Big Pink Naked Ladies are Already Marketing to Us: Predictive Marketing's Power in the World today

Predictive analytics in marketing, as I mentioned in my last post, is here. Already, this all-encompassing disruption in the fundamentals of marketing and sales is changing how marketing specialists and bloggers are talking about their industry. Machines can predict what you want, when you will want it. Pretty intense stuff, right?! Suddenly the larger than life 3D pink hologram woman from Blade Runner 2049 that bends down to talk specifically to you doesn't seem so far fetched, huh?

If you've missed the movie, Blade Runner 2049, go see it, it's good, (although I'm still most partial to the 1982 original Blade Runner). As you probably noticed in the trailer (if you haven't seen Blade Runner 2049), at one point a giant 3D billboard representation of a woman observes the main character, K, walking past and she bends down to talk to him. In my head, after researching for this article, I'm pretty sure the following happened just prior to that interaction: The giant billboard accessed its CRM, took in a yottabyte of data, crafted by data insight, the perceived perfect message to communicate to K and then executed with a conversation, all within a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, our birthday-suited, pink billboard pin-up didn't have the entire plot of the storyline involving K to understand what a terrible sales mistake she was making along this customer touchpoint. Her timing was incredibly off, making it an awkward user experience. Sorry future Marketing AI, K is in the wrong place emotionally for a conversion.

Joking aside, this one part of the movie dredged up one question from my last post for me: do we really want this level of personalization? Do we really want marketing AI to know us so exquisitely well, and have information on us that we wouldn't even want our mother's to know? Or through affective computing, marketing AI would have the ability to "read" our emotional state and meet us there, do we want that? Perhaps what I'm speaking to is the advent of a whole new age of empowered consumerism.

Do You Know What Machines Know? Do You Really Wanna Know?

I touched on predictive marketing in my previous post, but I didn't really get into how powerful predictive analytics really are for marketing and sales teams. With Google and Salesforce becoming more public about their predictive marketing offerings, only someone living on a protein farm out in the middle of nowhere would not be able to see that predictive marketing has wormed its way into all facets of our world. So what are these data megaliths doing with all this information at their disposal for businesses, big and small?

A. Lot. And much more than you might suspect. They're using the data to sort and qualify leads, scoring us for whatever products businesses are trying to sell to us. They're putting us into highly specialized segments for this purpose, using massive piles of data to draw likely conclusions regarding our behavior. They're offering predictions about what products and services would be most sellable in our communities given the demographics of our and the surrounding neighborhoods. They're using extensive, constant AB testing to draft the exact right content to deliver to us at the times in which we are most receptive to that specific type of marketing. They are then iterating on our behavior, changing messaging, rerunning their analyses, and developing new strategies and offering insights about the future. Marketing teams are looking to these insights to know how to allocate their time and money, if said teams have not already given those tasks to their predictive marketing systems already. These same machines are being given the power to imagine new steps to take in these strategies and forming trees of possibilities based off of those imagined paths that our behavior can take. They then start their interactions with us, adapting along those predicted pathways as we give it feedback, and thus more data.

I am not hitting you with some science fiction pitch. This is happening right now on your favorite search engine, on your favorite shopping site, in your emails regarding new offers and in your local brick and mortar big box store. Everywhere.

This sounds like a lot. And it is. But it's important that you know, that I know, that your mom knows, what is happening in the world of marketing right now. And it's this information that will help you answer that same question nagging at my mind: Do you want this?

Are we 1984ing Ourselves?

‘The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.’ ~ George Orwell, quote from his dystopian novel, 1984.

To be frank with you, the jury is still out for me on this all important question. It WAY creeps me out to know that machines are now capable of taking me, using my data and the data of potentially every person who makes purchases with a wired corporation, and placing me not in one box, but tons of boxes, given the personas predictive marketing AI has created. I'm me! Not one of five people who really enjoys catching up on email while drinking french press Costa Rican coffee outside with goats on a Colorado farm at 5:35 AM on Sundays and seems to always be open to buying some new tech gadget for self, husband or kids!

(This is my goat named, Tulip.)

But on the flip side, I like being given a personalized ad about a new tool or application to simplify my life since Sunday mornings are when I'm usually thinking strategically about my week ahead. Before predictive marketing, I got offers from companies when I didn't want them. Calls at dinner, accosted by online ads for things that I would never ever be interested in buying. These imperfect marketing interactions filled my life, (as I'm sure they filled yours), with noise that I would have rather lived without. Now, without telling ANYONE, the world of marketing is "getting" me. It "gets" me so well that it knows when I want to be marketed to and what I want to discover more about. These are my interests, and it's about garnering my attention. And at the end of the day, I can just decide I don't need a new gadget. (The only sidebar to this "they know me so well" is that when my teenaged son uses my Netflix account, Netflix suggests movies I would never watch...horror genre, and when I open my Amazon account because the kids use my account, I get retargeted advertising for things like Legos, drones, fishing lures, and anything CAMO.) Can you relate?

All this technology is sold to us as liberating us from poor advertising and all we have to do is give the massive pool of cloud data every aspect of our lives for aggregation and analysis. That's it. Fair trade, right?

(Image credit: Tom Fishburne, Marketoonist)

Quite the trade off, right? But along with that bit of clarity in our current position within this connected world, another question arises. How long will this last?

Back in the day, on TV, characters in shows were used to sell sponsoring items. It was a new and exciting marketing gimmick that must have worked for a little while, because every show on the Television seemed to do it. It made sense too. Get these characters/actors that our viewers love and trust to tell them about products that we want to sell.

"New and Improved!"

People got wise. Consumer's interactions with, and expectations of brands, have changed. Like the character, K, from Blade Runner 2049, as we walked through the streets of our own lives, we are ignoring these blatant attempts at marketing and are far more savvy to what is going on. Yes, predictive marketing is the first place where a potentially 99% correct persona can be built of us and machines can tirelessly re-strategize to sell to those personas. But that last 1% is an important piece of the puzzle. It encompasses the swirling maelstrom that is the human experience and accounts for that organic adaptability that has had to push marketing and sales to continue moving forward to innovate. That same 1% will continue to push that innovation into the future. The collective psychology of us as agents within the connected world will change. It has been changing for thousands of years and will continue to evolve and shift.

Will You Trade Privacy for Convenience?

It's kind of heartening in the face of the "do we want this" question but it doesn't discount the question all together. We're in this changing world now and we all have to decide how to interact with it. Do you want predictive marketing to be the vehicle of that change? Will you accept the vulnerability and loss of privacy for greater ease in marketing engagement until you adapt to the new world it brings? I'd love to hear your thoughts, I'm listening and open to your point of view. Please leave your comments below.

Interested in more on this topic? My articles, Marketing with AI: the next leap into the future and "The #1 Reason a Robot Will Take Your Job" and Neural Networks and Cyber Intuition, might be of interest to you. I'd love to hear from you.