At BIA/Kelsey’s NEXT conference last month in Boston, one of the more popular sessions featured Nish Parek from IBM Watson and Jodie Sassse from Equals 3 showing how artificial intelligence and cognitive computing can be applied to tough marketing problems. Basically, the answer is to design a solution that is accessible using English statements to have big data and analytics platforms like IBM Watson make your job easier, faster and more powerful.

We decided to expand on this conference session in a webinar set for Wed, Feb 1st at 2pm EST showcasing  the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as applied to local marketing. We’ll be interviewing Equal 3’s  managing partner, Scott Litman. Equals 3 built an intelligent companion they’ve named “Lucy” who can act on rules and procedures built by strategists and researchers using natural language queries to analyze data on the IBM Watson platform for which they’ve acquired rights.

Building data-driven audience and consumer insights that are actionable, effective and scalable is possible with new applications ofArtificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing platforms operating on massive structured and unstructured data sets based on queries and rules. These rules are built by the creativity, insights and experience of media and market researchers and strategists.

This is important because media researchers and strategists on both the buy (brands and agencies) and sell (publishers, programmatic exchanges) sides face a similar challenge. They need to figure out how to economically, efficiently and effectively orchestrate their use of data, tools and platforms to develop insightful and competitive audience and consumer segmentation strategies. It can be quite the menacing challenge to take this on in a meaningful and realistic way. There’s too much structured and unstructured data, too many platforms and it’s too hard and time consuming to sort through it all to mine for the hidden gems that might well be there. And if that’s a problem for national marketing, as we noted in an earlier post, multiply this by hundreds of local markets and location geotargeted zones for local marketing.

We’ll discuss and see live run-time examples of how AI companions like Lucy can assist in parsing big data to assist in research, segmentation and planning. Brand managers, account directors, marketing directors, media planners and media audience researchers can develop and present typed English language queries to Lucy. Lucy can then use IBM Watson to access (via APIs) a range of data services and platforms such as those pictured here.

If you’re heard about AI and cognitive computing but haven’t actually seen it in real-life, this is a great chance to get your heads around what’s coming up next in media and marketing.

Register for webinar here.