Digital marketing has already evolved the way some of the biggest markets in the world operate. But the future of Digital Marketing holds a lot of potential for us, marketers, especially given the good work that our friends in analytics and artificial intelligence are doing.

What if we are in an age where each one of us can have an assistant like Jarvis? (Yes Jarvis, the artificial intelligence from the Iron-man comics) Wouldn’t our life be a lot easier? May be. Your wish will be his command. He would know everything there is to know about you, from the time you were born, your likes / dislikes, your friends, your family, where you live, where you work, etc till the time you die. At the same time, he would be smarter as he would have access to the loads of common information that would be available on the internet.  But is it necessarily a good thing? What if he knows you so well, that he can start predicting your decisions and then manipulate you to act in a particular way? How do you think this might affect digital marketing or marketing in general?

What do marketers really do?

As marketers, we spend a lot of time and energy in trying to understand the motives behind our consumer’s behavior, trying to derive ‘Consumer Insights’. Consumer Insight in simple words are the reasons why your consumers would act in a particular way, which even they themselves are not able to articulate. One of the things that differentiates humans from others animals is our rationality. But have all the decisions that we made in our life completely rational, especially our purchase decisions? Consumer behavioural scientists believe that human beings tend to make mostly irrational purchase decisions. But, the same scientists also go on to say that there is a certain degree of predictable irrationality amongst human behavior. This predictability if fully understood, can do wonders for any marketer. So how do we go about it?

Age of Big Data

Today’s age is the age of data. Each one of us contributes to this data building everyday, both consciously and unconsciously. It started with the advent of the internet and internet browsers started creating data. This has been taken a lot further by the universe of apps. These apps are generating tremendous amounts of data on a daily basis, of what we like, what we don’t like, what we buy, where we go, what we eat, what services we need, what entertainment we watch and the list can go on and on. Every person now has a digital profile, which is an amalgamation of data from these multiple platforms, and is also constantly creating new data for marketer to understand, process and act upon. But the problem is precisely this. The amount of data generated on a daily basis is so high that the first instinct is to throw this data down the drain, and act on our instincts. But this will not give you accurate results. That is why the term ‘Big Data’ has become so relevant in today’s day and age.

There has been some serious advancement in the computational analytical capabilities of the world over the past decade. Human programmers write algorithms which try to derive meaning out of this massive chunk of data. But still we have just reached a stage where we are doing Descriptive analytics. For example, companies such as Facebook and Google have build their own universe where in they have the data of billions of people and can segregate people based on multiple parameters, and as a marketer, you can get a direct set of your target audience. The next step is moving towards Predictive analysis. Tools that would not just help you in descriptive analysis, but also predict the next move of your target audience. This is where the next phase of Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in.

Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing

Currently the difference between a human analyst and the machine analyst tools that is that machines can only identify trends, as per a pre-programmed logic; where as humans (digital marketers) can derive much better insights. For a machine it is not possible to do so as it does not have a context to this living world. It operated as per its program, not its own intelligence. But what if we can create context of this world for these machines? Its is important here to note that this is not a far fetched reality.

With the advances of Big Data analytics and amalgamation of all the personal data at a single place, either through personal devices or through organizations such as Google or Facebook (with all the companies they own and have access to), it is believed that in the next couple of decades we might actually have machine learning tools that can learn from itself, by observing data over longer periods of times. They would actually capture the predictability in human irrational behavior with great accuracy. Such an AI will not just provide descriptive, but also predictive information about individual consumers. As we move towards this singularity of data, with an understanding of the context of this world, these AI tools would very accurately start predicting the way our consumers will make their decisions. Not just the customers directly, but also understand which are the other influencing factors for your target group. They can predict what your consumer might need, when he might make a decision, where is he most likely to buy, whom will be take along with him while making the purchase, etc.

At a very basic level, all of marketing tries to think of the future of their customers in terms of their present. We as digital marketers try to reach out to relevant consumers in the present, so that we can impact their behavior in the future. Thus, this type of information might completely revolutionize the Digital marketing industry, and make it the most critical form of marketing, that any company might have to understand and adapt to. But an even bigger question that needs to be asked is, if machines will start predicting consumer behaviour fairly accurately, would you actually needs marketers in this world?

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