How this martech player is working to use artificial intelligence to rethinking campaigns and engagement
Campaigns have been a part of marketing since marketing began. Now Vivek Sharma believes its time to let them die, and Da Vinci is his chosen assassin.
Sharma is the CEO at Movable Ink, a New York-based martech company which began life in 2010 offering solutions for data-driven content personalisation. In February this year, the company acquired the artificial intelligence (AI)-based personalisation and predictive analytics company, Coherent Path. It has since reworked its technology as Da Vinci, a solution which promises personalised content based on individuals, not just segments.
Sharma says the purchase of Coherent Path flowed from his belief that the current campaign-based nature of marketing did not fit with ambitions to deliver personalised interactions.
“The long-term goal is to kill the campaign,” Sharma tells CMO. “There will still be campaigns five, six, seven years from now, and there is still room for the big idea from marketing departments, but that seems to be the majority of what marketers do today. And it misses the mark, because everyone is an individual and everyone has different tastes and interests.”
It is around this last point Sharma believes the over-reliance on campaigns is falling short of customers’ needs. The big problem is campaigns tend to deliver generic offers rather than personalising them to individual needs.
“There would be a message that they [marketers] would want to get out, either to their whole list or a segment, and then they would filter that a little bit and add in some layers of personalisation using Movable Ink or other technology,” Sharma says. “For the past 50 or 60 years that has been the process. While it has been useful, we also felt it has been the fundamental barrier to achieving true personalisation.”
Sharma says the value of Coherent Path comes through its use of a branch of mathematics called hyperbolic geometry, which has proven useful for visualising big data and modelling hierarchical structures such as social networks. This is used to understand what people are likely to respond to and maximise customer lifetime value.
“A lot of the existing AI technologies are reinforcement based, which means they over-index on the things people have done, which means you can get trapped in a bubble,” Sharma says. “What was brilliant about the Coherent Path approach was that it was focused on discovery of the products and categories that people will love, but that they may not have ever engaged with in the past.
“If you can build a model that understands that a person who has bought living room furniture in the past year suddenly has bought baby toys, it is incredibly powerful to key off that. Maybe they fit the pattern of a signal that could introduce them to new types of products and categories. And to be able to do this for every one of the million people on your list is an extremely powerful thing.”
The Da Vinci AI engine then enables these recommendations to be made at scale.
“For the first time, you can get insights in a living system that is able to detect and understand what is happening with each of your customers, and it generates the type of content and messaging that is going to be the most effective in not only maximising the revenue for this particular campaign but maximising the value from this particular customer over the long term,” Sharma says.
“What we do is find the creative that pairs most effectively with a particular customer because it is relevant to them in the moment. All the creative you have built over the years can be reused and you can start to add to that library.”
Sharma says early results have been promising, with users noting an average 16 per cent lift in clickthrough rates, a 20 pr cent lift in conversion rates, and a 25 per cent lift in revenue.
“It is running the entire promotional campaigns for some of the biggest brands on the planet,” he says. “Da Vinci helps the brand act more like a personal shopper, where people are surprised and delighted and actually get value out of these interactions and find things they might be interested in.
“In a counter intuitive way, AI can end up humanising marketing more by making it more relevant to the individual.”
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