It's been estimated that 96% of companies consider Account Based Marketing (ABM) as the key driver to increase revenue in B2B sales. ABM enables organizations, such as Reuters, to modify their marketing budgets by focusing on the customers' likelihood of purchase in order to optimize their marketing strategies and target customers who are more prone to convert. Account-based marketing is a data-driven customized B2B marketing approach. It focuses on high-value accounts and delivers messages based on particular traits and needs of these accounts. The sales, marketing, and executive teams sustain and improve their relations with these customers to direct them to buy more expensive or additional products.

Government regulations and new privacy rules instituted by Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google will limit the ability of advertisers, publishers and tech companies to track users and target ads based on identifiable data. Going forward, marketers will have to revamp their data strategies, while adtech vendors and other companies are hurrying to find alternative ways to reach consumers. One such alternative is contextual advertising: targeting ads by placing them close to relevant content. GumGum uses computer-vision and natural-language processing technologies to scan and analyze text, images, video and audio to help match ads to content. CMO Today delivers the most important news of the day for media and marketing professionals.

… company in the U.S., has expanded its contextual ad targeting with Magnite and PubMatic using GumGum’s Verity artificial intelligence (AI) product.

Traditional marketing tools lack the flexibility, scalability, and comprehensiveness to address many of the challenges faced by modern companies. With growing digitization and an always-online audience, more marketing teams now require artificial intelligence (AI) to stay competitive. Before rushing to hire a data science team, you need to evaluate the third-party AI solutions already available on the market. Many vendors use "AI" in their sales pitches, but lack credible research and engineering teams that can productize and operationalize cutting-edge AI research. In this article, we feature companies with proven AI and ML expertise that are transforming marketing activities with state-of-the-art AI-driven solutions.

Currently, the digital media is in a transitional phase, where the format of the medium is changing from text-based to one with visuals. Due to this significant shift, advertising has to play catch up, to stay up-to-date with the latest trends the industry. On top of that, the marketing industry has to deal with ad-blockers, which blocks out intrusive advertisements. According to a study done by PageFair, there are at least 615 million devices that use Adblock regularly. As you can imagine, getting through these ad-blockers is an uphill task, because they keep disruptive advertisements at bay.

The market for AI is so overhyped, virtually anybody looking for a fast buck can repackage an old abacus and sell it as a "machine learning" platform. Misinformed people buy the idea and the mounting frustration makes it extremely difficult for legitimate AI companies to get their message heard above the din. To successfully stand out in a crowded market, creative marketers have found it critical to create unconventional educational content and enlist the support of credible B2B influencers in their space. In the ever-shifting AI solutions ecosystem, even expert-led and well-thought-out marketing campaigns can fail -- and often do. To reduce costs and save time, marketers of AI products need to learn as early as possible what works.

The market for AI is so overhyped, virtually anybody looking for a fast buck can re-package an old abacus and sell it as a "machine learning" platform. Misinformed people buy the idea and the mounting frustration makes it extremely difficult for legitimate AI companies to get their message above the din. To successfully stand out in a crowded market, creative marketers have found it critical to create unconventional educational content and enlist the support of credible B2B influencers in their space. In the ever-shifting AI solutions ecosystem, even expert-led and well-thought out marketing campaigns can -- and often -- fail. To reduce costs and save time, marketers of AI products need to learn at the onset, or as early as possible, exactly which specific method doesn't deliver the results for their solutions.

Unless you work in computer science, chances are artificial intelligence (AI) still seems like a vaguely sci-fi-ish phenomenon. But the reality is that AI is already working its way into our daily lives through the apps and business services we use. Think of your smartphone as tomorrow's AI platform today, and the services you use (from banking and transportation to marketing and medical care) as extensions of AI "brains" in the cloud that will get smarter and more intuitive every day. Google's new AutoDraw, a product of its AI Experiments lab, combines your rudimentary artistic skills with computer vision to try to figure out what you're trying to sketch -- with your mouse on a desktop screen, or with your finger on a tablet or smartphone -- and instantly upgrades your doodling to a perfect little line drawing. "We hope AutoDraw will help make drawing and creating a little more accessible and fun for everyone," the Google team behind it says.

Artificial intelligence is no longer the sole domain of tech companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon. Recognizing the potential of exponential technologies like AI and bots, creative agencies like Ogilvy and consulting firms like McKinsey and Accenture now proudly feature AI departments. The message to brands executives is clear: understand and leverage trends in automation and artificial intelligence, or perish. According to McKinsey's Michael Chiu, "As many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages."

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been invoked by everyone from Elon Musk, who warns the technology could spell the end of humanity, to labor analysts, who caution it could bring an end to most jobs. But what, exactly, does the phrase mean to marketers? AI firm GumGum polled marketing and advertising executives in North America in June 2017 to take their temperature on how the technology was being incorporated into their efforts. GumGum's survey used an admittedly broad definition of AI, one that included programmatic advertising. Nonetheless, the firm reported that 61% of respondents were either generally aware of AI or had an understanding of its potential applications. But only 3% considered themselves experts in the area.