Rise of the machines

Robots rising-up and seizing power from humankind has long been the narrative of Hollywood blockbuster movies, but the ability of machines to self-educate and learn the same skills as man is now more fact than fiction.

The arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning is set to turn the world of digital marketing on its head, with the likes of the Kindred Group and Ladbrokes Coral already experimenting with the technology.

As contact with humans becomes increasingly involved with and managed by machines such as smartphones and tablets, marketers must adapt to, and capitalise on, machine learning and AI if their brands are to remain relevant to the modern-day consumer.

It is true that AI is still some years off, but machine learning and algorithmic software are widely available. They are used by the likes of Facebook, Netflix and Amazon to deliver tailored content to customers based on their previous activity, viewing preferences and purchases.

AI enables marketers to fully customise campaigns and messaging to individual users, which will become increasingly important as machine learning and algorithms take greater control over the content consumers are shown and engage with.

But AI goes beyond just filtering content; chatbots are playing an ever-more prominent role in customer service and the way players engage with, and speak to, brands, while machine learning can also power dynamic price optimisation and prevent fraud and data breaches.

“AI is a few years away, but we are seeing the precursor to this through algorithms and machine learning fundamentally changing the way we market to humans,” says Lee Cross, founder and managing partner of product design agency Skull Mountain.

“Content consumption today is shaped by machine intelligence based on various personalisation algorithms. This means that purchasing decisions are increasingly influenced by recommendation engines, and AI will become the gateway to human interfaces.

“AI is coming, and it will massively shape our future – it is already causing business leaders and marketers to rethink how their businesses are run and advertised.”

The art of automation
Before looking more closely at the opportunities AI and machine learning present egaming marketers, it is worth defining exactly what it is. In a nutshell, AI is where computers and algorithms take over from humans to automate and streamline business-critical tasks.

This can be anything from programmatic marketing and real-time bidding to harnessing customer data for personalised, predictive marketing and deploying chatbots and speech recognition to communicate with customers.

It is essentially implementing machine-learning algorithms into the digital marketing realm, empowering marketers with extremely effective tools that will be constantly optimised and improved over time as the technology develops.

The potential of AI marketing is huge. Adi Dagan, CEO of online gambling marketing platform provider Beehive, says a recent survey showed that 80% of marketing leaders believe it will revolutionise the sector by 2020, becoming a $5bn industry in the process.

“The gaming sector is ripe for innovation when it comes to AI marketing,” Dagan insists. “With AI becoming an increasingly important aspect of digital marketing, there is little doubt that it will continue to have a significant influence on marketing and marketers in the future,” he adds.

The key to unlocking the potential of AI and machine learning is to understand the tasks it is suited to, and where it can perform better than a human being. Bidding, assessing predicative analytics and negotiating the maze of recommendations engines are good examples.

AI excels at uniting information from a vast and diverse range of data sets and, when used correctly, will give online gambling marketers an edge. But other areas where it is equally effective include:
• Returning results on search engines, particularly with the emergence of voice search
• Preventing fraud and data breaches by allowing marketing to filter out bad customers
• Social semantics and sentiment analysis used to help power product recommendations
• Dynamic price optimisation using machine learning by correlating pricing trends with sales
• Ad targeting
• Customer situational segmentation
• Bots, PAs and messengers

The latter is set to be a game-changer for online gambling marketers over the coming months and years, as evidenced by a recent stat from technology research firm Gartner that 85% of all interactions between the customer and an organisation won’t require any human intervention by 2018.

“This underlines how chatbots are disrupting this space and why they are being heralded as the new apps. One clear benefit is that they reduce reliance upon customer support staff for handling most customer queries,” says Dagan.

“Marketers are always looking to gain an edge with their communications channels and Facebook Messenger now has more than a billion monthly users. Messenger and chatbots make for a powerful combination when it comes to communications and marketing.”

Beehive has developed its own chatbot, which is integrated into an operator’s Facebook page, allowing them to communicate directly with customers on Messenger as well as sending them personalised promotional offers directly to their inbox.

Heavy lifting
Richard Dennys, CEO of affiliate marketing network Webgains, says chatbots are “the heroes of administration” and that with 24/7 availability they can automatically progress basic but time exhaustive tasks in a matter of minutes.

“With our virtual assistant, marketers can also take this a step further by asking the machine “which ad campaign do you think would be worthwhile running today?” and it will crunch all the numbers for you and give a set of recommendations based on intelligent data analysis.”

Dennys touches on the cornerstone of AI and machine learning, and that is data. The amount of customer analytics and behavioural data available to marketers is frankly mind-blowing, and it’s impossible to segment, analyse and act with human hands only.

Many operators have implemented big data solutions, but quickly drown under the sheer weight of the information they are gathering. This means marketers are unable to make use of the data they have, which often leads to inactivity.

AI and machine learning provide the perfect solution to this. Automation can be used to drive marketing strategy based on solid data foundations. AI can delve deep into customer data, and siſt through what is relevant and what is not far more accurately and efficiently than any marketer ever could.

“With behavioural data, AI can be used to better target customers with more relevant and timely promotions, which then gives these customers a better and more meaningful experience with the brand,” says Dagan.

“So machine learning does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to automating digital marketing campaigns and being able to present customers with targeted, contextual messages and promotions.”

The increasing role of AI and machine learning will naturally lead to the question of whether computers will eventually replace humans. There are conspiracy theorists out there that believe humankind is engineering its own downfall, but when it comes to digital marketing at least, that is not the case.

Human imagination
While AI can build and implement a creative idea, it is not inherently creative. It can’t negate the role of humans in the process of creativity – devising campaigns, promotions, etc – but it can take command of the application of said idea. In that sense, it will change the role humans play in the marketing process.

“As AI becomes more sophisticated we need to understand which tasks are suited to AI machines and where best to place human employees,” says Cross. “Strategy and campaign creation will always be a human-led task.

“At Skull Mountain, we are focusing more and more on how we can help companies create unified marketing, organisational, data and AI strategies to provide solutions and build products that execute AI effectively,” he adds.

AI is perhaps the perfect combination of man and machine. Man setting the idea in motion and machine using its superhuman powers and capabilities to ensure its full potential is achieved. But the proliferation of AI in digital marketing is not without its challenges.

The biggest of which is whether it will be accepted by consumers, many of whom are already suspicious about the increasing role data and tracking is playing in the way they are targeted and marketed to by brands.

While most people are now comfortable with the likes of Netflix and Amazon tracking their viewing and purchasing habits to offer them more relevant movies and products, they may feel differently when it comes to being offered bonuses for their favourite slots and table games, or best odds on the weekend’s football matches.

Dagan says the proliferation of AI will “heighten concerns about data privacy” and that some consumers will still harbour concerns about the rise of the machines and find the notion of machine learning “intrusive” and even a bit “creepy”.

“On the whole, however, consumers are used to being targeted with ads and marketing messages based on their behaviour,” he adds.

“AI has been around in some shape or form since the 50s and consumers nowadays are becoming much more accustomed to encountering AI in their everyday lives, especially with the emergence of Amazon’s Alexa and other personal assistants from Apple and Google.”

Next steps
The speed at which AI and machine learning continue to gather pace will likely see a rush of operators and marketers, from the online gambling industry and elsewhere, ramp-up investment and resources dedicated to better understanding the technology and how it can be applied to their businesses and communication strategies.

“The popularity of AI is fast outpacing the on-going development of current technology,” says Dennys. “Soon everyone will be clamouring to enter the AI space and this will present a new challenge for marketers as they race to upskill and train their staff – the technology is only as good as the team behind it.”

So while it may not be the case that machines will rise up and overthrow humankind, they are going to play a vital role in the future of digital marketing. But just how intelligent can they become? Only time will tell.