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My favorite Einstein quote is the one that says, it is the theory that determines the data.  ;-)

So writes someone to a mailing list I’m on. I couldn’t find a source for that, but it might derive from this Einstein quotation:

Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

 Unification of Fundamental Forces (1990) by Abdus Salam ISBN 0521371406, page 99, related by Heisenberg.

(By the way, my quick Internet “research” turned up no reliable sources for a related quotation often attributed to Marshall McLuhan: “I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it.” It sounds like him, though.)

But no matter. What I really want to talk about is how the Einstein quotation applies to marketing:

Messages create markets.

This is I think quite literally the case in the pre-personalization view of markets as corresponding to demographic slices. The particular demographics that are assumed to constitute a market are the ones that are believed to be susceptible to the same broadcast message. If white adolescents are thought to respond to “Be a Pepper”, then they are a market. If suburban dads are susceptible to “Come alive with Subaru!”, then they are a market. If short baseball fans are not susceptible to the same message, they are not a market.

Such markets have no reality other than their susceptibility to a message. If and when (= now) messages can be delivered to, and even designed for, based on particular traits, preferences, and behaviors of individuals,  “markets” ?cease to exist. Since personalization can more effectively play on human susceptibility to non-rational appeals, many of us, including me, are of course disturbed about this development. 

But there is another side of this as well.  As Doc Searls once said, markets are conversations. If customers and users now talk with one another about the things they want to buy and have bought, then markets once again have some actual reality. The fact that these conversations occur in and on networks makes these markets fluid but does not make them less real.

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Dear David,

On behalf of everyone at easyJet, I hope you and your loved ones are healthy and safe at this time.

I wanted to write to you to let you know what’s been happening at easyJet.

Dearest Johan,

I cannot express the relief that swept over me when I saw your message in my inbox. And how like you to worry about me and my family above all else. My dear, dear Johan.

It instantly reminded me of the time four years ago when I took my only trip on easyJet and the very kind flight attendant stood up in front of all the passengers and assured us in the very sweetest of words that everyone at easyJet cares most about our safety… and then proved it by showing us how to operate the safety belts provided to each and every one of us, for free.

I knew then that EZJet, under your stewardship, was a member of our family.

And our family is doing well, given the circumstances.

As luck would have it, the call for self-isolation came when we were visiting Jack and Lucy and their five little ones in Worchester. (Mindy, bless her heart, insists on calling it Wor-chest-er because, as she says — maybe once too often, to tell the truth — would you call someone named Chester “Er”?)

It’s great to get to spend so much time with the grandkids 24/7 and weekends don’t exist anymore. We feel like we’ve really gotten to know them, especially Lilly, the middle child. Seven can be a tough age when you’re an energetic little tyke with no real interests other than dominance, locked in a house with a mother whose patience wore thin about six hours into the whole ordeal. Not that Lucy is a bad mother. She’s wonderful a good amount of the time and Jack still seems to love her.

For the past five weeks Mindy and I have only gone out three times to bring in some items that Jack and Lucy have forgotten to pick up for us on their grocery runs. You would have laughed to see the look on the face of the clerk at the liquor store when Mindy walked in dressed for a blizzard, with a full roll of toilet paper wrapped around her face. By the time she got home with her haul — Jack won’t let us use their car because of an article he read on the Internet — she had soaked through most of the TP and it took forever to comb it out of her hair. At least she combed her hair — it took three of us — for the first time in three weeks. When one door closes, a window opens, as they say. Everything has its positive side.

Although we’re struggling to find one in the passing of Mindy’s beloved Uncle Luke from the virus. Did you know that he landed at Normandy when he was just 17? Sorry to spring this on you, but I knew you’d want to know.

We have comforted ourselves by recalling that easyJet flight. We remember the conversations we had about whether the low cost of the flight was worth the trip to an airport an hour and a half away, which meant getting up at 2AM for a 5:30AM flight. And then Mindy and I laugh remembering learning all the things the ticket price didn’t cover. Not even a choice of seats! It was a wondrous journey of discovery for which we will always be grateful, dearest Johan.

The flight itself was a once-in-al-lifetime adventure. You took us literally miles above our beautiful blue pearl, as someone on TV once said. (I think it was Kermit the Frog but Mindy says it was a human impersonating him.) Anyway, you gave us the gift of flight, Johan, and we shall treasure it forever. Compared to that, Mindy’s lost suitcase is just earth-bound baggage. Literally, actually.

But enough about us, Johan. We appreciate all of the travails you yourself are suffering and tell us about in such a strong, calm voice: the long hold times that must frustrate your phone support people terribly, the suspension of flights that keep you from soaring like the eagle that is you spirit animal. Eagles don’t give us free snacks or carry our baggage without ever dropping a piece or two!

Please give our love and best wishes to every member of the easyJet family. We don’t know how you fit them all into your flat — that’s English for “apartment” — but we are sure that spirits are high, and we hope that you managed to grab enough snacks and those little bottles of liquor to keep everyone going as long as their credit cards keep working.

God bless you, sweet Johan. We miss you!

Your passengers forever,

Hal and Mindy

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Princeton has published the ongoing results of its “Dark Patterns” project. The site says:

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.

So, Nudge gone evil. (And far beyond nudging.)

From the Dark Patterns page, here are some of the malicious patterns they are tracking:

• Activity Notification: Influencing shopper decisions by making the product appear popular with others.
• Confirmshaming: Steering shoppers to certain choices through shame and guilt.
• Countdown Timer: Pressuring shoppers with a decreasing count-down timer.
• Forced Enrollment: Requiring shoppers to agree to something in order to use basic functions of the website.
• Hard to Cancel: Making it easy for shoppers to sign up and obstructing their ability to cancel.
• Hidden Costs: Waiting to reveal extra costs to shoppers until just before they make a purchase.
• Hidden Subscription: Charging a recurring fee after accepting an initial fee or trial period.
• High Demand: Pressuring shoppers by suggesting that a product has high demand.
• Limited Time: Telling shoppers that a deal or discount will expire soon.
• Low-Stock Notification: Pressuring shoppers with claims that the inventory is low.
• Pressured Selling: Pre-selecting or pressuring shoppers to accept the most expensive options.
• Sneak into Basket: Adding extra products into shopping carts without consent or through boxes checked by default.
• Trick Questions: Steering shoppers into certain choices with confusing language
• Visual Interference: Distracting shoppers away from certain information through flashy color, style, and messages.

Home page:https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/

Academic paper:
https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/assets/dark-patterns.pdf

Nathan Mathias has put a front end to this data at the Tricky Sites site: https://trickysites.cs.princeton.edu/

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Xpeditr has really overestimated the size of my wine cellar.

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(An unauthorized, unapproved homage to The Cluetrain Manifesto).

A powerful global reaccommodation has begun. Corporations are rediscovering themselves in their muscular masculinity. For we are the makers, the takers, and above all else, we are the winners. Customers, employees, the needy, the vulnerable are, by definition, the losers. Each one of them would gladly trade their seat for one of the tufted leather chairs in our CEO’s office. Instead, make sure your pathetic seatbacks are returned to their upright position, your trays are stowed, and you’re buckled in. For this is your pilot speaking, and we’re ready to fly the friendly skies of “PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKER!”

1. Markets are reaccommodations.

2. There’s the crew and there’s the screwed. Deal with it.

3. When jack-booted thugs rough up paying passengers and drag them from your plane, it’s time for the CEO to step up and declare that there’s two sides to every story.

4. There’s no customer need that cannot be met by a bag of off-brand peanuts.

5. Customers of course have rights. But only once they have lawyers.

6. Think of it like this: Boarding a airplane is like opening a shrink-wrapped product, an act that involuntarily voids all your rights. Except boarding a plane means also giving up the shreds of human dignity we didn’t already strip from you during the nudie scan, the TSA ritual ball or tit squeeze, the routine totally un-profiled examination of the darker-hued among us, the lack of sufficient seats in the boarding area, the unexplained delays, and the segregation into social strata announced over the PA. Also, I think we may have missed a spot in your rectum.

7. Costs have gone up while fuel prices and basic services have gone down, yet more and more people are flying. Therefore, passengers must love us more than ever. You can’t argue with math!

8. Virtually no other industry uses overbooking as a routine best practice because they don’t love their customers are much as we do.

9. “First they came for my free crappy meal, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carry-ons, and I said nothing. Then they just said ‘Fuck it’ and came for the guy sitting next to me and dragged him off the plane by the ankles. And I said something, and I video-ed it and I posted it.” Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I’ve got a corporate reputation to maintain.

10. Every act of corporate brutality can be fixed by combining the power of euphemism with the audacity of neologism, catalyzed by a really expensive blue suit.

11. It’s great to know that we’re making our employees so proud! Right, gang? Gang?

12. Hey, it’s us against them, where “them” are the customers, right, gang? Oh, c’mon, gang, quit kidding around!

13. You know who’s the victim here? The shareholders. How about some sympathy for them, eh?

14. Y’know, it’d be a lot easier for us to fly empty planes and not have to deal with you all. You’re welcome. Ingrates.

15. Hey, catch! Here’s your guitar. Sorry-not-sorry for the crushing.

16. Have a bag of last year’s peanuts, on us.

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Tim Wu [Twitter: superwuster] is giving a talk jointly sponsored by the Shorenstein Center and the Berkman Klein Center. His new book is The Attention Merchants.  He is introduced by Erie Meyer, a Shorenstein fellow this year.

Tim begins by noting that he was at the Berkman Center at its beginning, when it was pretty much just Charlie Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain.

He says that his new book is the “history of a business model”: the re-sale of human attention. This model has “long anchored the media,” but now has “exploded into all parts of our lives.” It’s part of many business models these days. Even the national parks are selling naming rights to trails.

“Maybe a thousand times a day, something tries to get us to spend maybe a micro-second” to notice something. “The deepest ambition of the book is to say that this is having an effect on the human condition.” He points to the casino effect where you get distracted by links and an hour later you say, “What just happened?” He’s concerned about a model that has us taking our attention away from people and our surroundings and into a commercial space.

The book is a history, he says. “”Newspapers once upon a time were not a mass media.” In 1830 NY’s biggest paper’s circulation was 2,000.”“Newspapers once upon a time were not a mass media.” In 1830 NY’s biggest paper’s circulation was 2,000. Papers were expensive. So, Benjamin Day — “the first attention merchant” — lowered the price of his paper to a penny, and covered a broader range of topics, “human interest stories for a mass audience.”. E.g., the first story in his paper, The NY Sun, was about tragic lovers. He was selling his audience to the advertisers.

“We’re in a time when we’re almost addicted to free stuff — free content, free services.” But people have begun to realize that we are then the product. “What’s being resold is something very scarce: human attention.” And as food, shelter, clothing, etc., are abundant, so the scarce things become even more valuable. We have 168 hours in a week, and that is one of the last scarce resources. “The models of free are scrambling to get at that resource.”

ERIE: You say in the book that trash-talking grabs our attention.

TIM: Many of the current techniques are quite old. E.g., Trolls. The NY Sun attracted competitors, including the NY Tribune. The Trib got attention by picking fights with other newspaper editors. He was the first troll. It worked. “We’ve seen recently that you can run an entire campaign just by insulting people.” The Sun fought back with even more salacious stories. E.g., “it reported that a scientist had discovered life on the moon, including trees, horse-like animals, and man-bats. They never retracted it.”it reported that a scientist had discovered life on the moon, including trees, horse-like animals, and man-bats. They never retracted it.

ERIE: As you point out, one of them grabbed attention by being pro-Abolition, which caused the others to become rabidly anti-Abolition.

TIM: The book doesn’t totally condemn that attention-seeking model, but it warns about its tendency to run to the most lurid content. This makes for constant ethical problems.

ERIE: You talk about the Oprah model…

TIM: “Orpah Winfrey is one of the great innovators in this area.” She was a fully integrated celebrity, production company, advertising company, and a tv network, all in one. She created product endorsements that drove a lot of advertising. She also married the appeal of ministry (salvation, forgiveness, transcendence) and commercialism. By 1995, she was making more money in entertainment than anyone else and gave rise to celebrities who are themselves attention merchants. E.g., Martha Stewart, Donald Trump: the celebrity builds her/his own media empire. Tim expects this to be the future.

One of the subtexts of the book, Tim says, is that the value of human attention was not widely recognized until the 20th century, except for organized religion. The entities interested in what you spent your time doing, before the 20th century, were organized religions that wanted you praying, and going to church, and in various ways to keep God on your mind.” In some ways, Tim says, the story of the book is the story of government and business figuring out that this is valuable resource. The govt realizes it when they see they can raise an army through govt propaganda. Industry, after govt, realizes they can sell products if they have public attention.

ERIE: Can you talk about micro-celebrities?

TIM: There’s a fascinating change in celebrity. (Tim name-checks me for the line “In the future, everyone will be famous to 15 people.”) And reality tv offers the lottery of fame to anyone. This has some consistency with the American dream: Everyone can have their own land and be sort of wealthy. “We have this idea that everyone can be famous.” The negative side of this is that in fact the disparities remain: it’s extremely hard to become famous, and the pursuit of it leads to empty lives. “It’s not like you write something and people read it.” The main reason is biological: ““The default setting of our brain is to ignore everything.”The default setting of our brain is to ignore everything.”

You can control attention to some degree, but it’s always darting around, and you can really only attend to one thing at once.

ERIE: You say the first ad blocker was a remote control…

TIM: In the 1920s, Zenith was a maverick company. The head of it (“The Commodore”) thought commercials had ruined radio. He had his engineers work on ad-blocking software for TV. They came up with the remote control. Originally it was a gun so you could shoot out the commercials. There have been other revolts. In Paris, there was a revolt against posters. In Paris, advertising is still restricted to certain areas. We may be in another such period now. (He mentions the Brave browserthat blocks ads from the gitgo.) “I believe in the power and legitimacy of results.”

ERIE: “You’ve said that if you have a mission in life, it’s to fight bullies.” What should aspiring entrepreneurs do?

TIM: I struggle with this. “A lot of people who have gone into tech have been very idealistic people.” The pay-for-content models haven’t worked so well. One chapter tells the story of decision-making at Google. At one point, it was bleeding money and didn’t know what to do, so they thought about advertising. But in 1996 Larry Page had written a manifesto that declared that advertising-funded search engines will always be biased and will never serve the interests of people. But Google thought it could square the circle with Adwords: a form of advertising that made the product better and didn’t bother people. That was true at the beginning. If an ad showed up, which usually didn’t happen, it’d be useful to you.

But the demands of the ad-based model have increased. The longer it gets, the worse it gets. They’ve increasingly blurred the lines between the organic results and the ads. Google Maps shows us things and it sometimes unclear why. Most of the major platforms haven’t gotten much better for consumers over the past few years, but have gotten better for advertisers. A developer said, ““The best minds of our generation have gone to getting people to click on ads.”The best minds of our generation have gone to getting people to click on ads.”

Tech is a key driver these days, he says. “Which has changed your life more? Government or tech?” I wish Google had considered a different kind of corporate form or model. “I give Wikipedia a lot of credit for going non-commercial. I give even more to the original creators of the Internet who just built it and put it out there.” E.g., the creator of email didn’t look for a business model. Likewise for the creators of the Internet Protocol or the Web.

ERIE: Have you ever clicked on an ad on purpose?

TIM: I think yes. I think I wanted to buy those razors.

Q & A

Q: Two positive examples: FB put out the call to register to vote. Services raise money for worthy causes.

A: Yes. Gathering up attention for some purpose isn’t inherently good or evil. The book argues for carving out quiet spaces, but I believe in the Habermasian public sphere.

Q: Platforms can abandon ads but show us content based on who pays them. How can we rebel against what we can’t see?

A: Ad-blockers are not the most sustainable form of rebellion. I’ve decided that my attitude that I should never pay for anything on the Web came from my adolescent years. You have to support the content you like. “”There’s a difference between buying and supporting.””“There’s a difference between buying and supporting.”

Q: How about “Society as Spectacle“? And Kevin Kelly’s True Fan theory?

A: Paid models support a much broader variety of content. Ad models require the underlying content to more generally be mass content. That’s one of the reason that TV has gotten better over the past fifteen years. Ad supported TV drove to the middle. TV now gets 50% of its revenue from non-advertising.

Q: What’s been your hardest struggle to regain control of your attention?

A: All books probably come from a personal place. Control of attention is a struggle for me. One of the places I decided I needed to write this book was during a 10-day solo trip in the Utah desert. Time seemed to pass in very different ways. An hour could feel like a week. I felt like the modern regime was having me lose control. I like the Web, but I found I didn’t like the way I’d spent my time. I wish I’d spent time on activities I’d consciously chosen. I like JS Mills’ Chapter 3: Life is a matter of autonomy and self-development, and you need to make decisions that are yours.

Q: Is your a book is a manifesto for policy change, or a self-help book?

A: Can I have a third option?

Q: Are there policy implications?

A: I struggled with how much to make this legally prescriptive. Should I end the book with policy proposals? I decided not to, for a number of reasons. One had to do with craft: those last chapters of policy prescriptions, after a book covering 200 years, are usually pathetic. It’s very hard to regulate well. A lot of it has to do with how people conduct their lives. Policies aren’t sensitive to individual situations. I have complex feelings about it and didn’t want to cram into the book. And then people focus on those prescriptions at the expense of the rest of the book.

“If you get down to it, there is room for a new era of consumer protection” that tries to protect attention. Especially when it’s not consensual. E.g., the back of a taxi cab where you’re forced to be exposed to ads. “Non-consensual things reaching you…in law we call that ‘battery’.”

Q: Is commerce in attention span part of a democracy? People have to learn things they would not willingly learn.

A: If we perfect our filters, we may live in worlds where we learn only what we want to learn. I have complicated ideas about this. The penny press did a good job of creating the sense of a public and public opinion. But I resist the idea that to be a democracy we have to all attend to the same sources of information. “In the 19th century, America was a flourishing democracy and there was no national media”In the 19th century, America was a flourishing democracy and there was no national media, and lived in geographically defined filter bubbles. I don’t pine for the 1950s when everyone watched the same news broadcasts. Building one’s character means making your own information environment.

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At the PAPis conference Bas Nieland, CEO and Co-Founder of Datatrics, is talking about how to predict the color of shoes your customer is going to buy. The company tries to “make data science marketeer-proof for marketing teams of all sizes.” IT ties to create 360-degree customer profiles by bringing together info from all the data silos.

They use some machine learning to create these profiles. The profile includes the buying phase, the best time to present choices to a user, and the type of persuasion that will get them to take the desired action. [Yes, this makes me uncomfortable.]

It is structured around a core API that talks to mongoDB and MySQL. They provide “workbenches” that work with the customer’s data systems. They use BigML to operate on this data.

The outcome are models that can be used to make recommendations. They use visualizations so that marketeers can understand it. But the marketeers couldn’t figure out how to use even simplified visualizations. So they created visual decision trees. But still the marketeers couldn’t figure it out. So they turn the data into simple declarative phrases: which audience they should contact, in which channel, what content, and when. E.g.:

“To increase sales, çontact your customers in the buying phase with high engagement through FB with content about jeans on sale on Thursday, around 10 o’clock.”

They predict the increase in sales for each action, and quantify in dollars the size of the opportunity. They also classify responses by customer type and phase.

For a hotel chain, they connected 16,000 variables and 21M data points, that got reduced to 75 variables by BigML which created a predictive model that ended up getting the chain more customer conversions. E.g., if the model says someone is in the orientation phase, the Web site shows photos of recommend hotels. If in the decision phase, the user sees persuasive messages, e.g., “18 people have looked at this room today.” The messages themselves are chosen based on the customer’s profile.

Coming up: Chatbot integration. It’s a “real conversation” [with a bot with a photo of an atttractive white woman who is supposedly doing the chatting]

Take-aways: Start simple. Make ML very easy to understand. Make it actionable.

Q&A

Me: Is there a way built in for a customer to let your model know that it’s gotten her wrong. E.g., stop sending me pregnancy ads because I lost the baby.

Bas: No.

Me: Is that on the roadmap?

Bas: Yes. But not on a schedule. [I’m not proud of myself for this hostile question. I have been turning into an asshole over the past few years.]

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Vinny Senguttuvan is Senior Data Scientist at METIS. Before that, he was at Facebook-based gaming company, High 5 Games, which had 10M users. His talk at PAPIs: “Predicting Customers.”

The main challenge: Most of the players play for free. Only 2% ever spend money on the site, buying extra money to play. (It’s not gambling because you never cash out). 2% of those 2% contribute the majority of the revenue.

All proposed changes go through A/B testing. E.g., should we change the “Buy credits” button from blue to red. This is classic hypothesis testing. So you put up both options and see which gets the best results. It’s important to remember that there’s a cost to the change, so the A-B preference needs to be substantial enough. But often the differences are marginal. So you can increase the sample size. This complicates the process. “A long list of changes means not enough time per change.” And you want to be sure that the change affects the paying customers positively, which means taking even longer.

When they don’t have enough samples, they can bring down the confidence level required to make the change. Or they could bias one side of the hypothesis. And you can assume the variables are independent and run simultaneous A-B tests on various variables. High 5 does all three. It’s not perfect but it works.

Second, there is a poularity metric by which they rank or classify their 100 games. They constantly add games — it went from 15 to 100 in two years. This continuously changes the ranking of the games. Plus, some are launched locked. This complicates things. Vinny’s boss came up with a model of an n-dimensional casino, but it was too complex. Instead, they take 2 simple approaches: 1. An average-weighted spin. 2. Bayesian. Both predicted well but had flaws, so they used a type of average of both.

Third: Survival analysis. They wanted to know how many users are still active a given time after they created their account, and when is a user at risk of discontinuing use. First, they grouped users into cohorts (people who joined within a couple of weeks of each other) and plotted survival rates over time. They also observed return rates of users after each additional day of absence. They also implement a Cox survival model. They found that newer users were more likely to decline in their use of the product; early users are more committed. This pattern is widespread. That means they have to continuously acquire new players. They also alert users when they reach the elbow of disuse.

Fourth: Predictive lifetime value. Lifetime value = total revenue from a user over the entire time the the produced. This is significant because of costs: 10-15% of the rev goes into ads to acquire customers. Their 365 day prediction model should be a time series, but they needed results faster, so they flipped it into a regression problem, predicting the 365 day revenue based on the user’s first month data: how they spent, purchase count, days of play, player level achievement, and the date joined. [He talks about regression problems, but I can’t keep up.] At that point it cost $2 to acquire a customer from FB ad, and $6 from mobile apps. But when they tested, the mobile acquisitions were more profitable than those that came from through FB. It turned out that FB was counting as new users any player who hadn’t played in 30 days, and was re-charging them for it. [I hope I got that right.]

Fifth: Recommendation systems. Pandora notes the feature of songs and uses this to recommend similarities. YouTube makes recommendations made based on relations among users. Non-matrix factorization [I’m pretty sure he just made this up] gives you the ability to predict the score for a video that you know nothing about in terms of content. But what if the ratings are not clearly defined? At High 5, there are no explicit ratings. They calculated a rating based on how often a player plays it, how long the session, etc. And what do you do about missing values: use averages. But there are too many zeroes in the system, so they use sparse matrix solvers. Plus, there is a semi-order to the games, so they used some human input. [Useful for library Stackscores
?]

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I’m at the PAPIs conference. The opening panel is about building intelligent apps with machine learning. The panelists are all representing companies. It’s Q&A with the audience; I will not be able to keep up well.

The moderator asks one of the panelists (Snejina Zacharia from Insurify) how AI can change a heavily regulated audience such as insurance. She replies that the insurance industry gets low marks for customer satisfaction, which is an opportunity. Also, they can leverage the existing platforms and build modern APIs on stop of them. Also, they can explore how to use AI in existing functions, e.g., chatbots, systems that let users just confirm their identification rather than enter all the data. They also let users pick from an AI-filtered list of carriers that are right for them. Also, personalization: predicting risk and adjusting the questionnaire based on the user’s responses.

Another panelist is working on mapping for a company that is not Google and that is owned by three car companies. So, when an Audi goes over a bump, and then a Mercedes goes over it, it will record the same data. On personalization: it’s ripe for change. People are talking about 100B devices being connected by 2020. People think that RFID tags didn’t live up to their early hype, but 10 billion RFID tags are going to be sold this year. These can provide highly personalized, higher relevant data. This will be the base for the next wave of apps. We need a standards body effort, and governments addressing privacy and security. Some standards bodies are working on it, e.g., Global Standards 1, which manages the barcodes standard.

Another panelist: Why is marketing such a good opportunity for AI and ML? Marketers used to have a specific skill set. It’s an art: writing, presenting, etc. Now they’re being challenged by tech and have to understand data. In fact, now they have to think like scientists: hypothesize, experiment, redo the hypothesis… And now marketers are responsible for revenue. Being a scientist responsible for predictable revenue is driving interest in AI and ML. This panelist’s company uses data about companies and people to segmentize following up on leads, etc. [Wrong place for a product pitch, IMO, which is a tad ironic, isn’t it?]

Another panelist: The question is: how can we use predictive intelligence to make our applications better? Layer input intelligence on top of input-programming-output. For this we need a platform that provides services and is easy to attach to existing processes.

Q: Should we develop cutting edge tech or use what Google, IBM, etc. offer?

A: It depends on whether you’re an early adopter or straggler. Regulated industries have to wait for more mature tech. But if your bread and butter is based on providing the latest and greatest, then you should use the latest tech.

A: It also depends on whether you’re doing a vertically integrated solution or something broader.

Q: What makes an app “smart”? Is it: Dynamic, with rapidly changing data?

A: Marketers use personas, e.g., a handful of types. They used to be written in stone, just about. Smart apps update the personas after ever campaign, every time you get new info about what’s going on in the market, etc.

Q: In B-to-C marketing, many companies have built the AI piece for advertising. Are you seeing any standardization or platforms on top of the advertising channels to manage the ads going out on them?

A: Yes, some companies focus on omni-channel marketing.

A: Companies are becoming service companies, not product companies. They no longer hand off to retailers.

A: It’s generally harder to automate non-digital channels. It’s harder to put a revenue number on, say, TV ads.

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