AI Aiding Retail

Its all about finding and leveraging the patterns from the data.

How AI Helped One Retailer Reach New Customers  By Dave Sutton in HBR

When Naomi Simson founded RedBalloon, an online gift retailer that sells personal experiences, she was pioneering the category in Australia. With a $25,000 personal investment and a small office in her home, she began aggregating sales leads and aggressively acquiring customers through very traditional marketing means — like yellow page advertisements. It was 2001, and  online advertising was at its nascent stage. Internet Explorer was the leading Internet browser and Google AdWords had only just recently launched. With a cost of customer acquisition of just 5 cents, Simson’s traditional approach to advertising was generating an impressive return on investment. RedBalloon was setting the pace for gifting experiences like outdoor adventures, wine tastings, concert tickets, and spa treatments. ... 

 .... Enter “Albert”, a digital marketing platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Working across Facebook, Google, YouTube and other paid and earned media channels, Albert autonomously targets audiences, mixes and matches creative assets, buys media, runs campaigns, measures performance, applies insights from one channel to another, and then makes adjustments based on what “he” learns to optimize the return on marketing investment. I met the team at Albert (formerly known as Adgorithms) while I was doing research into artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data-driven marketing technologies for my book, Marketing, Interrupted. As part of my research, I interviewed several of Albert’s customers, including Simson. .... "