Artificial intelligence has been one of the most disruptive new technologies to affect the marketing profession in the last 50 years. One study found that 53% of marketers plan to use machine learning in some capacity. At Smart Data Collective, we have discussed many of the ways that AI and machine learning have changed the face of performance marketing. However, brand marketing is also evolving with new technological advances. Machine learning is changing the way that companies position their brand image.

In this age of hyper communication and information overflow, companies often struggle to reach their customers in the manner they want to. Breaking through the clutter is not easy, and meaningful communication is scarce. While there is no dearth of channels - SMS, email, social media, in-app alerts, website pop-ups, Facebook and Google ads, digital assistants, and more - to distribute a message, it is often lost in transit or delivered to an unintended recipient, making communication lose its relevance. As a result, marketing campaigns, sometimes even large-scale ones, fail, investments and returns are not on par, people's expectations remain unmet, and eventually, brands lose customers to competition. This is what most martech companies aspire to do. Optimove has over 200 people with offices in Tel Aviv, London, and New York.

Marketers are exploring AI to understand what motivates and activates audiences at scale. As the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (now in its 65th year) kicks off today, bets are high that the realization that advertising is broken and humans alone can't fix it will be top of mind among the nearly 20,000 marketers, advertisers and tech companies set to descend on the high-profile event. Indeed, there is no overlooking the numbers that underline a dangerous disconnect in what brands want to say and what people want to hear. Millions of ads are ignored every hour by consumers, record numbers are using adblocking technology to cut out unwanted noise and evidence is mounting that people crave meaningful experiences, not marketing speak. However, the work required to deliver personalization at scale--sifting through billions of data points (trillions if you count the input from the sensor networks that make up the Internet of Things)--has moved beyond human capacity. This hard truth is driving interest and investment in AI into the stratosphere.

Marketers are exploring AI to understand what motivates and activates audiences at scale. As the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (now in its 65th year) kicks off today, bets are high that the realization that advertising is broken and humans alone can't fix it will be top of mind among the nearly 20,000 marketers, advertisers and tech companies set to descend on the high-profile event. Indeed, there is no overlooking the numbers that underline a dangerous disconnect in what brands want to say and what people want to hear. Millions of ads are ignored every hour by consumers, record numbers are using adblocking technology to cut out unwanted noise and evidence is mounting that people crave meaningful experiences, not marketing speak. However, the work required to deliver personalization at scale--sifting through billions of data points (trillions if you count the input from the sensor networks that make up the Internet of Things)--has moved beyond human capacity.

Most brand experiences will be delivered through AI by 2025. The only question is whether your brand will still exist. Some perspective: When Ray Kroc walked into the McDonald brothers' restaurant in 1954, he was taken aback with the efficiency and replicability of the facility. McDonald's lore never mentions what Kroc thought of the actual food, because he wasn't selling food. Kroc eventually fulfilled this dream, launching a franchise operation that spread McDonald's all over the country at the same time the Interstate Highway Act was being passed.

Chatbots -- a shiny object du jour within the industry -- make a strong case for this. Thus far, however, interest in chatbots has been driven more by vague notions of transforming customer service than by concrete opportunities for bots to drive business value. However, those opportunities do exist. Setting aside use cases that focus on customer support, for a moment, there are several specific ways chatbots can be tasked with appealing to new customers and making marketing efforts measurably more effective. Chatbots can (with a healthy emphasis on "can") be just plain fun to interact with.

Soon enough, your breakfast bar could be your search bar. Your lamp could be how you shop for lightbulbs. Your Chevy or Ford might be your vehicle for finding a YouTube video, like the classic SNL skit of Chevy Chase's send-up of President Gerald Ford, to make a long drive less tedious. And you won't have to lift a finger--all you'll need to do is turn toward one of those inanimate objects and say something. Welcome to a future where your voice is the main signal for the elaborate data grid known as your life. Two decades ago when Amazon and Google were founded, only a seer could have predicted that those companies would eventually start turning the physical world into a vast, voice-activated interface.

Chatbots, software used to simulate text-based business-to-consumer conversations, have grown considerably smarter in recent years with the ongoing advances in artificial intelligence and are fast becoming an effective marketing tool for some of the world's biggest brands. Brands like Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and Bank of America are all making the most out of chatbots and their ability to market their brands, push products to their customers, and to perform menial, time-consuming customer service functions like scheduling an appointment or telling you when a delivery has arrived. The marketing potential afforded by virtual assistants is also being capitalized by smaller digital brands and e-commerce sites with the rise of chatbot builders for messaging apps. The popular freelance website, Fiverr, recently launched a chatbot marketplace where companies can hire developers to build chatbots for their sites – for as little as $5. Early iterations of chat robots were mostly unsuccessful. Bugs and unnatural behavior commonly bogged down the bots.