In a study conducted by the CMO Council in partnership with IBM, 42 percent of marketers surveyed indicated that their top digital experience goal in the coming year was to better connect the multitude of campaigns being executed across the organization into a comprehensive, connected customer experience that could drive engagement throughout the engagement lifecycle. The challenge is how they will get there when 56 percent of marketers admit that data for their organizations is in more of a state of collection than action, or data is only being used to measure past activities. How will marketers—who are struggling to turn data to insight and insight into action—be able to reach their goal of a connected, robust digital experience? That is, how will marketing achieve this goal along with all of the other engagement, experience and operational goals that they must reach? How can data stop being a challenge and start being the fuel for innovation and engagement?
Enter the new era of analytics and operations that look to “machines” to deliver smarter decisions and outcomes through amplified analytics and improved experiences. You have likely heard buzz around machine learning, artificial intelligence or cognitive computing. Perhaps you have thought that these terms are more buzz than reality—don’t they all just mean the same thing? If you are like the 24 percent of senior marketing leaders that the CMO Council surveyed, you are not 100-percent sure what cognitive computing is or what value it could bring to the organization.
To help answer these questions and to bring some much-needed definition to this evolving and exciting conversation, the CMO Council spoke with Brady Fox, who leads strategy and execution for North American Sales with IBM’s Watson Marketing and Predictive Analytics group.