Has your CMTO brought you anything interesting recently? It’s getting harder to create relevant messaging at scale, but AI and machine learning might be able to deliver the thing that digital marketing people have been looking for since the beginning of the millennium – Personslisation.
Personalised advertising is hard. Most brands decide to group customers into cohorts or tribes because it reduces the workload. Maybe someone is a fan of SailGP – a niche sporting event. But not all sailing fans are the same, some like foiling catamarans and some like offshore monohulls. It’s a lot easier to advertise to all sailors with a more generic message than to a fan of the USA SailGP team who lives in Dubai.
In order to deliver true personalisation, you need to have some data. Brands that sell direct to consumer (D2C) via ecommerce, or who run loyalty schemes backed by mobile apps are at an advantage here.
What if you knew your customer’s name, location and product preference? What if you had tagged your products with the ‘occasion’ or use that they were used for? You could use that information to create messages that were more relevant to the individual. But not a scale. Not until now.
Using machine learning, we can customise a video for individual customers. We can change the background imagery or reel to match a location. We can automatically rhyme words in voice-overs. We can change the gender of the voiceover. We can use imagery of the activity that the product was used for. We can add the customer’s name. We can do all this ‘on the fly’ using known data about our consumers.
While companies like Apple believe that data should not be ‘weaponised’ to deliver better experiences, younger consumers don’t have the same hang ups about giving away data – if they get a return. That might mean in-game cash or discounts or freebies. For others it might be getting more relevant content or messaging.
We know that consumers are more likely to share content that is relevant. We know that customers are more likely to trust messages sent from friends than ads from brands. Using personalised video, we can increase engagement, conversion and return on investment.
Abandoned Cart emails have become so commonplace and predictable that customers just ignore them. What if you could use retargeting with a personalised touch.
Perhaps it’s a gimmick. Perhaps this too will become noise. But right now – it’s shiny and new.
