Think Tank: The Role of Machine Learning and User-Generated Content

Modern consumers expect more from brands than ever. As a result of digital proliferation and advances in data science, consumers expect brands to deliver consistent, personalized, high-quality experiences across a growing set of relevant channels. Of course, this presents quite a challenge for brand marketers, who must develop enough on-brand content to address their various audiences -- doing so quickly and at scale, all while measuring the effectiveness of each channel, piece of content and customer interaction. This crunch is making it more difficult for brands to continuously create the content that consumers want to see to make their purchasing decisions. To beat that content crunch, many brands are producing a mix of user-, influencer- and brand-generated content. Of those three, user-generated content, or UGC, is the one that brands have the least control over -- both in terms of creation and curation, but delivers the highest impact.