Dive Brief:
- Equals 3, an advertising and marketing solutions provider and IBM Watson developer partner, released Lucy, a cloud-based cognitive companion that uses Watson’s computing power to address marketing challenges around research, segmentation and media planning.
- Lucy is designed to provide marketers with a high-speed solution to grapple with and crunch the massive amounts of data now available.
- Equals 3 Co-Founder Scott Litman explained to Marketing Dive that, "Lucy truly empowers marketers to do more, in significantly less time, and to capitalize on all of the owned and licensed data across the enterprise."
Dive Insight:
Given the challenge of handling marketing data and turning it into usable marketing information, with the hype and promise around such a powerful computing tool like IBM Watson, Lucy should be an intriguing option for its target audience of enterprise-level marketers and agencies.
The American Marketing Association (AMA) was one of the few selected super users to test Lucy. In exchange for testing the new technology, the AMA shared its library of marketing content that would help provide users with instantaneous and detailed answers to their marketing challenges, AMA CEO Russ Klein told Marketing Dive. Per Klein, "the release of Lucy is a trailblazing innovation that will literally jump the tracks for marketing planners.”
Equals 3's Litman says that Lucy might appeal to modern marketers, who are "being asked to do more with less – smaller teams, leaner budgets, you name it." What this type of smart marketing technology can do is help marketers create plans that integrate more and more data.
