AI is analyzing you on social media for marketing research

Businesses are turning to AI for everything, it seems, including marketing strategies. Marketing runs on data, and people don’t have the kind of relationship with information that computers have. Why spend months researching dozens of customers when machine-learning can research them all in real-time?

Ayzenberg, an AI marketing solutions company, provides a method by which companies can leverage consumers’ social media use into data that can be segmented to create incredibly specific marketing strategies. It does this through machine-learning algorithms that analyze social-speech, basically everything you do, see, post, and share across all social media platforms.

Marketing is largely a game of throwing darts at demographics — and hoping to hit the biggest ones. We spoke with several members of the Ayzenberg team, including Dr. Galen Buckwalter, chief scientist. They’re passionate about what they do; it might not sound exciting on the surface, but when they talk about using AI to get all this data and put it to good use it’s evident they care about the work:

Our approach is unique in that we look at this mass of social media, social-speech, from a scientific perspective. We’re looking for deeper consumer personality traits, when we approach it from a psychology perspective we find we can get incredibly rich profiles from social speech. It’s a one-of-a-kind typology of what language looks like in terms of personality.

Current advertising models segment markets, or group people, based on the stuff they actually click-on. Ayzenberg’s machine-learning-based platform figures out what people are saying, sharing, and interacting with and applies that information into something actionable. The AI gets the data and then it finds patterns that make the data useful.

Despite the complex algorithms behind its insights, the information is presented in a very iterative way, Robin Boytos, Director of Insights for Ayzenberg, says:

Its much smarter than traditional methods, the initial success metric is simply being able to segment these, what used to be larger groups, into smaller and smaller sections.Eventually you have this deep understanding of the personality of your customers. The deep profile of these very small segments provides incredible ability to target. Our clients have used this to respond to opportunities in real-time, by creating short campaigns targeted at specific groups with great success. They’ve also used it to create 3 to 5 year marketing strategies.

It might just be that computers are better at market research than people.