AI does hyper-personalized marketing by analyzing large datasets: Epsilon

Positioned at the core of Publicis Groupe, Epsilon is a global company with over 8,000 employees in over 40 offices around the world. It is dedicated to helping clients understand their customers, as needs and habits change during the economic recovery and beyond. 

KumkumRaj Swamynathan, Senior VP, Software Engineering, Epsilon, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview: 

DQ: Can you provide an overview of Epsilon, its products and how it helps marketers?

KumkumRaj Swamynathan: Epsilon is a global AdTech and MarTech product company, that empowers brands to build trusted connections with their consumers, leveraging data-enabled technology platform and solutions. For decades, we’ve been helping marketers from the world’s top brands personalize experiences for millions of people. We create data-driven, enriched customer experiences focused on real people.

Our identity-based solutions and comprehensive consumer views help brands deliver 1:1 personalization, customer value and business growth—all at massive scale.

To market effectively, brands need a clear view of their customers. Only Epsilon has the industry’s most accurate, stable, and scalable identity that’s anchored in first-party data—not third-party cookies or device IDs that break down over time. With award-winning, best-in-class digital media, messaging, and loyalty solutions, we help brands deliver personalized messages at scale that grow real customer relationships. 

DQ: How does AI enable hyper-personalized marketing and how is it helping marketers today?

KumkumRaj Swamynathan: AI makes hyper-personalized marketing possible by using cutting-edge algorithms and machine learning to analyze large datasets, comprehend customer patterns, preferences, and behaviors, and precisely customize marketing efforts. 

This degree of personalization extends beyond what is possible with conventional techniques, enabling tailored experiences based on browsing habits, past purchases, interest, and even sentiment analysis from social media interactions. 

AI improves the user experience by making relevant product suggestions based on session-based data, browsing history, and customer data. Additionally, since AI-driven personalization techniques are scalable, companies can reach large audiences with customized content, which boosts engagement, boosts return on investment, and enables real-time decision-making based on data insights.

In fact, our AI models learn in real-time based on 2 billion+ customer interactions seen per minute across our 200 million ID universe. They also take about 178 intelligent decisions per customer based on their continuous actions.

DQ: Can you provide an overview of the modern technological developments in marketing tech? Hiw does Epsilon aim to incorporate these developments with changing consumer expectations?

 

KumkumRaj Swamynathan: As third-party cookies are phased out, identity resolution to map onsite and offsite user identities is a critical challenge that marketers are grappling with. The focus has shifted to first-party data. 

Companies are leveraging first-party data, which they collect directly from customers through website interactions, email signups, loyalty programs, and other channels. Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Data Clean Room (DCR) vendors must support a comprehensive deterministic matching and probabilistic identity resolution platform.

AI and ML are being integrated into various MarTech tools, enabling features like:

Predictive analytics: Predicting customer behaviour and needs to personalize experiences and automate marketing decisions.

Content optimization: Generating and optimizing content for better engagement and conversions.

Customer journey orchestration (CJO): These platforms help manage and orchestrate marketing activities across different channels, ensuring a consistent and seamless customer journey.

Generative AI is bringing a new wave of innovation to MarTech, offering benefits like increased efficiency, personalization, and data-driven insights. Use cases include:

* Content creation: Automate repetitive content creation tasks like writing product descriptions, social media posts, or ad copy. This frees up marketers to focus on more strategic initiatives.

* Personalization: AI can personalize content based on audience demographics, interests, and behavior. This leads to more engaging content that resonates better with target audiences.

The role of all our products and services is to empower brands to build trusted connections with their consumers. Hence our Epsilon’s People Cloud suite of products incorporates all these technologies that help marketers fulfil their objectives.

For example, Epsilon’s PeopleCloud Customer Product (CDP) is an extensible first-party data marketing solution built on connected identity that delivers a unified view of individual customers across channels and media, so marketers can natively execute the highest-performing activation in owned and paid channels through a simple and powerful self-service environment. 

PeopleCloud Customer Product connects brands to individuals with the most complete view of customer data, harnessing clients’ first-party data and bringing it to the digital space. The platform enables intelligence-driven, personalized campaigns with journey orchestration, visibility into performance, and influence.

Predictive AI is all about making smarter decisions faster. Generative AI will help bring them to life. Generative AI is noteworthy because it’s all about what the consumer can see: the creative execution, making the AI outputs more visible and emotionally impactful. 

Without strong predictive AI, generative AI delivers marginal returns. Epsilon has nearly a decade of predictive AI experience. We have the science of marketing down, so we’re positioned to truly unlock the new generative AI possibilities (the “art” of marketing) for our clients.

Epsilon’s CORE AI makes real-time marketing decisions at the individual—not the audience—level. Our platform is “AI by design,” and we have built and trained our machine learning and AI capabilities since 2014. AI helps our clients find and deliver the right message to more in-market customers on the open web who are ready to buy—and we're the only partner who does this in real time, at scale. 

With 2+ billion model updates every minute (where others can take a month or more), CORE AI chooses individuals—not audiences—at the time of impression, so our clients are engaging people who are still in the market and ready to purchase.

DQ: How does Epsilon provide engineers the platform to create and contribute to cutting-edge innovations?

KumkumRaj Swamynathan: Epsilon's India teams use data, technology, AI, and media platforms to enable global brands to achieve their marketing objectives. Our teams build our products or use these products to deliver value to our clients. The team at Epsilon processes more than 400 billion consumer actions each day and holds many patents on proprietary technology, including real-time modelling languages and consumer privacy advancements. 

Our platforms are built from the ground up with a “cloud-first” approach and zero-footprint software deployment in client data centres. These are massive, highly scalable, high-throughput SaaS platforms processing billions of marketing signals based on consumers interactions with the brands.

The India product engineering team is a full-cycle engineering team that drives architecture, POCs, implementation, quality automation, product management, support, operations, and DevOps. The team here works on creating cutting-edge technology that fuels global accounts. 

With flagship products like PeopleCloud and COREID, Epsilon connects advertisers with consumers while prioritizing privacy and client data protection. Our PeopleCloud Messaging platform processes over 120 billion emails, driving effective and impactful marketing campaigns for some of the biggest brands and millions of consumers. 

With core machine learning built-in, we bring 1st-party data as our proprietary insights with 7,000+ dimensions on every customer action observed online and offline. Our platform learns how individuals respond and factors those decisions into the experience. Epsilon's industry-leading data and consumer recognition ensure a marketing strategy anchored in first-party data, independent of third-party cookies or devices.

We provide engineers with the opportunity to leverage open-source frameworks and tools extensively for workflows, data processing, streaming, messaging, caching, alerts and monitoring, and other critical aspects of software engineering, DevOps, and SRE.

DQ: What are some of the trends that you foresee in MarTech for the upcoming years?

KumkumRaj Swamynathan: There are some interesting trends. 

Phasing out of cookies: Third-party cookies are no longer sufficient for tracking user behaviour, customizing experiences, and gauging the success of campaigns in the marketing industry. So, marketers will need to find a new way to identify people online so they can continue to personalize messages, optimize campaigns, and measure performance.

DCR: Data clean room (DCR) is becoming a critical tool as advertisers and marketers look for new methods to strengthen their technology stack. It is a safe method of connecting anonymous advertising and marketing data from different businesses. 

Although DCR is not new, it is gaining traction and transforming marketing through ethical data use. To function in a world where third-party cookies are not used and where regulations surrounding data protection are becoming more stringent, DCRs act as secure intermediaries for data relationships between retailers, partners, providers, and brands.

Data-driven marketing: Data-driven marketing will be the main trend, using data to improve choices, hone tactics, and provide customers with individualized experiences. Fundamentally, data-driven marketing is using data to improve decision-making, hone tactics, and provide customers with individualized experiences. It requires gathering and examining information from several points of contact along the customer journey, then using the results to inform marketing initiatives.

Hyper-personalization: Hyper-personalization enables companies to customize goods, services, and content for specific consumers based on their interests, actions, and past data. Hyper-personalization is the process of customizing the marketing experience for each individual consumer by utilizing real-time data and sophisticated analytics to comprehend their distinct preferences, behaviours, and demands.