The State of AI Research in Marketing: Active, Fertile, and Ready for Explosive Growth

Almost every aspect of consumers are subject to digitization and storage – physical movement, product and media consumption, online search and shopping habits, body metrics, and social interactions. Using cookies, offline beacons, and data trading, these so-called “digital exhaust” of individual behavior are collated to obtain “360 degree,” real-time view of consumers. Advances in computer science in the subfields of natural language processing and computer vision allow for sensemaking of qualitative unstructured data involving text, images, video, and various forms of multimodal data from consumers and the marketplace. Collectively, these advances in real time and varied data collection, algorithmic methods that make sense of data, and cheap computational power have led to significant advances in data-driven artificial intelligence (AI). For quantitative marketers, these advances in AI have led to exciting opportunities to improve marketing – through real-time and contextualized personalization of all elements of the marketing mix (the 4Ps), automation of many marketing actions, learning about customer needs and consumer feedback to products and services in the marketplace. AI can improve marketing activities (e.g., market research) and decisions by making them faster, cheaper, or better.