The marketing world is undergoing a transition from a customer experience built on traditional IT systems to one that leverages graph-based technology.
What does this actually mean? For the better part of the past two decades, marketing has been reliant on lists and databases to engage customers. Today, users interact with a brand’s offerings, and the key for marketing success is being able to capture and understand those interactions at scale.
For Blueshift Labs Inc., this transition has presented a prime opportunity to build a business that supports this new age of marketing, one that leverages artificial intelligence and real-time data capture to build a complete picture of the modern customer.
“The new age that we live in is called graph-based marketing,” said Manyam Mallela (pictured), co-founder and head of artificial intelligence at Blueshift. “This interaction graph that’s happening is across millions of customers and thousands of content articles, videos, shows, products, items, and that graph has a much richer knowledge of what the customer wants. There is a step change in what can be done at scale, and that’s taking the interaction graph and making it part of the experience for the customer. That’s what we enable.”
Mallela spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier during the AWS Startup Showcase “MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences” event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Blueshift’s use of AI and other tools to help enterprises embrace marketing’s new age. (* Disclosure below.)
Breaking down silos
Blueshift’s co-founder makes the case that enterprises must overcome several roadblocks in order to build an effective graph-based marketing effort. These include breaking down silos where app data doesn’t talk with social data or moving away from a singular focus on email to deliver brand messaging.
There is also the issue of “inside silos” where an organization lacks a common language that fully communicates interests of the customer.
“What are we learning from our customers?” Mallela asked. “That requires the shared language of how I know my customers and what I do with them. A lot of times organizations get into this habit of speaking their own language but don’t talk the common language of what we know about the real customer.”
AI plays an important role in the execution of Blueshift’s approach. The company’s SmartHub Customer Data Platform shapes data, AI and automation into tailored customer experiences across channels.
“AI-based automation is the key ROI piece for a lot of AI marketing practitioners,” Mallela noted. “AI marketing is essentially taking your insight, taking your creativity, and creating a tool and a platform that allows you to run this every single day. That’s agility at scale.”
Drive for 10x marketing
Achieving agility at scale is a key component of what has become known in the industry as “10x marketing.” The concept is to take the necessary actions and steps that ultimately improve results by 10 times instead of merely 10%. Blueshift’s offerings are designed to facilitate the 10x marketer, by providing AI and automation tools that allow smaller marketing organizations to achieve greater results.
“For a 10x marketer, you need to have tools that give you speed and agility without hindering your ability to activate any of the campaigns or experiences you want to create,” Mallela said. “It’s counterintuitive to think that a smaller team does more. In reality, we have seen that is the case when you have the right tools, smaller teams actually achieve more.”
Blueshift is finding that an AI focus and tools for the 10x marketer have appeal among organizations led by the chief marketing officer. The chief information officer may be responsible for data organization, but the CMO must find a way to translate that into business results.
“Chief information officers have been investing in data fabrics, data lakes, data warehouses for the better part of the last decade,” Mallela said. “But that still doesn’t solve the problem of how to take this data and make a meaningful, relevant experience for the customer. That’s the CMO problem, and they are the buyers of our Smart Hub CDP platform.”
Stay tuned for the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase “MarTech Emerging Cloud-Scale Customer Experiences” event.
(* Disclosure: Blueshift Labs Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Blueshift nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
