Landscape of Machine Intelligence Systems for Marketing

I’ll be speaking next month at the MarTech conference on How Machine Intelligence Will Really Change Marketing. This required assembling a list of marketing systems using machine intelligence, which pretty much inevitably led to the logoscape below.

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the idea – could there by anything less original?—but have found the result surprisingly useful. In particular, it illustrates several points that would otherwise have been hidden or much harder to convey. These include:

• Lots of systems. You may think that machine intelligence is still a pretty rare thing. Not so. I found 23 categories with 140 systems, and know there are dozens of other products I could have included.

• Some categories are already crowded. Boxes with a lot of logos have a lot of competitors. This doesn’t make them mature in the sense of having a widely accepted standard approach. But it does mean that many people have recognized they are a successful use for machine intelligence. Conversely, categories with few competitors are more speculative – although a few strike me as pretty sure to succeed in the end.

• Few systems for marketing strategy. Some research I’ll cite at MarTech suggests that marketers split their time roughly equally between strategy and planning, program design and content creation, and data management and analytics. I’ve classified vendors into those categories. I then make a further distinction between systems that help marketers with decisions and systems that make decisions without marketer involvement. This distinction is very loose, but that’s a topic for another day.  What’s immediately obvious is there are very few systems to do strategy and planning, and none of those are actually deciders. My take on this is that CMOs aren’t ready to delegate strategic decisions to machines, although another explanation is that CEOs aren’t ready to delegate marketing strategy to the CMOs.

• Decider systems for design. The design category is crowded with systems for the established applications of personalization and programmatic ad bidding. Perhaps more surprising, there is also a rapidly growing number of products to create contents such as copy, email dialogs, and even Web pages. Nearly all of these are deciders – perhaps because they work with volumes of choices so huge that only computers can handle them. Helper systems aren’t much use in those situations.

• All kinds of systems for data. This is the most populated area, with roughly half the categories and half the total vendors. It's also the group with the most vendors I didn’t include – for example, there are probably 100 social media monitoring systems alone, most of which use at least some basic machine intelligence for language processing. This group is about evenly split between helpers and deciders, reflecting the variety and complexity of data-related tasks.  One reason this group is so large is that many of the applications, such as data extraction and predictive model building, are also used for purposes outside of marketing.

I’ll draw some other lessons from this chart in my MarTech talk. You can still join us by registering here. In the meantime, I hope this chart helps you realize the scope of machine intelligence applications in marketing today and inspires you to explore more deeply how they can help in your own work.

Real Magnet Offers Complex Campaigns Without the Flow Charts

I recently saw a useful distinction between AI – artificial intelligence, which is machines replacing people – and IA – intelligent assistance, which is machines helping people. Real Magnet, an email service provider turned marketing automation vendor with over 1,000 clients, doesn’t position itself as either. But its flagship feature is letting marketers create sophisticated, multi-step campaigns by answering handful of questions in a template. The remaining work to implement the marketers’ choices is done by the system. That sounds like Intelligent Assistance to me.

This piques my interest because I’ve long argued that the chief roadblock to wider use of marketing automation is the difficulty of setting up campaigns, and have offered Artificial Intelligence as the solution. That is, I have been looking for systems that automatically design campaigns (or deliver optimal customer treatments without campaigns), thereby removing the roadblock by doing the work on the marketers' behalf. This has always felt a bit optimistic, but, then, so do self-driving cars. An Intelligence Assistance approach seems like a more plausible near-term alternative – analogous to the “driver assist” features already finding their way into automobiles.

Of course, many marketing automation systems use templates as part of their campaign set-up. What sets Real Magnet apart is the entire set-up is done through the templates. The system does offer a conventional workflow builder (which is quite nice, in fact) but it's not needed for campaigns that fit the standard templates.  Users do have the ability to convert template campaigns to the workflow format for customization. .

Campaign Steps

To make things a bit more concrete: the Real Magnet campaign picker starts out by asking the user to select their industry from a list. The system then presents a choice of industry-appropriate campaign types such as subscription renewals, webinar promotions, birthday and anniversary messages, and welcome kits. Once a campaign is chosen, the system presents three or four steps with a few questions per step: for example, steps for a standard email campaign are select the audience, select the messages and intervals, and schedule the execution. Most of these selections are themselves made by picking from predefined options or templates, with the ability for users to set up new options as needed.  Real Magnet support staff is also available to set up options when clients need help.

Campaign Workflow

Campaign templates can include multiple steps and branching flows, such as follow-up messages to people don’t complete a registration process. Campaign steps can include many types of actions, from sending messages to assigning group membership, setting field values, managing point totals, suppressing further communications, or directing the flow to another branch or block within a branch. Over-all, these options make Real Magnet a very powerful system.

Campaigns can also run processes such as a/b tests, lead scoring, landing pages, segmentation, or suppression lists. In other words, pretty much any task that would ordinarily require complex set-up can be created through a template. Not surprisingly, Real Magnet reports its users – typically small marketing departments with limited resources – find this very appealing. Those are exactly the kinds of users who struggle to deploy advanced features in most marketing automation systems.

Real Magnet also provides several levels of campaign reporting, from a dashboard with summary statistics to performance by individual messages within a campaign to lists of campaign participants. Reports vary based on the campaign details.  They often include engagement rates and achievement of user-specified goals. Reports can also consolidate results for groups of campaigns.

The Real Magnet database is largely limited to a single record per customer, although the system does track promotion history and related events such as form files and survey completions. Users can add custom fields to the customer record but not custom tables. The system integrates with major CRM and association management systems, and can access their contents to some degree. It also stores social media handles for Facebook and Twitter, can send messages through those systems, and can create scores based on social media behaviors such as retweets and likes.

Real Magnet started business in 2000 as an email service provider. More than half of the company's 1000-plus clients are trade and professional associations, with additional concentrations in education and publishing. Pricing of the Real Magnet system is based on number of emails sent. Packages start around $200 to $300 per month.