Robot marketer will save clients time, with humans only needed for last 20% of strategy, says machine-learning startup
“Creating the next generation of marketer” and slashing the time spent on preparing client strategies is the promise of machine learning startup Robotic Marketer.
Mellissah Smith, the company’s founder and managing director of consultancy Marketing Eye, told Mumbrella the technology idea came out of years of running workshops and developing strategic plans for clients.
Founder of Robotic Marketer, Mellissah Smith
“To write a strategy you’re looking at 100 hours and clients are paying for that right now,” Smith said. “If we can do that in minutes that’s more valuable for the client and they can spend their budgets on outcomes.
“I came up with the idea five years ago because I’ve personally written more than 300 marketing strategies and every time I finish one I know they aren’t good enough.
“The reason why I know they’re not good enough is no matter how much market research or examples we can find of successful campaigns or data analytics, you’re only contained to what is available to you.
“However having access to big data and machine learning where it’s learning from hundreds of marketing strategies, workshops and conversations, we can produce a marketing strategy better than anything I could write.”
Robotic Marketer is a partnership with the Queensland University of Technology, whose Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (ACRV) last month won the US$80,000 first prize at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge held in Nagoya, Japan.
“They are really innovative and they have strong leadership within the team,” Smith said. “I’m quite empowered by it. The energy is great and the way they operate is really exceptional.”
Rather than raise money from VCs and investors, Smith is crowdsourcing the venture through advance payments of $1,950 per strategy and promises the early projects will have human supervision including four hours editing and consulting as the company tweaks the product.
“Normally we sell one-off marketing strategies for $25,000-plus that are 20 to 30 pages in length – yet, this will be more accurate, more comprehensive and have more research and fact-based recommendations than any human-based strategy development has ever achieved.
“A human will be needed for the last 20% of the strategy as the robot will still be a work-in-progress.
“The challenges are that this is an ambitious technology build, however it has the benefit of more than 100 voice-recorded workshops and 200 marketing strategies for machine learning.”
So instead of recycling their own strategies by hand, they are using AI to recycle everyone elses.
It would be interesting to see a comparison of the output before I declare bullsh**t before Ritson does.
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I must be doing it wrong!
I wrote the re-launch of My Dog strategy (after it first failed to launch in 1983) in 4 hours. The Bicentennial Number Plate strategy development took about 8 hours, but that was because I had to do it twice (the parameters changed after the first draft).
It took a 20-minute meeting for me to write the strategy to conceive & launch Mersyndol Day Strength in 1994.
A 2004 dairy-foods client grew 50% in annual sales on a strategy that took me a day to develop. I spent under 2 hours to develop the strategy for a 2007 dental client to grow from annual sales of $250K to over $10M. Strategy development that takes a 1000 hours? Some product life cycles aren’t much longer! 🙂
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You literally are a guru and must be the richest person in marketing in the world. Anyone who single handedly is responsible for those huge sales results and the success of an entire product range for Mars – clearly has a bank balance to match Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook. Hats off to you for being the smartest, fastest marketer on the planet. P.S. You must have bionic abilities in research as well, and design, and advertising and marketing. Kudos to you! You might note that the story says up to 100 hours though… not 1000.
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You must be a genius!! It would take me a couple of weeks to write a strategy that takes into account the company goals, budget, resources, competitor market and come up with campaign ideas. I’ve just looked at your website though, might need it’s own marketing strategy written by you.
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Creativity has been reduced to a mind numbing low level it might as well be done by a robot!
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Sorry but this is sounding like “cooky cutter strategy”. It’s another opportunity to generalise using broad industry information to create a business’s strategic and all in the name of saving time while avoiding doing the hard yards. What’s happened to the practice of drilling down to the actual business issues with actual consumers? It’s what we do
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I would love for both Jaded Industry Vet and Leigh Cowan to do a public competition against the robot when it has finished testing to see who comes up with the best marketing strategy, that is completely unique and not a carbon copy of another, in the shortest time for a charity decided on the day. I’m sure Mumbrella would be keen to video that and everyone to participate. Let’s not shy away from innovation but embrace it and if someone thinks it’s better, then let’s publicly pick random good causes, and see if the robot is as good and fast. I will definitely be in touch with both of you when it is finished. PS. Leigh Cowan, as a marketer, do you think your website best represents your brand and the marketing profession?
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Do we know if there was success in getting to the 1000 pledges/signups?
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Yes but it wasn’t 1000… we were after 100. Someone commented mistakenly with that figure. Look up http://www.roboticmarketer.com to confirm that it was the person who commented with the error not something the company is seeking. It’s exciting times. New colleagues that help us be more accurate and efficient and give clients a more competitive advantage. Creatives will have more time to be more creative.
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Ah – apologies. I thought it was 1,000.
Congrats on reaching the desired 100!
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