Artificial intelligence will help us remember what marketing is all about

The beauty of artificial intelligence (AI) is its capacity to release marketers from the heavy burden of manual execution. Freeing them up to ideate, create and tell brand stories that truly engage their customers. This week I speak to Or Shani, founder and CEO of AlbertTM – the world’s first and only AI marketing platform – about how AI is not here to replace our intelligence, but to augment it.

When I stepped back into the fold of RedBalloon in mid 2017, I discovered we had largely outsourced our key capacity – marketing. We were buying customers one-by-one, over and over again, pulling the same marketing levers repeatedly, with mixed success; all with little to no transparency over where our advertising dollars were going.

It was John Wanamaker who famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. And all of a sudden, with the stark reality of skyrocketing customer acquisition costs (that went from $0.05 when I launched RedBalloon, spiking at almost $50 last year), I understood exactly what he meant.

So what did we do? We brought our marketing back in-house and made the bold move of employing an AI marketing platform, named Albert. Within the first hour of ‘plugging him in’ with all the required inputs, insights and campaign creative, he had optimised almost 46,000 keywords. He stripped our return on advertising spend down from almost $50, to less than $17 during our ‘make or break’ Christmas period. Read more