George John

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• Artificial Intelligence Is All Around Us, A Benefit For Marketers  in Marketing Daily on 07/14/2015
  

  While there may be a potential threat to the jobs we know today, overall I think AI will bring about more good than evil.

Comments by George All comments by George

• The "If & Then" Algorithm In Marketing by Doug Ryan (MAD on 06/02/2015)
  

  My experience is that simple if/then rules designed by people can feel very empowering at first, but then people start trying to optimize for better results and it becomes an un-maintainable mess.  I think an ideal marketing plan will have marketers defining specific rules in rare cases for triggered or situational messaging (for example, the starbucks app on my phone asks me if I'd like to tip the barista shortly after paying), but for more mainstream performance-oriented messaging there will be some constraints set by marketers (for example, certain offers are only eligible for gold customers) and then an AI system will be allowed to show whatever message is most likely relevant to the customer and ROI generating for the enterprise.   You can think of that AI system as learning its own rules based on what works empirically, but they're more complex and maybe surprisingly allow for more shades of grey and nuance than human rules.  In our history of media buying at Rocket Fuel with nearly a billion in total revenue to date, I only remember one time in 2009 when a human if/then rule beat the machine-learned scoring models.  It was for a free internet voice communications app, and we experimented targeting people in the US whose browser language was not set to English, realizing that people would likely use it to communicate internationally.   

• Humanizing Optimization: The Need For Us To Get Involved by Dan Swartz (Marketing Insider: Cross-Channel on 06/08/2015)
  

  These are great points!  Increasingly, technology can handle the basics of optimizing a campaign within a channel or specific objective.  But it's not so much "set it and forget it" as "manage it!" Oversee the machine optimizations, be sure it's set up with clear constraints and objectives, and help design those objectives so they flow with other program objectives to achieve the bigger picture goals for the company.   As one example, at Rocket Fuel we're proud of our tech but also our analysts who look for opportunities and synergies, recently finding 30% to 3x better results by targeting people and measuring responses through multiple devices.   It's an exciting time for advertisers and marketers where machines can not just the A/B test but millions of experiments, letting us focus on the customer journey.

• Are Current Technologies Truly Capable Of Data Wrangling? by Tyler Loechner (RTBlog on 05/08/2013)
  

  Hi Guys. George John from the panel here. The moderator was paraphrasing the IBM CMO survey, but he paraphrased in a way that unfortunately packed in some meaning that wasn't originally there. IBM asked CMO's which opportunities they felt most unprepared to manage. The #1 answer was "data explosion." So there's no undercurrent of things being "out of control" or not trusted, just that it's a huge opportunity that they are unprepared for. And that's ok. They'll figure it out, and smart companies will build technology to help them.

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