Industry Preview is a special, limited-run audio series featuring interviews with key leaders in marketing, media and technology who share their predictions and key priorities for 2021. This podcast is sponsored by IBM Watson Advertising.
Brands have long been sold the vision that artificial intelligence will one day supercharge their marketing plans, but results have been mixed.
In this episode, Bob Lord, IBM’s SVP of cognitive applications, assesses AI’s progress in areas such as audience modeling and campaign optimization, and articulates some future opportunities related to first-party data management, creativity and privacy.
In the case of privacy, AI is often invoked as a bogeyman by people fearful of its misuse. Think facial recognition and mortgage approvals. But Lord argues that, to the contrary, the technology has a role to play in countering these risks. As new laws and browser policies multiply, he says, artificial intelligence can help organizations stay compliant with permissions across large and overlapping data sets and by flagging noncompliant uses that may otherwise be overlooked.
“If you’re a big enterprise client you have information on your customers that you want to guard well,” Lord says. “AI can help you make sense of massive data and protect consumer privacy at the same time. We need to learn how to make large amounts of data accessible, useful and productive in a post-cookie world.”
