Know Albert? Meet the AI marketing platform

FinanceFeeds continues to explore the future of fintech and the perspective of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions playing a bigger role in business operations, including marketing. As robotics and robotics-related solutions advance in the financial services industry, the possibility of robots replacing human staff in marketing positions is also suggested.

A breakthrough in this respect is the development and growing adoption of Albert, created by AI company Adgorithms. Albert is an artificial intelligence marketing platform.

Today, FinanceFeeds speaks to Albert’s Chief Technology Officer Tomer Naveh and Albert’s Chief Marketing Officer Amy Inlow, who have agreed to share their view on the future of marketing technologies and the various effects of AI growth, including ones on human employment.

• Meet Albert

We asked Tomer Naveh, Albert’s CTO, for a brief presentation of this innovative AI marketing platform.

Mr Naveh started by presenting the daily routine of a contemporary marketing team.

“In marketing, there are several different functions in the chain that eventually lead to a marketing campaign – there is the creative function, budgeting, planning, etc. It takes quite a bit of human labor to execute a complete campaign. Many of these functions are very analytical and often carried out by very intelligent people, but the work is repetitive and involves large amounts of data. It’s currently being done in a very manual and ‘silent’ way, meaning that the various teams involved in executing on different channels and parts of the campaign don’t talk to each other on a daily basis. They don’t exchange data, which means there’s no interplay between the insights they’re getting on one channel and insights they’re getting on another. They operate manually, working 9 hours a day, carrying out 10-30 different operations a day and that’s it. There’s too much room for error and it’s not all working together,” he says.

“What our system does is execute all of the activities involved in the larger campaign and manage them over time—optimizing, applying learnings from one campaign to the next, and so on. All of the technical execution can be done by a machine.” – Tomer Naveh, CTO, Albert.

• Marketing transformation

“I think that the marketing world today is pretty much like stock trading 20 years ago when people used to pick up the phone to buy stocks. This is just as clunky a process as how marketers are still buying media inventory from sellers. And, now, if you try to beat the machines that trade stocks, futures or other financial instruments, just by having an army of people trying to trade them efficiently, you’ll obviously lose to the high-frequency trader or a trader using AI and related methodology. I think the marketing world is going through a very similar transformation, only we are a few years behind,” Mr Naveh says.

• Will AI marketing systems replace human staff?

Amy Inlow, Albert’s CMO, explained that such systems do not replace human beings, they rather augment the work human employees are doing.

“We believe AI marketing systems will empower marketers to do more higher value problem solving, and will not replace them” – Amy Inlow, CMO, Albert.

“Today’s marketers spend too much time trying to parse together the tsunami of marketing data, and operating various tech systems which slows them down and pulls them away from focusing on strategy and storytelling. While a system such as ours may replace a digital agency (for media buying, execution and analysis) it empowers in-house marketing teams to bring those functions back in-house. This gives them control over all their data, and allows them to focus on strategy, planning and the development of more creative”, says Ms Inlow.

Mr Naveh agrees with Ms Inlow in this respect.

“Marketing has a very strong human component to it, in the sense that you need to come up with your brand identity, creative, budget and how all of that relates to your business. I think that all business and creative considerations will always be (for the next 100 years at least) managed by people. Those are not things that machines can easily replace”, he says.

“Of course, machines like Albert can help you with the decision-making process, as they can communicate data insights that are worth taking into consideration when you plan your yearly marketing budget—or even decide on the next direction of your creative based on what performed well and what didn’t in the past. But this is more so a case of an assisting system and not a system that replaces the need for people”, Mr Naveh adds.

• The advantages of using an AI solution over a human being (or vice versa)

Amy Inlow says: “Today’s consumer wants unique, personalized experiences. AI is what helps get marketers there”.

Mr Naveh elaborates: “I think there are several advantages. One is using a system to automate all of your marketing activities and get the global view of all of your activities and how they relate to each other. There are many predictive analytics systems out there which try to somehow give you a view of all of your activities but Artificial Intelligence is actually executing campaigns for you. Then you get a lot of efficiencies because it actually takes actions based on the data that is accumulated.”

Another advantage, according to Mr Naveh, is the significantly better performance of campaigns executed by AI systems.

“Whatever the KPIs, once you have a system that looks at everything and crunches tons of data and takes millions of different actions a day, you just get better performance” – Tomer Naveh, CTO, Albert.

Mr Naveh said: “A third aspect is human capital efficiencies. Instead of having an army of campaign managers, you take the smartest people and convert them into AI supervisors.”

• Albert has to learn

Mr Naveh reiterated the need of human supervision of the work of AI marketing platforms.

“If you have an AI system, it needs to learn, it takes time. You need the people to oversee those systems and provide feedback – human feedback. The AI marketing system can say “We need more creatives of this type” or it can say “This campaign is not working as expected, maybe there is a problem with the business setting”. Someone needs to oversee it and give feedback and provide new data to the system”, he says.

• Albert and efficiencies

“Costs are saved in two ways. One is human capital. Companies that use Albert need one or two people to oversee the system instead of 15 people. The other way is media efficiencies—specifically, bidding intelligently for media. With our system we can manage millions of key words, each getting its own bid that’s based on meeting the desired ROI. This precision significantly reduces the costs of media buys and increases results”, Mr Naveh said.

“I have to say that in most cases our customers increase their media buying as it becomes more efficient, rather than focus on cutting costs. Now that there’s a direct correlation between ROI and buying, they want to spend more and aren’t as focused on cutting budget”, he noted.

• Is Albert fit for all companies regardless of their business field?

“Once you have your business settings in mind, you know your KPIs, you know the message you are trying to convey, you know what your budget is going to look like, basically it’s much better to rely on an AI system than to execute it manually. It’s not tuned to a specific vertical”, Mr Naveh explained.

“At the end of the day, it’s marketers trying to get their message in front of people and trying to get the people to act” – Tomer Naveh, CTO, Albert.