TechRepublic's Teena Maddox talked to Dave Neway, head of marketing at IBM Watson Advertising, at CES 2020 about how Watson can take advertising to the next level with artificial intelligence (AI). The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Dave Neway: We had a major product announcement this week. On Tuesday, I'm very proud to announce that we launched a new offering called Advertising Accelerator with Watson, which as you can probably tell by the name, leverages Watson AI really to do three things. Anticipation: It helps advertisers better predict as opposed to react to the optimal combination of visual elements to drive the highest engagement for an audience.

At the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the launch of Advertising Accelerator with Watson, a first-to-market offering that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the optimal combination of creative elements to help drive high engagement and conversion for a given audience. The predictive solution from IBM leverages Watson to create campaigns designed to understand and engage consumers while addressing industry pain points like targeting and personalization. IBM Advertising Accelerator with Watson makes AI more accessible to advertisers, to help drive faster predictive models, enhance creative performance, audience discovery and actionable insights. The new solution continuously learns and predicts, helping advertisers to better understand the composition and preferences of their audience to inform future media strategies. "Ad targeting enables marketers to identify core customers, who are often overserved with messages that might not drive immediate action," said Jeremy Hlavacek, Head of Revenue, IBM Watson Advertising.