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The shifting role of healthcare marketers

Technology is changing the game for all businesses, and marketers are also finding new ways in which to do their jobs more effectively. Now healthcare marketers are discovering the ways in which they can use technology to identify and engage their target market. In order to identify the priorities for healthcare marketers in the upcoming year,  Affect , a public relations and social media agency specializing in technology, healthcare and professional services, spoke with a panel of senior healthcare executives from organizations like, Illumina, MDxHealth, Pfizer and Phoenix Children's Hospital. Based on those discussions, it published a guide to navigating major trends in healthcare marketing in 2018 with a look at five key areas: Advanced social media use to increase awareness  and loyalty Highly customized content plus promotion Creative media relations Emerging tech campaigns Business-oriented metrics I spoke with Melissa Baratta, SVP and healthcare practice lead at

Can Facebook Prevent Suicide? Ethical Questions Arising from AI

In today’s hyperconnected world, we are generating and collecting so much data that it is beyond human capability to sift through it all. Indeed, one application of artificial intelligence is identifying patterns and deviations that signal intent on posts. Facebook is using AI in this way to extract value from its own Big Data trove. While that may be applied to a good purpose, it also raises ethical concerns. Where might one get insight into this issue? In my own search, I found an organization called  PERVADE  (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research). With the cooperation of six universities and the funding it received this September, it is working to frame the questions and move toward the answers. I reached out to the organization for some expert views on the ethical questions related  to Facebook’s announcement  that it was incorporating AI in its expanded suicide-signal detection effort. That led to a call with one of the group’s members,  Matthew Bietz. Bietz to

AI Raises Awareness of Fake News

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The proliferation of fake news couldn't happen without technology. The internet allows anyone, anywhere to spread information -- whether or not it is true. But technology could also help serve as a tool that makes people more aware of which stories are not trustworthy. (Image: Mega Pixel/Shutterstock) True story: one of my social media connections asked for recommendations for reliable new sources and got a few outlets named, though some of us -- myself included -- said that you simply cannot rely wholly on any single source and have to check through multiple sources to be sure you get the full picture of the facts in context to find where the truth lies. But not everyone is sophisticated enough to be aware that reports they see -- even from outlets with solid reputations -- need to be taken with a grain of salt. That's why Valentinos Tzekas founded  FightHoax . Its AI-powered algorithm that empowers anyone to ascertain if an article is fake or not in just sec

Visual AI: What you see is what you shop with

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With the responsiveness to indications of taste set by Amazon, many sites now offer browsers suggestions for additional items that resemble the style of the ite initially selected. Now with the advance of AI and object recognition, it is possible to get that kind of recommendation from an image anywhere, whether it's on a retailer site, a style article, or even something captured on your phone from real life. Partnering with technology companies like SAP, Naver, Microsoft, Line, and Oracle,  Syte.ai  pulls together object recognition, AI, and machine learning to render anything visual “clickable and shoppable.” If you can get a picture of it, you can shop for it. Syte.ai is designed to grasp all elements in a still or video image and render them shoppable without having to work thought text and tags. The advantage for those shopping is that they just have to locate or snap a picture of the item they want and let Syte find the item or something very close to it for sale onlin

Going Green In the UK

According to Britain’s environmental mandate traditionally powered cars and trucks will be eliminated from the roads altogether in the next couple of decades. That’s why now telematics are being applied to several models to find the most sustainable choices—both for consumer and industrial purposes. This past July the UK took another step in its ambitious CO2 reduction targets that would keep pace with the plans set  in France . UK environment secretary  Michael Gove   announced that Britain would ban the sale of any cars powered by gas (petrol, as they call it,) or diesel fuel by 2040. That means that car manufacturers have to find economical designs (and the supply chains to bring those designs to reality) for cars and trucks powered by electricity in the near future. To that end, the government has directed toward research and testing with funding of £20 million to be distributed via the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) and Innovate UK among 20 firms that were selected t

IFTF's Forecast for 2030

Key changes to result from the rise of machines in the workplace that we can anticipate over the next 13 years include: Cloud computing would become the norm. While some jobs will be handled by machines, new jobs that don't exist yet will make up the majority of positions in 2030. The machine and human interaction will yield greater efficiency in finding talent, managing teams, delivering products and services. Workers will learn what they need to do 'in-the-moment,' while on the job to keep up with the skills in demand for the rise of machines in the workplace. The whole nature of individual careers is expected to change. "By 2030, expectations of work will reset and the landscape for organizations will be redrawn, as the process of finding work gets flipped on its head." The trend currently observed of people working in a "gig economy" is expected to grow to the extent that people would find that they are hired for tasks rather than permanent

Timing is Key to Effective Social Marketing

As everyone now acknowledges, social media is an essential marketing channel. With the ability to reach billions, and to identify what's important to them, social combines the benefits of targeting and scale. Connecting the dots that makes the targeting effective is the business of data science and media technology platform  4C . I spoke with 4C's CMO, Aaron Goldman, about his company's latest State of Social report.  Read more in  Focus on Key Moments for Social Advertising Success

Beyond Games: The Future of AI and AlphGo Zero

Intel's Bob Rogers explains the possibilities that emerge as AI progresses beyond standard machine learning. DeepMind's self-taught Go champion is just the beginning. The next iteration of AI is the step of generating its own examples with which it builds the models to extract rules. That’s what AlphaGo Zero did in generating a million examples of different rounds of Go to improve its own play. That was achieved through reinforcement learning, which relies on “feedback — positive reinforcement for what’s right and penalties for what’s gone wrong,” Rogers said. While that ability opens up great possibilities for systems to learn to answer the questions we want answered, the thing to remember is that the systems “are very much unitaskers,” Rogers said. AlphaGo Zero may be an unparalleled Go player, but playing Go is the only thing “the program is designed to do.” Through transfer learning, AI systems can shift to apply the same kind of deep learning to another domain. Still, t

Holiday Marketing Fail from Adora Dolls

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Below is the email I just saw copied exactly as it appeared except for the manual addition of one of the pictures.  So how many things does this get wrong? 1. Market targeting: my youngest is 16 -- in other words way past the stage of playing with dolls. 2.They say "multi-cultural" when they really mean muti-racial. Dolls don't have culture, and these are not the kind that come dressed in native costumes that reflect a particular ethnic or cultural identity. 3. They give themselves a big pat on the back for making dolls of color avaialbe yet show a girl of color holding a white doll. 4. Notice that for all their claiming broad-mindedness, including stressing the possibility that a boy may want to play with dolls, they don't show any little boy with a doll here. At best, they showa doll who could be dressed as a boy, or what they like to call"gender-neutral." In fact, parents have thought of giving their boys dolls to play with already decades ago (a

Tailored and Targeted Marketing in the B2B Space

The problem facing B2B marketers is that they have not been given the same tools and capabilities available for B2C marketers to reach people on more than 500 channels available. That's because they don't have integrated data on the people they need to target, which hampers their addressable audience and reach. The 2016 Forrester Report, “ B2B Budget Plans Show That It's Time For A Digital Wake-Up Call ," found that even though two-thirds of B2Bs indicated they would be increasing their digital budgets within the year, only about one-fifth considered their teams truly adept at leveraging data and insights for effective digital campaigns.  Darian Shirazi, CEO and cofounder of  Radius , a leader in connecting B2B data and intelligence spoke with me about the big challenge that B2B marketers have had in trying to target a CIO.  Read more in  Targeted Advertising for B2B

Mixed Reality Marketing

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Picture to illustrate app courtesy of Trigger Mixed reality experiences began playing an important role in marketing a few years ago. Jason Yim, the CEO of Trigger, “The Mixed Reality Agency™,” explained what makes it so effective.   “On the marketing side, there are two big things that mixed reality can do that others can't,” says Yim. “One is product visualization and the second is the sharing of user-generated social content.” Read more in  Why Marketing Through Mixed Reality Works

Marketing to Visitors Like Customers

Visitors to a site present marketers with a dilemma. Does it pay to pour resources into sending all of them ads, knowing that over 90% will not turn into customers, or do marketers risk losing those who would buy if they did get targeted? In the absence of a crystal ball, marketers can now apply AI solutions to identify which visitors are worth pursuing. Marketers had already been using AI that identifies customer behavior to set up targeted communication for retention with the help of software from companies like  Optimove . The Optimove Customer Marketing Cloud consolidates, mines, and models customer data to fit customers into micro-segments that accurately predicts their future behavior and value to a business. That kind of customer profiling enables marketers to coordinate hyper-personalized communications at scale. However, it has been limited to customers who have already established their own history and pattern of behavior. In other words, it wasn't possible to predic

Smart Waste Management with IoT

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ace it, waste happens. Every supply chain must deal with it. That’s why there are waste management companies and solutions, though they have been hampered by inadequate information flow, which leads to another form of waste – that of time and energy. Now, IoT is enabling smarter solutions, and rapid-application development (RAD) platforms make it faster and easier to implement effective waste management. UK-based  ISB Global , a Value Added Reseller (VAR) of SAP software solutions, is also a Software Solutions & Technology Partner (SSTP) for  Waste & Recycling One . That software solution, based on SAP Business One ERP platform, creates smart waste management application based on analytics and mobility.   Below is the video in which ISB describes how its smart bins systems increase efficiency, lowers logistical costs, and reduces carbon emissions as a result. It also automates the process of identifying the best route for the day’s waste collection needs and the

A simple tool to counter ad fraud

Do you know where your ads are? The less than satisfactory answer to that question has prompted some companies to pull back from the digital ad space.  Pixel tracking may solve that problem. Read more in  Where Your Digital Ads Are At

Just Slightly Off Target

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As I was going through my emails to see which to read and which to zap, I noticed this one from Target because the subject line "Women subject line should read: This sweater deal unravels tonight." Here's the snip of the email as proof. It looks like the former cake decorator may have finally learned not to misspell "birthday" and moved on to a job in charge of sending out Target's emails.