Teach Archives - Business Intelligence Info

Tag Archives: Teach

Google AI researchers want to teach robots tasks through self-supervised reverse engineering

May 26, 2020 Big Data

A preprint paper published by Stanford University and Google researchers proposes an AI technique that predicts how goals were achieved, effectively learning to reverse-engineer tasks. They say it enables autonomous agents to learn through self-supervision, which some experts believe is a critical step toward truly intelligent systems.

Learning general policies for complex tasks often requires dealing with unfamiliar objects and scenes, and many methods rely on forms of supervision like expert demonstrations. But these entail significant tuning; demonstrations, for example, must be completed by experts many times over and recorded by special infrastructure.

That’s unlike the researchers’ proposed approach — time reversal as self-supervision (TRASS) — which predicts “reversed trajectories” to create sources of supervision that lead to a goal or goals. A home robot could leverage it to learn tasks like turning on a computer, turning a knob, or opening a drawer, or chores like setting a dining table, making a bed, and cleaning a room.

“Most manipulation tasks that one would want to solve require some understanding of objects and how they interact. However understanding object relationships in a task-specific context is non-trivial,” explain the coauthors. “Consider the task [making a bed.] Starting from a made bed, random perturbations to the bed can crumple the blanket, which when reversed provides supervision on how to flatten and spread the blanket. Similarly, randomly perturbing objects in a clean [or] organized room will distribute the objects around the room. These trajectories reversed will show objects being placed back to their correct positions, strong supervision for room cleaning.”

VB Transform 2020 Online – July 15-17. Join leading AI executives: Register for the free livestream.

TRASS works by collecting data given a set of goal states, applying random forces to disrupt the scene, and carefully recording each of the subsequent states. A TRASS-driven agent explores outwardly using no expert knowledge, collecting a trajectory that when reversed can be used by the agent to learn to return to the goal states. In this way, TRASS essentially trains to predict the trajectories in reverse so that the trained model can take the current state as input, providing supervision toward the goal in the form of a guiding trajectory of frames (but not actions).

At test time, a TRASS-driven agent’s objective is to reach some state in a scene that satisfies certain specified goal conditions. At every step the trajectory is recomputed to produce a high-level guiding trajectory, and the guiding trajectory decouples high-level planning and low-level control such that it can be used as indirect supervision to produce a policy via model and model-free techniques.

In experiments, the researchers applied TRASS to the problem fo configuring physical Tetris-like blocks. With a real-world robot — the Kuka IIWA — and a TRASS vision model trained in simulation and then transferred to the robot, they found that TRASS successfully paired blocks it’d seen during training 75% of the time and blocks it hadn’t seen 50% of the time over the course of 20 trials each.

TRASS has limitations in that it can’t be applied in cases where object deformations are irreversible, for example (think cracking an egg, mixing two ingredients, or welding two parts together). But the researchers believe it can be extended by using exploration methods driven by state novelty, among other things.

“[O]ur method … is able to predict unknown goal states and the trajectory to reach them,” they write. “This method used with visual model predictive control is capable of assembling Tetris-style blocks with a physical robot using only visual inputs, while using no demonstrations or explicit supervision.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Ubisoft uses AI to teach a car to drive itself in a racing game

December 29, 2019 Big Data

Reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to drive software policies toward goals, has been applied successfully to domains from industrial robotics to drug discovery. But while firms including OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind have investigated its efficacy in video games like Dota 2, Quake III Arena, and StarCraft 2, few to date have studied its use under constraints like those encountered in the game industry.

That’s presumably why Ubisoft La Forge, game developer Ubisoft’s eponymous prototyping space, proposed in a recent paper an algorithm that’s able to handle discrete, continuous video game actions in a “principled” and predictable way. They set it loose on a “commercial game” (likely The Crew or The Crew 2, though neither is explicitly mentioned) and report that it’s competitive with state-of-the-art benchmark tasks.

“Reinforcement Learning applications in video games have recently seen massive advances coming from the research community, with agents trained to play Atari games from pixels or to be competitive with the best players in the world in complicated imperfect information games,” wrote the coauthors of a paper describing the work. “These systems have comparatively seen little use within the video game industry, and we believe lack of accessibility to be a major reason behind this. Indeed, really impressive results … are produced by large research groups with computational resources well beyond what is typically available within video game studios.”

The Ubisoft team, then, sought to devise a reinforcement learning approach that’d address common challenges in video game development. They note that data sample collection tends to be a lot slower generally, and that there exist time budget constraints over the runtime performance of agents.

Their solution is based on the Soft Actor-Critic architecture proposed early last year by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, which is more sample-efficient than traditional reinforcement learning algorithms and which robustly learns to generalize to conditions that it hasn’t seen before. They extend it to a hybrid setting with both continuous and discrete actions, a situation often encountered in video games (e.g., when a player has the freedom to perform actions like moving and jumping, each of which are associated with parameters like target coordinates and direction).

The Ubisoft researchers evaluated their algorithm on three environments designed to benchmark reinforcement learning systems, including a simple platformer-like game and two soccer-based games. They claim that its performance fell slightly short of industry-leading techniques, which they attribute to an architectural quirk. But they say that in a separate test, they successfully used it to train a video game vehicle with two continuous actions (acceleration and steering) and one binary discrete action (hand brake), the objective being to follow a given path as quickly as possible in environments the agent didn’t encounter during training.

“We showed that Hybrid SAC can be successfully applied to train a car on a high-speed driving task in a commercial video game,” wrote the researchers, who futher noted that their approach can accommodate a wide range of potential ways for an agent to interact with a video game environment, such as when the agent has the same inputs as a player (whose controller might be equipped with an analog stick that provides continuous values and buttons that can be pressed to yield discrete actions through combinations). “[This demonstrates] the practical usefulness of such an algorithm for the video game industry.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Researchers teach robots to use inference to complete complex tasks

November 16, 2019 Big Data

There’s much robots can achieve by observing human demonstrations, like the actions necessary to move a box of crackers from a counter to storage. But imitation learning is by no means a perfect science — demonstrators often complete subgoals that distract systems from overarching tasks.

To solve this, researchers at the University of Washington, Stanford University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Toronto, and Nvidia propose an “inverse planning” system that taps motions or low-level trajectories to capture the intention of actions. After evaluating their technique by collecting and testing against a corpus of video demonstrations conditioned on a set of kitchen goals, the team reports that their motion reasoning approach improves task success by over 20%.

The researchers lay out the full extent of the problem in a preprint paper detailing their work. In an environment like, say, a cluttered kitchen, they note that objects are configured in such a way that the goal is obfuscated. Recognizing an action sequence isn’t enough, because a task could have myriad motivations. For example, a demonstrator might move a tablecloth both to remove it from view and reach a knife underneath it.

The researchers’ AI system, then, outputs the symbolic goal of a task given a real-world video demonstration, which can then be used as input for robotics systems to reproduce said task. To test it, they had it learn a 24-task cooking objective where a human cook poured and prepped ingredients — tomato soup and spam — which were initially blocked by three objects, including a cracker box, a mustard bottle, and a sugar box. They recorded a total of four demonstrations for each task, resulting in a total of 96 demonstrations (excluding videos with substantial missing poses), and then they divided the tasks in two — 12 for system training and 12 for testing.

The researchers say that their full model explicitly performed motion reasoning about the objects in the demonstration, and thus wouldn’t blindly take all the object movements as intentional. Additionally, they note that it enabled imitation learning across different environments. In one experiment, the system managed to successfully extract the correct goal despite the manipulation of an object (the aforementioned sugar box). Although the sugar box appeared in the kitchen, the robot recognized it didn’t need to move it because it was already out of the way.

“Our results show that this allows us to significantly outperform previous approaches that aim to infer the goal based on either just motion planning or task planning,” wrote the coauthors. “In addition, we show that our goal-based formulation enables the robot to reproduce the same goal in a real kitchen by just watching the video demonstration from a mockup kitchen.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Alexa scientists teach AI language models new tongues with transfer learning

April 8, 2019 Big Data

Adding support for a new language to a voice assistant like Alexa isn’t as easy as you might think, but researchers at Amazon believe they’ve developed a method that’ll expedite and simplify the process. In a newly published paper (“Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Spoken Language Understanding“) and accompanying blog post, they describe a technique that adapts a machine learning model trained in one tongue to another with minimal training data.

The method, which the paper’s coauthors are scheduled to present at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Barcelona, Spain next month, relies on transfer learning (specifically cross-lingual transfer learning) to bootstrap new functions. They report that, in experiments, it reduced the data requirements for new languages by up to 50 percent.

“We believe that this is the first time that cross-lingual transfer learning has been used to translate a joint intent-slot classifier into a new language,” Alexa AI Natural Understanding scientists Quynh Do and Judith Gaspers said.

As they explain, spoken language understanding (SLU) systems typically involve two subtasks — intent classification and slot tagging — where an intent is the task a user wants performed and a slot implies the entities on which the intent acts. (For example, in the voice command “Alexa, play ‘High Hopes’ by Panic! at the Disco,” the intent is PlayMusic, and “High Hopes” and “Panic! at the Disco” fill the SongName and ArtistName slots.)

Training intent and slot classifiers jointly improves performance, Do and Gaspers note, so they and colleagues explored six different jointly trained AI systems. After comparing their performance with an open-sourced benchmark data set of English-language SLU examples, the team identified three that outperformed their predecessors on both classification tasks.

Next, they experimented with word embeddings (series of fixed-length coordinates corresponding to points in multidimensional space) and character embeddings (clusters reflecting the meanings of words and their component parts), which they fed into six different neural networks in total, including a type of recurrent network called a long-short-term-memory (LSTM) network that processes sequenced inputs in order and outputs factors in those that preceded it. And they used data from the source language (in this case English) to improve SLU performance in the target (German), chiefly by pretraining the SLU model and fine-tuning it on a target data set.

In a large-scale test, they created a corpus from one million utterances sampled from an English Alexa SLU system, plus random samples of 10,000 and 20,000 utterances from a German Alexa SLU system. The development set consisted of 2,000 utterances from the German system.

With bilingual input embeddings trained to group semantically similar words from both languages, the researchers found that a transferred model whose source data was the million English utterances and whose target data was the 10,000 German utterances classified intents more accurately than a monolingual model trained on 20,000 German utterances. With both the 10,000- and 20,000-utterance German data sets, the transferred model achieved a 4 percent improvement in slot classification score versus a monolingual model trained on only the German utterances.

“Although the highway LSTM model was the top-performing model on the English-language test set, that doesn’t guarantee that it will yield the best transfer learning results,” they wrote. “In ongoing work, we’re transferring the other models to the German-language context, too.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

What the UK’s John Lewis Christmas Adverts Can Teach Us About Tentpole Marketing

December 21, 2017 CRM News and Info

Besides the commercial and all its tear-jerking wholesomeness, the John Lewis Christmas ads have also created buzz with the soundtracks they use, which are cover songs from established hit makers. This year’s soundtrack is the Beatles classic, “Golden Slumbers,” recorded by the band Elbow. Both versions of the song usually top the record charts following the release.

To summarize: Besides making me cry, the John Lewis Christmas adverts are speculated on throughout the year, throughout pop culture, own the air time leading up to Christmas, are the standard to which everyone else’s ads are compared, and make a return on the investment in a number of different ways.

Sounds like a perfect example of tentpole marketing.

What is tentpole marketing?

The reference to the tentpole comes from the graphic representation of the marketing that comes before and after the release of a Hollywood movie. (It also looks like a bell curve for those of you who freak out at any reference to clowns or circuses.)

The idea is to build excitement before the event to get butts in movie seats, and then afterward to get people to buy the DVD and all the other associated licensed merchandise. (As Joe Pulizzi at Content Marketing World points out, Star Wars movies before The Force Awakens pulled in about $ 5 billion, and the licensed merch pulled in about $ 12 billion.)

Nowadays, tentpole occasions include big events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics, as well as annual holidays and happenings like Christmas, Back to School, and so forth. There will be a tentpole event for just about any industry. For marketing technology or marketing automation, we could consider Scott Brinker’s annual MarTech Supergraphic release to be a tentpole event, as well as Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference. And movies continue to market tentpole events. Good luck not seeing some sort of advertisement for the next Star Wars release.

Plan your tentpole-marketing event.

Finding your tentpole event shouldn’t be too difficult if you have a firm grasp on your business goals, your buyer personas, and your budget. If you don’t have those, you should put off tentpole marketing for at least another quarter.

If you are a B2C, you can plan around seasonal tentpole events like Easter, Back to School, and Christmas. This is true whether you’re a small business or a $ 25 billion business like Macy’s, which recently announced its tentpole marketing strategy. You can also get creative and leverage tentpole events not specific to your industry. Bud Light and others, for example, have done this with past presidential campaigns. You can also take advantage of a big tentpole-marketing event like the Super Bowl, even if you have a less-than-super-sized marketing budget. Progressive Insurance created a bingo app of Super Bowl marketing clichés. And Newcastle Brown Ale has scored viral hits with its Super Bowl ambush ads.

For B2B brands, it can be a little harder to identify your tentpole events. This is when knowing your buyer well helps. Are there big events that everyone in your industry attends? Or is there an event that your industry can be connected to, even loosely? Accounting and financial services and Tax Day on April 15 is one example.

We mentioned Dreamforce, which is Salesforce’s big annual event. This could be an event you co-opt as your tentpole-marketing event. Or it could be that you also host an annual event or series of events that you can build tentpole marketing campaigns around. Apple, Microsoft, Google, and the others all have their special events. For Act-On, it’s the annual I Heart Marketing Roadshows that we host. And plenty of tech companies and other startups try to leverage tentpole events such as CES or SXSW.

If you do any business in Europe, or you do business with companies that do business in Europe, then you can consider May 25, 2018 ‒ when the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect ‒ to be a tentpole event you should be considering.

Plan you tentpole marketing calendar.

Once you’ve identified your tentpole event, you next want to tackle planning out a campaign calendar for marketing leading up to the event, marketing around the event, and marketing following the event. You also want to be creative with the messaging and tactics you’re going to employ. (Of course, this is true for pretty much everything.) The advantage here is that you’re thinking creatively while you’re still planning, instead of a week before the big event. Knowing your business goals, your budget, and your buyer will help give that creativity a canvas on which to paint.

“The creative idea changes every year, but the heart of our Christmas strategy remains the same: It’s all about thoughtful gifting, because at John Lewis we feel that people can go the extra mile to find the perfect present for the one they love,” Rachel Swift, head of brand marketing at John Lewis, told The Sun. “We connect that idea with emotional storytelling to create a really powerful campaign.”

Include in your planning how you will activate your tentpole marketing across channels, including social; how you will leverage it with prospective customers and current customers; and how the rest of your organization will embrace the campaign (both internally and externally).

And if you have a marketing automation platform like Act-On, you can build out your tentpole-marketing campaigns from pre-event emails to event press releases to post-event automated programs that nurture prospects based on their engagement with your campaign.

Building out a successful tentpole-marketing event that you can one day own also takes time. Dreamforce got started in 2003 with 1,300 registered attendees. This year’s event, which wrapped up this fall, saw more than 170,000 attendees descend on San Francisco.

John Lewis has become known for their holiday videos broadcast on television networks, but these short works of art are also hinted at in Twitter posts and in traditional print campaigns, with advertisements displayed in bus stops and underground train stations.

And, just like the movies and their tentpole-event marketing, John Lewis sells the toys, books, bedding, and other products that were featured in the video.

Their follow-up marketing also includes the release of a “making of” the commercial, a reading of the story underlying the annual ad, and, with each sale of its Moz the Monster stuffed animal, a donation to a nonprofit that helps young people.

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of how to create a tentpole-marketing event for your business. If you have any questions or want to brainstorm, let us know in the comments below or ping me on Twitter @isaacsnd.

From all of us at Act-On and our families, we wish you and your families a safe and happy holiday season!

Now for those additional John Lewis adverts. Enjoy:

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Act-On Blog

LinkedIn plans to teach all its engineers the basics of using AI

October 25, 2017 Big Data

LinkedIn is working to train all of its engineers on the basics of implementing artificial intelligence as part of the company’s drive to make its professional social network smarter.

“The demand for AI across the company has increased enormously,” Deepak Agarwal, head of artificial intelligence at LinkedIn, said during an onstage interview at VB Summit 2017 today. “Everyone wants to have AI as a component of their product.”

The company has launched an AI academy for its engineers to give them a grounding in the basics of implementing artificial intelligence. The idea is that this will make it possible for them to deploy intelligent models in the company’s products.

LinkedIn has a great need for artificial intelligence, since its business is built on the back of recommendations. The professional social network recommends potential connections, jobs, content, marketing opportunities and a wide variety of other interactions.

“AI is like oxygen at LinkedIn, it permeates every single member experience,” Agarwal said. “And just to give you an idea of the scale, we process more than 2PB of data both nearline and offline every single day.”

The academy isn’t designed to give engineers an academic grounding in machine learning as a general discipline. Rather, it’s intended to prepare them to use AI in much the way that they’d use a system like QuickSort, an algorithm for sorting data that’s fed into it. Users don’t have to understand how the underlying system works, they just need to know the right way to implement it.

That’s the goal for LinkedIn, Agarwal said. Thus far, six engineers have made it through the AI academy and are deploying machine learning models in production as a result of what they learned. The educational program still has a ways to go (Agarwal said he’d grade it about a C+ at the moment) but it has the potential to drastically affect LinkedIn’s business.

Agarwal’s comments echo — to a degree — those made earlier in the day by Gil Arditi, the product lead for Lyft’s AI platform team. In Arditi’s view, one of the most pressing problems facing the ride hailing company is a dearth of qualified AI talent.

As it stands, creating a machine learning system still requires a number of skilled practitioners who can help wrangle the data and tweak the parameters needed to optimize the system. Those employees are generally hard to come by and expensive to hire. Distributing AI knowledge across LinkedIn’s entire organization could help the company keep up with its demand for intelligent capabilities.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

5 Powerful Newsletters That Teach More Than a College Degree

August 2, 2017 CRM News and Info

Which college graduation anniversary does this year mark? Your 5th, 10th, 20th, or more? Don’t worry, I won’t make you answer. The truth is: The answer doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that marketing and technology are advancing faster than ever. The demand to continue learning and growing never lets up as you work to keep up. But how does that learning happen? The answer may surprise you.

Quartz surveyed 1,357 top-tier executives to reveal the answer. The survey found that these executives don’t stay current by poring over industry magazines or relevant print publications. The majority, 94 percent, get news from email newsletters.

No doubt your inbox is overflowing with emails ― so which newsletters are really worth your time? Here are five powerful newsletters that are so valuable they will earn a spot in your inbox.

1. Swipe File

Jimmy Daly knows a lot about powerful marketing. The marketer used what is called a Skyscraper Technique and got 30K page views and 1K email subscribers and ranked No. 2 for his suggested term. The post also attracted more than 5,600 social shares, including attention from marketing authorities such as Neil Patel of Quick Sprout, who has over 224K Twitter followers. Accident? Nope. Technique. And that is what is great about Swipe File.

On his sign-up page, Daly says, “Swipe File is a newsletter for people who want more from their work. It’s an exploration of this awkward time between college and retirement. So far, 7,000 people dig it, including folks from Google, Apple, Spotify, New York Times, Marriott, and Harvard.”

The newsletter is diverse in that it doesn’t focus just on all things marketing, but on topics that relate to your work. For example, the newsletter recently featured an article titled “Happiness Does Not Equal Productivity,” in which Daly explains that research says that forcing workers to appear more pleasant and cheerful than they actually feel can result in unexpected challenges.

He also wrote an article titled “How to Design a Life” where he highlights an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’ podcast with designer Debbie Millman. She talks about an exercise she has her students complete called “Your Ten-Year Plan for a Remarkable Life.”

Key takeaway. Subscribe to this newsletter because it will keep you well-rounded as a marketer. It provides creative insights to help you think about things differently, so you can approach problems in new ways and forge connections that otherwise could have been lost.

2. Copyblogger

You’ve likely heard about Copyblogger. The site has been around since 2006 and teaches people how to create killer content. Today most of what’s featured in Copyblogger’s newsletter is considered “content marketing,” but when founder Brian Clark started, that term didn’t exist.

The newsletter currently has a list of more than 334,000 recipients, and if you’re not reading it, you’re missing out on some great tools that should be in every marketer’s arsenal. Copyblogger covers everything from writing online copy effectively to using social media strategically to reaching new customers successfully.

For example, check out this post written by Clark, titled “5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post with a Bang.”

Clark writes that “master copywriter Eugene Schwartz often spent an entire week on the first 50 words of a sales piece — the headline and the opening paragraph.”

Then he goes on to teach you how to write a killer headline with an opening that creates the momentum required to keep your audience reading your content.

In another post, Copyblogger gives tips on “Fanning the Social Media Flame for Viral Exposure.”

The author argues that marketers can’t leave viral potential up to chance. They must take the reins and demand results. She writes:

“What is more common is that marketers need to fan their content to help it ignite and go viral. And sometimes that means stepping in when an accidental hit shows signs of life. How do you recognize those signs to take advantage?”

The rest of the articles dives into some specific ways to get more attention and includes real-world examples.

Key takeaway. Copyblogger is a must for B2B marketers. You can swipe strategies and squeeze every bit of potential from each piece of content that you produce.

3. SaaS Weekly

SaaS Weekly is written by Hiten Shah, who founded Crazy Egg and Quick Sprout. The newsletter focuses on SaaS marketing; however, it’s relevant to all marketers.

Shah wrote the article titled “Set Your Company Up for Marketing Success by Working Backwards from 15 Million Blog Visits.”

The article highlights that, after doing marketing research, the author found that founders and marketers get too focused on short-term tactics that lead to temporary spikes in traffic that look good on paper but don’t move them toward more sustainable month-over-month growth. He then argues that the only way to accomplish this goal is by working backwards. Shah writes:

“By working backwards from massive websites with millions of visitors to those that are just starting out, we’ll walk through the steps a company needs to scale from each stage to the next.”

The rest of the article provides specific research and strategies that you can borrow from others to grow your traffic.

Key takeaway. This newsletter is great for providing specific case studies of marketing strategies. You can dissect each case study and determine whether the underlying strategy is relevant to your business.

4. Content Marketing Institute

Over half of all marketers say they will increase spending on content marketing in the next 12 months. That means the majority of content marketers will be heavily investing in this marketing strategy, and the Content Marketing Institute is a great resource for spending those dollars more wisely.

When signing up, you can choose to receive a daily blog alert, which provides the latest news and insights from the CMI blog. You can also choose to receive a weekly newsletter, which is a summary of the week’s CMI blog articles and content from the company’s founder, Joe Pulizzi.

For example, Pulizzi recently wrote “New York Times Leverages Snapchat as a Marketing Tool,” which highlights The New York Times’ debut as a Snapchat Discover publisher and puts it in the context of content marketing.

And there is this article that helps marketers fine-tune their buyer personas, titled “Are Your Buyer Personas Ready to Take On the World?”

The author cautions about the risk of using one set of personas everywhere. She says, “Sometimes, even small differences between regional and cultural personas affect the bottom line, according to Cassio Politi. In his talk at 2016 Content Marketing World, he delivered a message for multinational brands.”

Key takeaway. This newsletter will keep you up to date on marketing trends to watch and give you new insights into approaches for traditional marketing. Start with the weekly newsletter for a small upfront time investment and then move on to the daily blog if you crave more.

5. MarketingProfs Today

MarketingProfs is all about practical advice. They give marketers useful insights, lessons, and perspectives through their daily newsletter. You can check out past newsletters here to get a sense of what content you’ll receive, but what follows is a sampling. A recent issue featured “Five Lessons for All Marketers from the Departure of Coke’s CMO,” and the newsletter highlights a quick survey and infographic.

The article goes on to explain that Coca-Cola decided to eliminate the position of CMO in its organization — a bold and rare move. Instead, the corporation is moving to a “chief growth officer” role, which may be a new trend for rising marketers to watch.

MarketingProfs also recently published “15 Proven Methods for Increasing Organic Traffic in 2017.” The author asked 17 SEO experts for their tried-and-true strategies that have led to their own businesses’ growth and shared those with readers.

Key takeaway. MarketingProfs is targeted to the professional marketer and features marketing tips, but it also shares knowledge useful for assisting with career advancement, such as articles focused on personal branding and running your team more efficiently. These are great resources for marketers looking to stay on top of industry news and strengthen their relevance in the market.

Making the Most of Insights

When subscribing to newsletters, you may have the best of intentions, but work is busy and it’s difficult to read everything. So check out the list above and start with one. Mark time on your calendar to read it each week and evaluate your investment. Take notes. Create strategies you can start implementing in your work. And when you’re ready, add another newsletter into the mix.

Like eating a balanced diet, consuming information works best when you select a variety of sources. That way, you can cover all the bases. And in the end, always measure your results to ensure each piece of content you read is giving you a positive ROI on your time.

What are your favorite marketing-related newsletters? Please share your most valuable finds!

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Act-On Blog

When customers are fans: What sports teams can teach us about engagement

September 20, 2016 CRM News and Info

sports fans When customers are fans: What sports teams can teach us about engagement

The value you provide is a feeling that the customer is valued.

If you didn’t know it already, I love sports. Mostly team sports. I loved playing them when I was younger, and following them now that I’m older. To catalog my personal interests because that’s what sports fans do, here’s a short list.

When I was younger:

I was a good power hitting, horrible fielding baseball player.
I was a slow wide receiver with really good hands in football.
I sucked royally at basketball – to the point that my face was more often catching passes thrown to me than my hands.
I never played hockey really – at least not on skates.

Now that I’m older:

I am a diehard New York Yankees fan. My company — The 56 Group, LLC — is named after the 1956 Yankees because that year:
1. The Yankees beat the Dodgers to win the World Series.
2. Mickey Mantle, my childhood hero, won the Triple Crown.
3. Don Larsen pitched a perfect game in the World Series.
4. I watched my first ever Yankees game with 6-year-old eyes.
I have no second baseball team, though I will root for the Mets on occasion and find someone to root for in the World Series preferably the American League team – unless it’s the Mets and this year, if it’s the Cubs I’ll root for them (I lived in Chicago for 22 years) even though I didn’t want Aroldis Chapman to be leaving the Yankees – even for the Cubs – or anyone.
With the NFL, I love the New York Giants and have two “second” teams that I root for – The Green Bay Packers (largely because my wonderful friend Wayne Hintz roots for them) and the Los Angeles Rams (because my BFAM and fellow influencer Brent Leary is more diehard about the Rams than I am about the Yankees).
In basketball I root for the New York Knicks with my second team being the ubiquitous Golden State Warriors – though not because of Steph Curry and his stand up teammates but because Kenny Lauer, their VP of Digital and Marketing is a great friend – and I do like the team because they are good eggs.
In hockey, it’s the New York Rangers – and there is no second team – though in a pinch I’ll root for the Islanders.

I can keep going but I think that you might see two important themes here:

I’m from New York originally, and once a New Yawker always one.

I am a typical sports fan who LOVES teams though they are businesses and institutions that, at a business level, function just like all other businesses and institutions.

AND the latter one is what I want to talk about when it comes to sports the vertical, not sports the emotion sucker.

For the last four years I have been a participant in what is arguably tied for my favorite conference in any given year. (It would be my favorite, but I chair CRM Evolution and would be remiss in not making that one my favorite.) That is the SEAT conference. SEAT stands for Sports Entertainment Alliance in Technology and is the product of the amazing Christine Stoffel who is the founder, CEO, President, and creator of the SEAT Consortium, a community of thousands of sports business professionals. (In her modesty, she doesn’t talk about the fact that she was the CIO of the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2007 when women executives in professional sports were even scarcer than they are now – and that’s beyond rare at this point).

This conference is their community gathering and I’ve seen attendance grow in the four years I’ve been going — from 450 (in Kansas City) to 650 (Miami) to 1,000 (San Francisco) to 1,200 at the one I got back from in July, SEAT 2016 in Las Vegas. I have been so active that I now sit on their Global Steering Committee as either one of the only or only non-sports industry person. And I love every minute of it.

What do sports teams need to do to acquire and retain their already passionate fans, and even the new upcoming generations of fans.

What makes this conference so remarkable is that it is the gathering of the world of professional and some collegiate sports business leaders. Even though it has a strong technology bent — with CRM and digital marketing being leading tracks — it does not target only the tech leads for teams and leagues and sports-related other institutions. Also in attendance are the marketing, sales, and even corporate management leaders, who have an interest in how to engage fans via use of the technology one way or the other. Unlike many of the pure tech company conferences, it is highly outcome-focused. What do sports teams need to do to acquire and retain their already passionate fans, and even the new upcoming generations of fans, given the pressures imposed by sports revenue – which is discretionary.

What I mean by that in the context of customer engagement is that sports has a unique set of “problems” (some of them being of the variety that some of us like to say, “I could only WISH I had problems like that”) that only perhaps the entertainment world (which, I guess, technically they are subset of), has. Let me outline it to you.

The “customers” of sports teams are already advocates for the most part. Fan rooting interests are not often lukewarm. It’s usually white hot. Just check out any hashtag of any team during a game and watch what the fans are saying about the team they love. You’d think they now HATE them but the reality is that they root SO hard for the team that when they are losing for even a minute, they are frustrated.

Or think about it this way: If team acquires some player for whatever millions of dollars and you don’t like the player your response is that you can’t believe how they are spending “our” money. Ummm, it isn’t our money. Or a very small part of it may be – like .000001 percent of the total revenue – but for the most part – its “their” money. That would be the owners.

The net result is that sports is probably the only vertical (outside of the entertainment world) that doesn’t have to create advocates – it just has to figure out what to do with them. Advocates who are not only promoting the team but vested emotionally in its success.

The downside is that each advocate — because they are so invested in the team — has a high degree of special expectations. They want (and, more often than is warranted, demand) a highly personalized interaction with the team or the players or the front office or the personnel at the stadium because their emotional engagement is deep and personal. They have enterprise-level – meaning BIG – expectations.

As a Yankees fan, my general expectation is that we are going to do whatever it takes to win the World Series the year we happen to be in. This year we are rebuilding – and surprisingly, I’m good with that – but it’s surprising because it goes against the grain of my expectations – which are decades long held. I expect the NY Giants to invest in the personnel that will get us to the playoffs. I expect little to nothing of the Knicks and I expect the Rangers to get to or near the Stanley Cup finals. But I also think I know how to manage and run the team – which, of course, I do – err, I don’t.

That said, regardless of my managerial prowess, minimally, as a diehard fan, I also expect that my experience at a game is going to be amazing, win or lose, because tickets are so damned expensive – and because I root so hard. Is this a reasonable expectation? Not entirely. The fact that I root really hard is not something that guarantees me anything from the team but heartburn when they are losing. However, again, my spending is discretionary, so I don’t have to support the team either with my dollars.

The problem sports teams have is that because they spend so much on the players they are seen to be enterprises when it comes to revenue and personnel – and they aren’t. There are four franchises in the world that have the revenues to be at the low end of the enterprise scale. The Dallas Cowboys ($ 4 billion), REAL Madrid ($ 3 billion), Manchester United ($ 3 billion) and the Yankees ($ 3.4 billion). ALL of them are considerably smaller than Salesforce.com for example, which from a revenue perspective is the smallest of the Big 4 software technology companies.

Sports fans are passionate advocates that you didn’t struggle to create, but they still have to remain engaged.

Yet, the sports team fans expect a very deep level of engagement – and they expect the team to provide them with what they need – tools, consumable experiences, access, to support the level of engagement they are looking for. But the revenues are mid-market sized for the most part – and the bulk of the money goes to the athletes – who are paid for their skills and entertainment value – meaning they can fill seats and sell merchandise – and those incredible amounts of money, beyond the imagination and scope of any ordinary human being on the planet enhance the myth of the enterprise size of the business. But not only is the revenue mid market, but the staff size is small business and underfunded. So we have enterprise expectations for mid-market companies with small business sized staffs. Whoops. That can make things untenable – because the company has to deliver.

The other huge problem is competition – but not for league titles. The real competition for sports as a business is not the other teams in the leagues and divisions. It is movies, restaurants, vacations, and staying home. For example, the National Football League knows that its biggest competition is the couch in man caves with very large screens – and a good bar or restaurants with good take out nearby. The experience of watching an NFL game on TV in that environment easily beats going to a game at a stadium which gives you effectively one camera angle unless you watch the giant TV screen at the stadium!!

In other words, the dollars allocated to sports, passions notwithstanding, are discretionary dollars. They are not a required spend like food, clothing, shelter. Not only is it the same dollars that might be spent on restaurants, movies, vacations etc. they also might simply not be spent. During a recession or a bad individual financial period, discretionary dollars tend to go to either required expenditures (food, etc.) or are hoarded “just in case” of a job loss, a price increase, or a rough patch of any kind. So if a sports organization is not producing the kinds of experiences a fan expects, including a good team, then, the discretionary dollars are spent elsewhere – because they can be. People may not be able to go without food or health care but they can go without attending sports events. And they can still be satisfied due to the ability to watch it on TV or via digital streaming.

So what does that mean for sports franchises – these medium sized companies saddled with enterprise expectations competing off the field for currency with other entertainment venues, necessary dollar expenditures or no expenditure? It means that even though they have an existing passionate fan base – already existing advocates – they can’t be blinded by that.

Let me explain. Fans may be passionate, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t looking to be satisfied with the relationships that they have with those teams. Think about your own relationships in life – if you are continually disappointed by someone or upset with or ignored by someone who you think you love – will you continue to love them? Of course not. Or at least, under normal circumstances, not likely. That means, as Madonna once said, the team in question has to justify your love.

Keep in mind, this is what teams must do, not what they think they have to do. Their bread-and-butter is the season ticket holder and especially the always renewing season ticket holder. The person who buys season tickets in any format (partial, x number of games, all home games) is typically doing it for many complex reasons. His/her emotional connection to the team, the team’s history and legacy, civic pride, business, reminders of childhood when it was simpler, etc. So the triggers to get them to renew their season ticket purchase are many.

For example, the Philadelphia Flyers used to bring the season ticketholders with a reasonably likely propensity to renew to a gathering at Wells Fargo Arena of like people. It was held in the Hall of Fame room and comfort-food level drinks (wine, beer, soft drinks etc) and comfort food (ice cream, popcorn, etc) were provided as the season’s ticketholders were pitched on renewal. But the key was that it was the Hall of Fame room – which has photos of the history of the Flyers – the tradition of the championship teams – to remind some of the ticketholders that this is a legacy-rich hockey team with a history of winning. KEY to renewal was the nostalgia for the past – in addition to the better mood generated by comfort food according to a study in the Journal of Psychology in 2014. The results were that 86% of the season ticket holders who were approached this way, renewed early — meaning more cash in the bank and less angst for the account managers who handled those ticket holders.

special feature

agile it nov 2015 intro When customers are fans: What sports teams can teach us about engagement

How To Make IT More Agile

Business executives are increasingly moving to an IT environment that is no longer focused on big, long projects but shorter, more sustainable efforts to drive change and innovation. Here are the pros and cons, and how to make it happen.

But there is also, in each and every sport, a battle they have to fight with inertia. That means how can you make the stadium/arena experience significant and good enough to get the fan to the event rather than just watching it at home. Each sport has a different set of problems when it comes to that. In baseball for example, the stadium experience is actually part of the reason that the fans go and its markedly different from the “watch the game on MLB.TV” experience.

But in football, watching at home is far better (for many people) than being at the game and the stadium plays a much lesser role. So, for example, the San Francisco 49ers have started to make Levi Stadium an experience unto itself – meaning you could come to the stadium without a game and still (possibly) find enough engagement to make it worth a trip. The 49ers have been smart enough to recognize that their fan base is digitally connected, highly visual and sensory in general and is looking for an experience that is more than just a game. As a result, they have installed over 2,000 iBeacons – Bluetooth-enabled sensors that are embedded in floors, walls, ceilings, etc. so that they can track the movement of individual fans and, tied to their mobile device, provide a personalized experience via that mobile device at the game. They have relatively high speed internet provided via Comcast Business Internet that gives their fans connectivity that works mind-blowingly well at scale. Paul Kapustka of Mobile Sports Report found that the speeds ranged from 27+ mbps to 57 mbps. Holy…crap. That’s amazeballs. How?

This is done by providing a router every hundred seats in a stadium of 68,500 seats. There are 400 miles of cable and 1,200 distribution points. The net effect is optimized offers for food, or merchandise tied to the individual fan’s likes and dislikes (e.g. Colin Kapernieck who might be either these days). It means 4K video screens driving play analysis that is made visible to the fans during the game. It can mean an interactive mobile app with a location aware device that provides you with the best lunch deal in the area that you are in, the shortest lines to whatever, but also the app becomes the screen for in game replays.

The New England Patriots take the in-game replays one step further. One of the key reasons that people prefer watching football at home is that the camera angles that Fox or ESPN or whoever provides them, give them a much better view of the game and with more insights on the game. You don’t get that at the stadiums. Or maybe you do…

What the Pats do is provide unique angles and unique camera “services” such as a mic’d up player followed throughout the game, that you will get on the app or the big screen video monitors but that the TV networks can’t provide you. The idea is that you as a fan become more immersed in the experience of the game on the field by being at it. That is fan engagement par excellence.

But the true cutting edge when it comes to sports and fan engagement appears when you understand that teams are not just teams but at the core of a broader fan experience. This thinking is best presented by the Vice President of Digital and Marketing of the Golden State Warriors, Kenny Lauer, who is not only one of the most advanced/forward thinkers in the sports world, but comes from a customer-facing background back in the days when he was a consultant with Peppers and Rogers. So he gets this engagement thing.

Kenny put what is the most contemporary outlook succinctly in an article in VentureBeat in 2015, right after the GSW won the NBA championship.

“It’s all about how you enhance the experience…It’s not just about basketball, but about being an entertainment company…people want to be entertained– how will their lives be better with the Warriors in it?”

special feature

ent ux background 3 When customers are fans: What sports teams can teach us about engagement

How UX is Transforming Enterprise Software

Today’s smartest businesses get serious about how to design user interfaces that drive efficiency, increase user adoption, and impact customer satisfaction.

With the Warriors new stadium being planned and built in San Francisco, Kenny is leading an effort to re-imagine the fan experience around the area being an entertainment venue of which the team and game itself are a part, not the whole.

The Warriors are veterans in the use of technology for enabling fan engagement and even IoT for the team itself. For example, they test smart clothing and sleep masks (Neuroon sleep mask in particular) to see how it might improve athletic performance. They measure, measure, measure.

This extends to fan engagement and the re-imagination of the fan experience even in Oracle Arena, their current rental stadium. They use beacons to pinpoint fan location and activity; they use mobile apps that tie to the beacons to generate offers and other individually useful information for the fans, they use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Vines, and have tested Google Glass as a precursor to figuring out how to bring virtual reality to the fan experience. And they measure, measure measure to see what value is there. For a more detailed look on this – check out this interview that Brent Leary, CRM influence par excellence, did with Kenny Lauer in 2015.

What does this all mean when it comes to customer engagement, advocacy and lessons to be drawn?

Sure, sports fans are passionate advocates that you didn’t struggle to create, but they still have to remain engaged – and their expectations are higher than the norm, because they are advocates and their devotion is expected to be met with some devotion back. Your assignment, if you should accept it, is to find out what that “some” means.
That means that if you have advocates — or your game plan is to create them — understand that the level of customer experience that you have to provide is one that suits their behaviors and one that at the same time supports the company’s ability to spend on it, without bankruptcy as the outcome. Sports franchises are mid-sized companies with small business-sized staffs and enterprise level customer expectations. Therefore, they must be prudent in spending so that it impacts the customers in ways that give them the ability to maintain their passion and makes them want to continue to interact and transact – and feels personal – even though you are impacting many customers most effectively, not one at a time. Though there are one at a time exceptional behaviors that need to be noted and acted on too.
Having advocates is a great thing, but at the same time a very demanding one. Don’t underestimate its value to your business OR the value you have to provide to the customer/advocate. The value you provide is a feeling that the customer is valued. Not a thing. No more, no less. It’s a feeling that you care enough about them to give them what’s good enough to keep them interacting with you. Not delightful. Good enough. THAT will provide them with the kind of engagement that leads to a great customer experience – over time.
But when it comes to sports, there is no substitute for a team that is winning – no matter what you do. Just thought I’d throw that in here.

See you later. I’m going downstairs to watch the NY Giants play the New Orleans Saints. Giants have to win. (UPDATE: Giants 16, Saints 13. YES!).

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

ZDNet | crm RSS

Google’s Project Ara founder creates a smart lamp to teach you better habits

August 2, 2016 Big Data

We’re always looking for ways to motivate ourselves around learning new behaviors, whether it’s reading more, getting more exercise, or even spending more time writing. Perhaps technology is the obvious place to turn for help, and a new company has developed a lamp that it believes contains the keys to instilling positive habits within ourselves. Called Peak, this device is now available through a Kickstarter campaign and is the brainchild of Dan Makoski, the founder of Google’s Project Ara initiative, and David Khavari, a former associate at Andreessen Horowitz.

Whether your goal is running, spending time with loved ones, practicing a musical instrument, meditating, or anything else, the Peak lamp promises to help you build these patterns into your life, thanks to its smart technology. “Peak is a lamp and a conversation,” Makoski explained to VentureBeat. “At a fundamental level, you tell Peak a goal you’re working on, and it breaks it down into small habits and encourages and celebrates you as you make progress.”

The impetus behind Peak came from issues Makoski and Khavari encountered while working in the financial space. Following Makoski’s departure from Google, he joined Capital One to work on mobile design, while Khavari previously served as an associate product network at Upstart Networks. Both were working on ways to encourage people to take control of their financial behavior, but ultimately, felt they weren’t making a big enough impact.

Peak connects to your smartphone, enabling you to stipulate the habit you want. Touching the lamp will instruct the system to send you an “encouraging” text message with the aim of getting you one step closer toward the goal you want to achieve. After completing that step, touch Peak again, and it will record your progress before “celebrating” your success with a light show.

“Both light and text messaging were chosen, because the literature supports their efficacy,” Makoski said. “Light is an unobtrusive, natural trigger, and text messages have the highest open and reply rates of common forms of digital communication. From a higher level, it just feels like friends text you and apps send you push notifications. So we wanted to stray away from the standard app feeling.”

The company views the product as more than a lamp — it’s a platform. Makoski shared: “Our vision is to unlock people’s potential through great habits, much like the vision of Nest is to learn how to make the home simple, safe, and efficient. We’re instrumenting the platform to learn what factors play the greatest role in influencing positive action. We’re looking at everything from time of day, size of steps and rhythms of routines, to the brevity, humor, use of emojis, personality, and level of encouragement of our conversation.”

Following Peak’s launch, this smart lamp could see placement in offices for leadership teams, hospitals for chronic patients, and more. The company is also exploring the possibility of opening up its platform to developers and industry experts to “share their skills, knowledge, and insights to everyday people.” Of course, this will all depend on the success of its Kickstarter campaign, which is looking to raise $ 50,000.

At first glance, it’s clear Peak isn’t the conventional lamp that you’d pick up at Target or IKEA. However, it fits into a design pattern that Makoski brought with him following his days working at Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group and at Capital One: “While doing our research, we realized light has a powerful effect on the human psyche – in the morning, blue tones can facilitate attention and wakefulness, and in the evening, amber hues engender relaxation and calm. From a design perspective, we like light’s subtlety,” he said.

“To create the form itself…we had 4 designers from around the world create first takes, and we selected one to work with to create the final design. Ultimately, we came to a mountain-like form that we call The Spire. We feel it’s beautiful, and in our early testing it evoked a lot of great associations for people, from Mount Everest, a common symbol for achieving goals, to an iceberg, 90 percent submerged, like the latent potential that so many people need just a small nudge to unlock.”

peak team Google’s Project Ara founder creates a smart lamp to teach you better habits

Above: Peak cofounders (left to right) Dan Makoski and David Khavari.

Image Credit: Peak

Should its Kickstarter campaign be fully invested, Peak estimates delivery of its smart lamp to early backers some time in March 2017. However, if you’re a “Peak Partner,” pledging more than $ 5,000, you could receive the device as early as September.

With so many options out there to helpp us adjust our habits, will people be receptive to Peak? Makoski thinks it should be given a chance because “it’s fundamentally different than the other options out there. Most habit-related technologies offer solutions that assume tracking functionality and punishment are the keys to forming new habits…We believe encouragement and tiny habits create the solution to forming new habits…Peak is psychological.”

“Like the decoding of the human genome, we’re trying to decode human behavior and habits,” he said.

Get more stories like this on Twitter & Facebook

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

What the 2015 Holiday Shopping Season Can Teach Us about the New Buyer’s Journey

December 7, 2015 CRM News and Info

3. Prioritizing Content & Lead Scoring

Not all white papers are created equal; you need to understand which content has the most value for your customer. Review your existing business data analytics. Interview your sales and marketing teams. Ask your current customers. Determine which content help the buyer move through the buying funnel.

Once you have this information, associate a value to the content. You could start by giving a clicked-on email a value of five. A downloaded white paper could be worth 15 points. A product demo is worth 40 points. And so on. Your marketing automation platform can do this automatically, making it feasible to track a volume of prospects as they move along on their own idiosyncratic journey. Read more about the importance of lead scoring.

Remember, that it is no longer a linear one-way journey. A buyer may first come to your business after an Internet search resulted in a white paper or webinar offer. If you know it takes a score of 80 points for a prospect to become HOT, then encouraging them to download white papers or attend a webinar can get them there faster than having them retweet a post, which may only be worth one or two points.

4. Testing & Technology

You have now created amazing content targeted to your very own buyers, and you would be happy to have online sales land somewhere between Amazon (500+ transactions per second) and Alibaba (85,900 transactions per second) on their respective big shopping days.

Well, you’d better make sure first to test all the moving parts. One organization recently moved its website to a new server and never confirmed all its online forms still worked – they didn’t. A sure fire way to lose potential customers is to not be ready for them once they have made the decision to come to you online – especially if they’ trying to buy via mobile (read about Google’s emphasis on mobile).

Make sure your PPC advertising is updated for the season or current campaign. Make sure the links actually link to the correct landing pages, not your home page. Make sure there is a call to action on the page (“register right now to learn something important at this fabulous webinar’). Test the call to action. Test every link and form, on different screens (laptops, tablets, smartphones), on different operating systems and Internet browsers. Is the form hard to navigate? Is any of the language confusing? When you’re ready to launch, A/B test your headlines, buttons, and offers.

Innovations in technology make it easy to segment your buyers. You can segment by attributes such as title or location; you can segment by actions (e.g., attended a webinar); by purchased product (they bought a printer, so you send emails about ink); by engagement; by where they are in the journey (top of funnel? Mid-funnel? Almost closed?); or any other factor that mkes sense in your unique marketing environment.

You can also consider purchasing retargeting advertising or use programmatic advertising to deliver your snappy videos to customers. Sell direct to buyers online? Consider creating a secure way for existing customers to store purchase information, or incorporate Apple Pay or Google Pay to your shopping cart options to speed up the process. Be transparent about this to enhance trust.

Read Act-On’s ebook on Marketing Tech 101 to better understand the landscape and how you can plan your technology investments.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Act-On Marketing Blog

Tag Archives: Teach

Google AI researchers want to teach robots tasks through self-supervised reverse engineering

Ubisoft uses AI to teach a car to drive itself in a racing game

Researchers teach robots to use inference to complete complex tasks

Alexa scientists teach AI language models new tongues with transfer learning

What the UK’s John Lewis Christmas Adverts Can Teach Us About Tentpole Marketing

What is tentpole marketing?

Plan your tentpole-marketing event.

Plan you tentpole marketing calendar.

LinkedIn plans to teach all its engineers the basics of using AI

5 Powerful Newsletters That Teach More Than a College Degree

1. Swipe File

2. Copyblogger

3. SaaS Weekly

4. Content Marketing Institute

5. MarketingProfs Today

Making the Most of Insights

What are your favorite marketing-related newsletters? Please share your most valuable finds!

When customers are fans: What sports teams can teach us about engagement

special feature

special feature

Google’s Project Ara founder creates a smart lamp to teach you better habits

What the 2015 Holiday Shopping Season Can Teach Us about the New Buyer’s Journey

3. Prioritizing Content & Lead Scoring

4. Testing & Technology

Recent Posts

Categories

Archives