – or about 20 members – of Taykey’s […]

AI-driven marketing automation platform Artsai came out of a two-year-long stealth period on Thursday with plans to help brands cut down on marketing vendor fragmentation hell. Client Pandora has been using Artsai to help its ad partners with dynamic creative optimization and to gather and apply campaign performance data and insights across touch points. Pandora […]

Leanplum is leaning into machine learning and mobile marketing automation with $47 million in Series D funding, announced Wednesday. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners with pinch-hitting from existing investors, including Canaan Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Shasta Ventures, and brings the company’s total funding to just over $93 million since […]

Around this time last year, the chatter around artificial intelligence (AI) was escalating as Salesforce and IBM unveiled splashy programs to help advertisers make sense of massive and complex reams of data, in order to enable more personalized marketing. Oracle, too, announced the creation of Adaptive Intelligence Apps at the time, and at its annual […]

Personalization is a top agenda item for most brands, but data management technology still leaves something to be desired. Machine learning could provide the answer, said Kabir Shahani, CEO and co-founder of Amperity, a Seattle-based startup that came out of stealth on Thursday. Since raising $9 million in Series A in February, Amperity has been […]

Food brands that want their ad creative to appear next to recipes for quick and easy dinners, Japanese food or gluten-free meals can buy inventory via CafeMedia’s private marketplaces that fits into those content categories. CafeMedia created those content categories using IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI). Traditionally, companies use content management systems to categorize and […]

Adobe is looking to get schooled on AI and data science. While many technology giants foster relationships with academics by offering them lucrative part-time consultancy positions. Adobe is pursuing a different tack: dishing out $50,000 no-strings-attached grants to professors and doctoral students working on projects of joint interest. “What academia provides is more the advanced […]

Despite the tech company takeover of Cannes, the ad industry’s current infatuation – artificial intelligence – confined its appearances to panels and presentations. But a few AI aspirations (“deployments” is too strong a word in many cases) are worth calling out. Tencent The Chinese maker of the popular WeChat application has a machine learning agenda […]

Microsoft is looking to claim itself a spot beside the top dogs competing on the video and cloud front. It says data is the differentiator. “Unlike other providers who use your data to sell groceries or other services that compete [with your business], your data belongs to you,” Martin Wahl, principal program manager for Microsoft, […]

Investors are putting Facebook’s feet to the fire about fake news. At the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting on Thursday, investors questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook is combatting the spread of false news on its platform. Advertisers have become increasingly sensitive to brand safety issues since the YouTube/Google Display Network debacle kicked off in […]

Businesses spend around $40 billion a year on digital content marketing, and Demandbase, which announced a $65 million financing round on Thursday, is looking to cut itself a slice of the pie. Led by existing investor Sageview Capital with participation by a smorgasbord of others, including Adobe Systems, Altos Ventures and Sigma Partners, the financing […]

Mobile-first? Passé, says Google. The future is being driven by artificial intelligence. “Mobile made us reimagine every product we were working on,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday at Google’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. “Similarly, in an AI-first world, we are rethinking all our products and applying machine learning and AI to […]

Whisper, an app that lets its anonymous users post what’s on their mind, is still going strong after five years – even after other secret-sharing social apps like Yik Yak have closed shop. One reason for its longevity is that it is making money through programmatic advertising. Demand partners include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, OpenX […]

Google rolled out a machine learning-powered display product called Smart display campaigns on Thursday. The product is now generally available to all advertisers buying native, image or text ads across the Google Display Network (GDN). Smart display campaigns are accessible via AdWords and reach more than 3 million GDN sites and apps on GDN now. […]

Marketing may be a trillion-dollar industry, but its supply chain needs a makeover, says Microsoft’s CMO. “What makes marketing such a unique case is that the labor component is much higher than any other industry,” said CMO Grad Conn. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize the way we’re working in marketing and […]

Nielsen Marketing Cloud has built a new brain. The measurement company unveiled Nielsen Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Tuesday, meant to help advertiser and publisher clients build custom audience segments in real time. Nielsen AI is baked into the Nielsen Marketing Cloud platform and designed to process multiple external circumstances concurrently, which it can then use to […]

T.O by Lipton, Unilever’s Keurig-like tea brewer in France, was struggling to turn analytics from its ecommerce platform into actionable insights. “With [tools like] Google Analytics, I could know what consumers were doing, but I had difficulty knowing why they were dropping off or why they weren’t buying our machines,” said Mathieu Bernard, ecommerce lead […]

Havas Media is going through a brain change thanks to IBM and Watson developer Equals 3. While Havas’s relationship with IBM goes back for decades, it was mostly on the creative side. But Havas Media has over the past year been installing and training a Watson-powered artificial intelligence (AI) solution – in the form of […]

This is the third of three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. Read the previous stories about Xaxis and Publicis.Sapient.  After years of double-digit growth, global lingerie brand Cosabella suddenly lost momentum in 2016. “We decided we needed to cut ties [with our agency] and change something […]

This is the second of three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. The next installment will publish on Friday. Read the first story about Xaxis.  As marketer interest in artificial Intelligence (AI) grows, Publicis.Sapient sees opportunity to provide guidance. It has a dedicated unit that provides AI-related advice […]

Think of IBM and you’re likely imagining heavy technologies managed by an expensive services division. But IBM Chief Digital Officer Bob Lord emphasizes that’s the old company. He’s here to help IBM reinvent itself and, most importantly, its way of doing business. “What I’ve loved doing throughout my career is helping a company pivot,” Lord […]

Brian Andersen, a partner at LUMA Partners, will read the tea leaves on marketing clouds and omnichannel marketing at Industry Preview on January 18 in New York City. Remember when everyone kept predicting the seminal year of mobile, year after year, until the question became moot because mobile was everywhere? The same thing is happening […]

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which officially kicks off Thursday, is fundamentally a hardware show. It’s a sprawl of new toys that consumers will either really want (drones!) or want not at all (3-D TVs!). “One needs to be careful about CES, as there are a lot of things on display and aren’t relevant for […]

  Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around […]

Microsoft underwent big shifts in its platforms and ads business in the last year, first when it shook up its sales structure by outsourcing its direct order business to AOL and again, when it dropped $26.2 billion on LinkedIn. And now, Microsoft is eyeing artificial intelligence. It recently bought messaging app developer Wand Labs to beta test intelligent chat […]

Salesforce wants to “democratize” the development of artificial intelligence (AI) applications. That is, making AI available to as many business users as possible. Consequently, it’s baked an AI system called Einstein into the Salesforce platform – such that its capabilities are available across its various clouds, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. “AI […]