Dive Brief:

• Quartz Creative, the content studio for Atlantic Media-owned Quartz news website, partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and DigitasLBi for an ad product that is powered by machine learning that includes an HPE bot called “Hugo,” per a news release made available to Marketing Dive.
• Hugo is deployed in Quartz’s Machines with Brains special project as a chatbot that can converse with project users about technology trends and insights and will be embedded in native display ads serving topics of relevance to surrounding article content. The bot is designed to initiate relevant conversations that are aligned with HPE’s areas of expertise.
• Both the Machines with Brains project and Hugo were built to be mobile-first experiences and Hugo was designed to provide value to users by delivering dynamic content experiences useful to Quartz readers. Hugo learned to recognize over 1,100 facts extracted from HPE and Quartz content aligned with the Machines with Brains project.

Dive Insight:

Machine learning — in Hugo’s case an algorithmic approach to teaching a machine how to interpret and act upon natural language data — is one aspect within the larger artificial intelligence (AI) space. The Quartz news release claims Hugo “will be one of the first ad products in the market to prove that machine learning is the pathway in which to create value for users.”

Applying AI to content is still in its early stages, but the area of opportunity includes creating more effective content, content variations and dynamically assembling content, Maria Winans, CMO of IBM Commerce, previously told Marketing Dive. Chatbots are another area where marketers might be more familiar with applied AI. Hugo sounds like technology that combines both applications by dynamically choosing content to be displayed as well as providing interactive chat for Machines with Brains viewers.

Both areas continue to evolve following some early hiccups that resulted in poor experienes for brands and consumers. On the chatbot front, platforms like Messenger are making it easier for users to find bots and beefing up capabilities. On the marketing services side, agencies, consultancies and other key players continue to adopt AI-based offerings. There also indications that enterprise businesses like Walmart are beginning to leverage machine learning widely across the organization.