Digital Marketing’s Evolution of Speed

Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching the long awaited fourth Matrix movie. If you appreciated the first three films then it’s a must-see. The action-packed sequences and thought-provoking ideas turbo-charged my consumption of cola, popcorn, and chocolate, which I find is a key metric for whether I’ve enjoyed a movie at the cinema!

I love the bullet time camera work and (spoiler alert!) in their latest installment, some characters move considerably beyond bullet time — thinking faster and anticipating quicker, making bullet time seem very slow. 

As a marketer, I see direct parallels between this evolution of speed with how cloud platforms, data, and integrations are converging to create more sophisticated, real-time marketing processes and intelligent decisions. The world's top brands are no longer just one step ahead of the consumer, they are operating at many calculations and processes per millisecond, which enables a supremely relevant and personalized experience. A consumer trusts brands that offer quality of service and relevance of choice. They feel known, understood, and appreciated — a powerful combination that contributes to brand loyalty and advocacy.

When I started managing customer marketing at an enterprise level , real-time processing of data was not new, but it was expensive, difficult, and time consuming. The concept of real-time decision making was science fiction. Data decisions were made by Senior Marketers in conjunction with Data Scientists, who examined consumer data from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd party sources (often overlaid), producing data models that delivered insight. Teams formed theories from this insight and planned tactical marketing or advertising campaigns to take advantage of this knowledge, which took several weeks from initial analysis to playback discussions to campaigns going live. And, this was targeted to a segment of consumers, not each consumer individually.

Today we can program multi-layered decisions (business rules) and take advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence to decide what to present to each consumer (offer, product, content) in real time. We can even leverage data from other systems (POS, Web, App, CRM, Analytics) in making these real-time decisions. We can make better marketing and advertising decisions for each individual consumer than has ever been possible, in real time and at scale.

To quote the despicable character Merovingian (The Matrix Reloaded), “Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without.” Tools like Salesforce’s Interaction Studio gives marketers the power to create extraordinarily compelling choices for billions of consumers, via any online channel. The content, experience, product, service, or offer presented by Interaction Studio is the result of real-time assessment of all connected systems to calculate the best possible “Next Best Action” for that particular individual.

This positions the brand as omnipresent and super intelligent, but this is set to improve further in 2022 and beyond. The complexity of real-time decision making will only increase, the sophistication of artificial insight will improve, integrations will be everywhere. More and more use cases will be defined, tested and proven, giving marketers the edge across all channels.

At Lev, we have helped many of our customers unlock the power of Interaction Studio to deliver substantial commercial return on investment. We support a whole range of industry verticals. Here are a few examples … professional sports teams, retailers, and banks. We also make strategic recommendations, like when personalization starts to get creepy.

Want to take the red pill? Lev-erage our considerable Interaction Studio Strategy and Implementation experience, and connect with us today.