Machine learning and artificial intelligence are being used across industries to help mine vast quantities of data. For a recent article on ComputerWeekly.com, Heather Blank, MediaMath SVP of Audiences, talks about how marketers are utilizing these technologies.
Marketers are also harnessing machine learning to better predict how certain customers react to various marketing efforts and how likely they are to make a purchase in what’s known as conversion.
This helps brands and agencies run more holistic marketing campaigns, targeting the right audience through the most optimal channels and at the best times, says Heather Blank, senior vice-president at MediaMath.
However, Blank says machine learning is not necessarily always predictive in nature and can be descriptive instead.
“Studying machine learning models can help explain which features or individual characteristics are important in predicting an event – usually a conversion – and which features may be meaningless or even predictive of the event not occurring at all,” she says.
“This can help marketers understand their consumer patterns more clearly, by filtering out the noise. It can also help challenge status quo notions of what is important to the purchase cycle or even what an ideal consumer looks like.”