Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you do this through your own email marketing system or do you interface with other email marketing systems and optimize as an add-on?

Or Shani: We can do both. We usually prefer people sending things through us. It depends on the integration, process, and the state of the client, but we really prefer to be on the driver side. Another example is email. Once you send an email, what’s going to be your open rate? It might be 2%. It might be 5%. If you’re really hyper-targeted, you can get maybe 7%.

We have Harley-Davidson here in New York as a client. They can send a newsletter or an email with a headline of, “If you’re going to click on the link here, you’re going to get a free Harley-Davidson.” Theoretically, they can give a Harley-Davidson bike which costs $30,000 to anybody who is going to open theemail. They’ll still, maximum, get the same opening rates. The reason is that email is an amazing tool mostly because it’s free, but it’s not as efficient.

Because Albert is cross-channel, he will start off by sending this email. Later on, he can also do re-targeting those people and show them this content elsewhere. You might open the email but then if you log into your Facebook account, you might get it as a content ad. You might respond to that. Studies show that you can get opening rates ranging from 2% to 3% to almost 25% to 30%e.

You just need to automate it and make it super smart, and make the machine drive the decision-making in a very smart way. I think what a lot of people are trying to do in artificial intelligence, more specifically machine learning, is do things that are so complex rather than taking this amazing technology and try to solve very simple problems that are just outside of human reach.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about other types of marketing. Let’s talk about Facebook for instance. One of the things that Facebook is doing that drives me crazy, and I think has driven a lot of people crazy, is even for the fans that you have on your Facebook page, you now need to pay Facebook to show your content to them. Facebook, on its own, isn’t showing the content. You have invested in developing this fan base but you cannot access them without paying Facebook more money. What is your strategy vis-a-vis Facebook marketing optimization?

Or Shani: There are so many things I can say about this. It’s a very natural move for Facebook.

Sramana Mitra: They want to monetize.

Or Shani: Exactly. You’re going to have to pay for it. There’s no way around that. The question is how do you do it in a smart way. I think you’ll hear me say the same thing over and over again. We solve this problem with some kind of team work where we take our machine learning guys, programmers, and the marketing guys, and have them work together and find the best possible combination on how to do things.

Sramana Mitra: That’s too vague. I want something specific on how you apply artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimizing Facebook. You don’t need to give away your IP, but you need to give me something more concrete that speaks to thought leadership in artificial intelligence.

Or Shani: It’s almost the same thing as email in a way in terms of how to choose what is the best timing to advertise to each segment. The actual question and where a real good software will come into play is not just by communicating to your current contacts, but how to drive more people who might be interested in your content. It’s doing a lot of trial and error on a scale that’s not inhumanly possible, and comparing the result.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Adgorithms CEO Or Shani
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