IBM Watson turns focus to analyzing video, behavior for new insights

Dive Brief:

In separate press releases, IBM announced two new artificial intelligence capabilities for marketers: IBM Watson Marketing Insights, which uses cognitive capabilities to study customer behavior, and a Watson-enabled cloud service that will roll out later this year to pull insights from video using language, concepts, emotions and visual analysis.
The video content enrichment service will use several Watson APIs including Tone Analyzer, Personality Insights, Natural Language Understanding and Visual Recognition to generate video content insights with a deeper level of understanding of content and context than currently available.
Watson Marketing Insights is available in the cloud and provides marketers with predictors about customer segments and audience profiles to help tailor targeted campaigns. As an example, the press release indicated that the cognitive capabilities could be used to uncover insights such as that customers who regularly abandon their shopping cart are more likely to defect from a brand than those who frequently return products.

Dive Insight:

The video analyzing content enrichment service sounds similar to Google’s Cloud Video Intelligence API currently being tested as a way to use AI to automatically classify video. Being able to easily categorize video content is a growing need as the sheer volume of content grows at the same time that offensive and even criminal content is becoming more prevalent. So far, Google's tech has been proven to be easily defeated through adding single frames of adversarial content into videos.

Google is looking for ways to easily classify YouTube video content right now in order to avoid placing ads next to offensive content while IBM’s upcoming offering seems to be positioned more geared toward helping marketers manage and classify their content. However, if IBM's service is able to overcome some of the shortcomings that Google's API has encountered, a wider use of the technology in advertising could evolve.

Both announcements from IBM are the latest examples of how artificial intelligence will continue to impact marketers, bringing new capabilities as well as new tools to the industry. Maria Winans, CMO of IBM Commerce, previously told Marketing Dive that cognitive capabilities “enhance” marketers’ experience and knowledge rather than just replacing them.

AI has captured the attention of marketers for its ability to help marketers automate some of the more mundane tasks in generating campaigns, significantly increase the volume of data they can process and free them up to focus more on creative and strategy. IBM Watson is the early leader here, but Microsoft, Nielsen, Oracle are building offerings as well.