Machine learning and what it means for marketing

Machine learning has a high profile currently and is riding a wave of exposure in the media that includes articles about subjects from self-driving cars and self-landing rockets, to computers beating the world's best players at Go, the most computationally complex board game in the world. Is there an opportunity for your organisation, and the marketers within it, to make use of this "new" technology? Machine learning techniques were developed as long ago as the 1950s, but with the advent of big data and large analytical engines, the prevalence and the ease of applying the techniques has increased. Additionally, organisations now understand the value that analytics can bring, so are willing to place it front and center in their plans and invest more time and resources in exploring new and better techniques. Segmentation and predictive models, for instance, have proven themselves time and again in the marketing world, but to a certain extent, they require a higher degree of knowledge to understand. In some cases, a machine learning technique unburdens the user of the statistical work, but provides just as good an answer as a traditional technique.