Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Since the beginning, marketing has required a balance between analysis and execution. Especially in digital marketing, the cycle of analyze > optimize > execute > repeat is the nucleus of all successful initiatives.

But the age of cognitive marketing has begun, and robot assistants will handle more and more of the creation duties that used to belong to human marketers.

IBM (a Convince & Convert partner) is the forward guard of this movement, with their Watson Marketing suite of tools and APIs powering an increasing number of real-time analysis and optimization opportunities. The IBM Think Marketing portal, for example, uses the Watson CMS to automatically serve up a different mix of content based on what you’ve read in the past.

This past weekend gave us another glimpse of marketing’s future, at The Masters golf tournament. IBM is a long-time sponsor of the storied event and provides all the technology for the tournament, using it as a product showcase. This year, for the first time, IBM used Watson’s cognitive capabilities to automatically determine which video clips should appear on the official Masters website and mobile app1.

Based on real-time signals such as loudness of crowd reaction and announcers’ use of superlatives in their commentary (the shot was “terrific” or “spectacular,” etc.), Watson instantly identifies a snippet of video as a highlight, tags it, and pushes it live in seconds, including to Twitter....