Machine Learning: A competitor email experiment

How to train your puppy to sort newspapers from pizza flyers

Ok, so we didn’t actually train a puppy, we trained an algorithm to sort documents, but that doesn’t sound as fun or useful. Useful, though, is hugely underplaying the importance of our latest experimentation.

At Other Media we thrive on delving into new trends and technologies by experimenting with what is available to help us, and our clients, to provide the best solutions for business needs.

We are hearing more and more about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and the latter has been the focus of our most recent experiment.

The last few weeks have seen us utilising machine learning to enhance our ambient data technologies. We wanted to see what it could do for us in terms of analysing vast swathes of data in order to help us understand competing brands.

The ambient data technology, JustNow, collects real-time or near real-time data from multiple sources including Google Analytics, social media, news feeds and email newsletter campaigns. Our custom data displays help our clients to see the bigger picture of how their marketing activities, and those of their competitors, might be driving visitors, sales and value.

We wanted to explore the use of machine learning technology to distil insight from data and present it through this ambient, real-time display. To do this, we looked at the collection and display of competitor newsletters and asked ourselves this question:

Can we build a picture of what is going on in a competitive market by using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to automate the reading and classification of news?

Well the spoiler is that, yes, we can.

You can read more about machine learning (what it is, what its applications and implications for businesses are) and see what our resulting data screen looked like and get a feel for how it could look for your organisation in our report.

In this report you will learn about:

  • What machine learning is
  • Its applications and implications for businesses
  • The results of a simple but powerful experiment with competitor email newsletters
  • How ambient data can provide real-time views of competitors, customers and industry behaviours

It’s survival of the fastest in a rapidly changing environment.