Brief:

• Fashion brand Natori deployed Albert, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that drives autonomous digital marketing campaigns, to drive a 76% surge in social media revenue in six months, according to a press release. The brand’s paid social media on Facebook and Instagram rose 18% in return on ad spend and boosted its 2017 holiday-related conversions by 84%.

• Natori, whose brands also include Josie Natori, Josie and N Natori, targeted the discovery of new audiences on Instagram and Facebook with the Albert platform in an effort to drive visits to its e-commerce site and to increase social media conversions. Natori’s data analysis helped the designer to update its content to resonate with changing consumer tastes.

• Albert boosted Natori’s online conversions by 24% in a single month after learning which creative combinations were driving the most conversions among different audience segments. Albert determined that custom carousel ads exceeded benchmarks and recommended that Natori’s creative team find new ways to format content for improved performance.

Insight:

AI technology is gradually transforming the way marketers and ad agencies promote products and monitor performance. AI tasks include compiling data from varied sources into insightful reports for humans to use in decision-making, optimizing the timing and pricing of ad placements and creating thousands of permutations of ad copy or ad images for a campaign, per MarTech Today.

With social an increasingly important part of how brands engage with consumers, Natori turned to AI technology to become more responsive to consumers by testing a combination of creative and media placement for improved performance metrics. Rather than focus on initial awareness of campaigns and approaching its creative from the standpoint of “artful,” the brand’s creative teams informed their work with more in-depth performance data.

While AI helped Natori with its marketing campaign, the technology does have its limits in the fashion industry. San Francisco startup Original Stitch offered an AI tailor that designed dress shirts based on customer information and pictures of their favorite shirts, but Bloomberg News reporters were disappointed with the results. The shirts didn’t fit properly, couldn’t be buttoned up or had sleeves that were too long. Original Stitch ended up taking the AI tailor off its website to work on the technology.