Dive Brief:
- Nielsen announced a new artificial intelligence capability in Nielsen Marketing Cloud with the purpose of automating audience optimization, according to a company press release.
- The AI element uses real-time data across multiple channels regarding audiences’ motivations, interests and actions to allow marketers to tailor messaging and advertising.
- Nielsen AI is a “big leap beyond industry-standard batch-learning approaches” said Mark Zagorski, Executive Vice President, Nielsen Marketing Cloud, in the press release.
Dive Insight:
The Nielsen announcement highlights two major trends in marketing technology. The first is the growing importance of AI tech in marketing. In this case specifically, technology enables marketers to harness massive data sets in real-time to influence current marketing efforts rather than use the data to learn from and plan future campaigns around that knowledge.
The second trend the news points to is the ongoing blurring of lines between what different players in martech provide marketers. Nielsen, once a third-party measurement company only, is one among many that have expanded their reach into new areas as competition has grown and marketers look to streamline the number of marketing services vendors they partners with. Nielsen is now part of the increasingly crowded space of marketing cloud providers, which includes big competitors like Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe and others.
One area of strength for Nielsen’s AI offering is the company's existing strength in consumer data. Artificial intelligence capability is only as good as the data it has to work with and Nielsen is able to provide real-time data from a wide range of marketing channels including search, social media, email, video, mobile, programmatic, OTT-TV and owned-and-operated websites and apps. According to the release Nielsen AI is supporting more than a thousand live adaptive learning models with clients and those models are seeing an almost 25% increase over standard batch-learning models.