AI is Changing Digital Marketing for the Better

Good evening, professor. Can you hear me?

Good evening, Arthur. I can hear you.

Yeah. Hi. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll get started. I we just a fight or two was waiting for you to come in. So Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on a Wednesday evening for an interesting session on how AI is changing digital marketing for the better. My name is retrofit Acharya. I am the Senior Director of Sales and Marketing at talentsprint. We are also joined by the program director, Professor Servin Ajay Kumar from I am Calcutta for the iPod marketing program. What we have planned today are a couple of things. So, we are going to talk a little bit about how digital marketing can be used and is making a difference in the lives of marketers. And what is the and how is it better You could benefit as a marketeer. How could you benefit out of a program like the AI part marketing program that I am Calcutta is offering along with talentsprint. We can talk a little bit about that we will have a q&a section whereby you will be able to ask questions as a part of the session to both the professor and I, and we will answer the questions that you have. So, what I'm going to do is I have Okay, just about a Give me a second and just sharing the screen. Can all of us see the screen?

Oh, yes, in the chat window will be helpful.

Excellent. Yes, I'm getting a lot of yeses. And the video and audio, I'm assuming are fine. So let's go on. I spend more time over here. Just a brief introduction. Many people You may know talentsprint may not know about talentsprint. So talentsprint is an edtech company we are 10 years old now. And we work with leading academic institutions top academic institutions like I am Calcutta to offer deep tech programs and niche programs which working professionals and even college students to some extent, are able to use to you know, upskill themselves to get a better job, etc, etc. So some of the programs are listed on the screen we have an AI ml program with triple ID three programs with the IM Calcutta AI powered marketing being the program that we are discussing today there is the AP FSB or different tech and financial blockchain program and the newest program that's going that's hot off the press, so to speak, is the global economy and digital money program that we have. And there are other institutions that we partnered with as well, including IAC, it can pour among others. So, what we are going to do today is you know, we are going to talk about a pod marketing it's important to understand the evolution of marketing as, as a as a function, and I'm gonna spend just less than a minute maybe 1015 seconds, you know, marketing is something that started off in 19, the 1960s you know, we had the traditional marketing, you had the television ads, you know, leaflets, flyers and all of that, digital marketing, so to speak, kind of started off in 2000, the penetration of internet and availability of internet access when God democratized so to speak, kind of took off post 2010 11 when you know, we really had a lot of more personalized way of attracting and talking to people. traditional marketing was you know, you you hit a spray of bullets or speak and hope that one lines at the intended audience, digital life They've been brought about a lot more personalization. But what it also meant was that with the advent of technology, the amount of data that was available, what and what, you know, what could be used as insights has been exponentially growing. So in 2020 18 2018 20, we are looking at an explosion of data. If you look at a data curve, it's gone up like this, everything that we do is connected, you know, from an internet enabled air conditioner to a fridge, etc, etc. So the amount of data that is available has gone up, which means that we actually have to find newer ways of making sense of this data. So that's bad. You know, that's been the evolution of marketing. You know, talk a little bit more about that. And before I get there, I'd also like to take this opportunity to, you know, introduce Professor Servin Ajay Kumar. He is a part of the IM Calcutta He's been teaching at Target a professor of behavior better idea would be for you to introduce yourself then me doing it. Yeah, thanks. So my name is surbana. I've been with M capital for about four and a half years now. Prior to that I was with I am with a food and then I did my PhD from I am Ahmedabad. Yeah. So about more than more than 15 years ago, I think it may be from Cardiff University from UK. Most of my work experience has been you know, post MBA has been on digital marketing and marketing strategy. But after joining May, you know, PhD and after taking the position at and target I have been a lot more interested in working on a board marketing and we've done a lot of work with the faculty from University of Missouri, but we're also the faculty in this particular program, which is an AI powered marketing as well. So, we do a lot of research in you know, how he can actually help out with marketing, in addition making in the marketing domain, and so on. Apart from that, I'm also working actively on public policy and at the nexus of public policy and marketing as well. So creating awareness among about pharma products and other stuff. Yeah, that's about me. But I'm also the CO directors for this particular program. I started through mentioned, which is advanced program on a board marketing. And, you know, I'll be taking about, I think, almost half to half the program, I guess, if I'm right here, and we all do our intro. So I think you will, you can try to differentiate and I can chip in at a later stage. Yeah,

absolutely. I probably bring the professor on and ask him a couple of slides. And then we will have a small interaction session. I have a couple of questions for him. And, and, you know, we can open it up to the audience q&a. So you can all hold on to your questions. Till the time we open up for q&a, we'll have enough time to answer most of your questions. So, you know, you'll be presenting this in front of him. He obviously knows a lot more than me, but then this is what it is digital marketing. We've been talking about it you know, you Most of us would be marketers over here and we will be using this be the search engine marketing, the social media email marketing, search engine optimization, etc. What it has allowed us to do till now is that it has allowed us to personalize communication to a certain extent whereby we are able to personalize communication to certain segments of the audience that we intend to target. But what it can do is something is where AI comes in because while we have been able to personalize, we are able to target much better than we were able to do before. Our budgets the way in which we don't spend our marketing budgets that we get assigned. It has improved but it is the pinnacle of what we can do. It's definitely not and with the advent of artificial intelligence, it is DD forums the what are the areas in which golf where we can actually work towards getting Even better results has grown exponentially. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. And then, you know, I'm sure the professor will have a lot of insights to share with us when we are interacting with him. So this has been the traditional digital marketing, you know, most encompasses most of the things that we are doing. The slide that I'm sharing right now is from a survey of Salesforce, it came out a couple of months back, if I'm not mistaken, sometime in May. It's called state of marketeers. And they do the survey annually, and the sixth edition of the survey. So the question was, what was and this is a I guess they had surveyed more than 30 countries, marketeer, some 1200 1300 professionals. So they were trying to figure out what are the top challenges that marketers were facing? So the biggest challenge was engaging customers in real time, innovation, innovation, creativity, in terms of creativity, cohesive customer journeys, so you know, being Getting the customer in and handling this entire journey through his entire lifetime value of which for the organization is something across channels and devices. That's something that's very important now, because you may have the same customer coming in across channels and devices. So that's the card most biggest challenge that marketers are facing worldwide, unifying customer data sources, again, with more channels with more devices, data sources of customers, again, has exponentially grown up so that's that's the fourth biggest problem and presenting a view of the customer across business units. You know, customer can be a customer across multiple business units, maybe I'm sorry. So across multiple business units, so presenting that so that every business unit which has any interaction with the customer, is able to get the access to data and make most That, so that these are some of the top ones, the ones number two and number four, were not there in the survey in 2018. They have come in the survey of 2020, which kind of talks about specially number four kind of talks about the importance of the customer data and how much the data has exploded, the data explosion has happened.

Why, you know, this, this, you know, we'll be talking about that this is a very cliched statement, artificial intelligence has arrived. And it's not arrived in the form of, you know, robots and flying cars, so to speak, maybe it will happen in the next couple of years. It's happening and I'm kind of drawing up from the data sources, the problems that we have in the form of all of these connected devices. Our homes are connected, your phone, your tablet, AC fridge, everything that we have, we are connected, our cars are connected. We have used connected devices like Alexa or Google Home smart bulbs. What not So all of this actually leads to humongous amount of data and come back to that. Tons of problems that we have. And this is where artificial intelligence can help us. Because if you were to look at it, engaging customers in real time is something that AI can help us pay innovation. Again, it's still a human thing. So I probably not put it in the ballpark of artificial intelligence being able to help us too much. But it can definitely give us insights which will help us innovate more journeys across customers and devices. That's something where artificial intelligence can help us by making help us make sense of the amount of data that we get, get unifying data sources. Again, same thing. Similarly, number five, you know, unified view because of the fact that we are able to pull in data and make sense of all of the data that we get from our customers will be able to do that. So those Some of the problems now what I'm showing over here is the again this is from the same Salesforce survey that I was just showing in the previous slide which talks about the top AI use cases in marketing as you know told by marketers, so, personalized experiences across individual channels. So, personalization if you are able to give everybody you know x y z you meet all of us when we go to St That's it, we get a journey and experience that is personalized to the needs that I have. You know, I will probably be in a better positioned to buy tech product or service. Now customer segmentation look alike modeling. That's the second most important use case that marketers are seeing in terms of usage of AI insights from data. So we took up just talking about the amount of data that we are all generating here, you know, walking, talking, we are generating data. Thanks to all of the You know, activities that we do everything is online for us. Next Best actions or offers, it's again a part of the customer journey. But the fact of the matter is, if you were to know about the customer's profile better, AI can help machine learning can help predict deep learning can help predict what would be the most suitable thing for the customer to, you know, buy your product by your service, so to speak. And automating some of the customer interactions that are there we will so that's these are the top five use cases of AI in marketing. Professor of would you have some thoughts that you would want to share on some of these things if they this kind of captures things or if there is, and I'm sure he will have much more insights than these five points? Yeah, I

think these kind of capture the broad areas in which you know, when can be useful to marketing. But apart from that, you know, so if you have take a broad definition of marketing as a whole, then there are like, you know, the sky's the limit where you can apply AI to several use cases, right? For instance, in healthcare, you can even use it to predict, you know, who's going to show up for your appointments, who's not going to show up for appointments, and you know, what can and you have a lot of other systems that are actually interconnected in the healthcare also. So, healthcare is a huge domain, where AI can play a much bigger role in terms of in terms in in a lot of ways actually, in terms of bringing in the patient into the hospital or taking them through the entire process and you know, and post post, you know, post discharge care as well. So, a plays a huge role over there. And apart from this, you know, so one of the interesting points that Arthur mentioned was you know, improved customer segmentation. We always hear that you know, in digital marketing, we can segment customers a lot better and we can actually target them much better, but a makes it much more sharper, you can actually predict to a greater accuracy in what is the probability of purchase for you to individuals starting a data set, and you can actually target those offers in a much better way so that we can actually enhance your digital marketing efforts to a greater extent. So look alike modeling is another thing, which Facebook, I think many of you will be aware of that about Facebook actually uses look alike modeling to find similar customers who have already bought it, it takes a new sample of customers have bought your products already. And it's going to build a profile, which is like a look alike profile of that particular set of customers and find them on Facebook, and you can target them. So that enter algorithm is based on you know, a is driven by AI. So those are some of the examples of you know, just to expand on those those five points. But yeah, so you can carry on. Yeah, please. Thank you. I mean, this wonderful, I am kind of reminded of one of these interactions that we were having professor, where you were talking about his family profiling of a family using the receipts off their purchases from a Walmart store. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So So what do you what do you just paint Ability talking about that, or even I can I can share the broad insights that I can talk about that. So can you give me the host right to share the screen?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

So just to give a broad overview of, you know what, so I can actually start the video as well. So yeah. Right. So this is a screen I think most of you would be aware of, I mean, all of you, most of you are here in the panel. And notice also that it needs to be aware of, you know, the screen that you see on Amazon, right? So though there are like, you know, eating pro products on Amazon, you're never, you don't think of, you know, you don't feel overwhelmed by the number of choices that you're faced with because it's kind of personalized. It keeps all the content that's thrown in front of you is actually make keeps you engaged, and you never feel like you know, the choices that is the overload of choices. That's because, you know, there's a lot of algorithms running the background and they are on a power shot once to algorithms, associations and market basket optimization, so do those running in the background today. Make sure that you know you're getting the content that's very, very relevant to you, based on your shopping trends based on lookalike customers, customers similar to bought other items. So that's basically what is running in the background, what Arthur was actually mentioning was more about. Yeah. So this is just one example of you know, how we can actually build a profile of a customer based on this few data points. So if you look at, you know, the this particular receipt from Walmart, so you can actually track the purchases with the mobile number. So when you look at this receipt, you see that you know, they are purchasing Diet Pepsi. They're also this particular family is purchasing an Atkins bar which is more like you know, protein high bar and there's also slimfast ring. So this kind of tells you overall, there is a there is possibly a female household and she's kind of cutting calories, but look at the other items on the on that particular receipt, you'd also see ice cream, you'll also see popsicle Cheetos, all those calorie heavy items. So this kind of thing. says that no, maybe there is a kid maybe there is a kid in the household. But just from one receipt you get to know there is you know, some sort of compulsion about And the current object is what they're trying to do. So a few weeks later, the same family comes in, they're kind of buying, let's say, basketball, I mean baseball cards. So you definitely know there is at least 1000. So baseball cards, they actually purchase in that. And they're also getting some dog treats. Maybe they have a pet, right. So you're kind of getting a picture with just two receipts, you're getting kind of getting a picture of the DNA of the household. Let's say there is a third receipt that you get after a few weeks, and they're kind of buying fish shoots, so you know that maybe they're interested in fishing, so they are hobbyist fishing, they're also buying marine oil in the same purchase. So this kind of tells you that they also own a boat. So just from these transactions, these three transactions when you put these three together, you kind of see that you kind of get a DNA of the entire house. So there is this small family with a pet and they're interested in fishing and they also own a boat. So you kind of get the DNA of the house also once you can get the DNA of the household a lot of predictive analytics now is focused on predicting the life's life's lifecycle milestones like you know, when the milestones are happening, like when a particular person is likely to graduate, When are they going to get into, let's say, get their first job? When are they going to get their first salary? When are they going to get married? When are they going to have the first kid, the second kid. So all these are typical milestones in life by psychologically, consumers are going through a lot of changes. So the kind of predicting this using AI gives you a lot of power to actually target them at the right moment when they're going through these changes when they're actually willing to change. So you can actually target them much more precisely, and you can get them to purchase and, you know, upgrade a lot more. And you can also actually, it's, you might think that this kind of, you know, kind of data privacy issue, but it's like kind of making the lives a lot better. You're bringing the right information at the right point in time using AI algorithms. So this one example of when you get to know the DNA of the household, you kind of can predict what is going to happen down the line in the future, and what are the kind of products are going to be interested in? What are the kind of things they're looking for when are they going to look for a mortgage? Or are they going to look for, let's say, health insurance or a term insurance, so you get a lot more insights into how this household is going to behave in the in the foreseeable future. So that's just one example of you know why He can actually do for from a marketing perspective. Yeah. Yeah, who had those these slides on Amazon? Bell, you know how Amazon is using that, you know, we go through that every day, you know, Amazon's suggest that this is, you know, more important what we use the term I think recommended for you or on the your search patterns is what they say. Inspired by your shopping trends are based on your shoe shop, you know, shopping is purchase history or customers similar to you bought certain items, and stuff like that. So each of them runs on, you know, different kind of rules. And so we'll be covering all of those in the course anyways, on how to build those rules or basics behind those rules and how to get that mark. We call it Market Basket optimization. So how to combine certain products and provide it to the customer. So they are much more engaged and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And we also have these very practical use cases, I believe. Uber runs surge pricing cases, an mln AI algorithm that's running behind, which is number of users and the demand for transportation to decent location. True, exactly right.

So. So given that, you know, the traffic predicting the traffic, you know, predicting the kind of demand in a particular particular area or area at a particular point in time, all these would have a huge impact on your pricing, dynamic pricing models as well. So you need to actually work with the real time data to predict what kind of usage is going to happen in the next let's say one or two hours and for surge pricing, that's kind of very critical, say plays a huge role over there in to come up with this dynamic pricing models as well. Yeah, absolutely. So in terms of Professor lead incent we are talking about this Vivi also we launched our program on AI powered marketing, which so what was what is it that led to, you know, this program being conceptualized and launched, I mean, Before that he had this huge need for it. But we also have, you know, digital marketing. So can you kind of give us some idea of what's been, I've been talking about that as well. But I want to hear your perspective. So when we were actually discussing about, we were doing a kind of a lot of work in a marketing with a couple of my co authors who are in actually in University of Missouri. So the thing that we find the most interesting thing we found in the market was, you have these set of people who are really marketing gurus who know exactly what to do, you know, out of, you know, they were really good at marketing strategy in trying to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And you have these really good data science and data analysts, right, data science engineers, but there was a huge gap, you know, between them in terms of communication between these two in terms of translating what these you know, marketing guys want and what these guys can accomplish, so to bridge the gap, so that's where we thought, you know, that kind of program which is a little bit technical, but focuses a lot more on the marketing strategy. perspective so that these two guys can talk to each other in terms of you know, so if I find a particular market here, and I have no idea what's the capability of a, I won't be able to translate what I have in mind to the data science guys to get the best output. And data science guys are really good at what they do, but they may not understand the business case, or they may not understand how to actually, you know, they may not have the kind of insights about the consumers insights about what works in the market. So they're going to just, you know, translate my requirements into some sort of an algorithm and give it back to me. So as a marketer, if I'm not aware of what those what are the capabilities that are possible. So the otherwise it doesn't open up my mind to those possibilities as a marketer, I need to be able to comprehend what are the different possibilities? And what are the different things that I can accomplish today? What are the different algorithms What are they you know, merits and shortfalls as well, so that I can actually translate my requirements in a realistic way to the data science guys. So there is these two guys can talk together and talk with each other in a in a seamless manner. And that we thought would actually result in a lot more productivity. So that's the basic idea. That was a basic motivation for us to come up with a program of this. So we discuss a lot about this last year, and we are trying to make the balance between, you know, technical aspect of the program, as well as a, you know, marketing aspect. And we kind of found the right balance in terms of giving them some hands on experience, but without any coding background. So, you don't really need to have a coding background to understand what exactly we're talking about, we'll be handling you through that process. But we'll be giving you a lot more insights from the marketing perspective, how what are the, you know, capabilities of these different different algorithms and how they have been deployed in the market till now and how companies are using them. And so once you understand the algorithms, once you understand the use cases, then you know, it kind of opens up your mind to different possibilities in your own organization. That was a basic idea that, you know, how this program was conceptualized in the first case, first place. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I mean, that's, that's a great way of, you know, telling us about the origin of the program. In terms of Professor Can you be one can we do a little bit of a deep dive into The program itself, you know, I have kind of summarize that as a part of that ideally, this presentation also had those slides around the program itself. If you want, you can go to that or I can share one of the abridged summary slides. You can please go into the summary slides so we can take around. Yeah.

Yeah.

So what I had in mind was, I mean, see there is a there's one slide again, the professor did talk about it a lot in terms of you know, to these are some of the provider would you want to run people a little bit across these applications of artificial intelligence in digital marketing in terms of what can happen? Yeah, sure. So, so, I mean, if I don't know what kind of expertise people have in terms of digital marketing the attendees panel, but to take it In a simple manner, so like I mentioned, then, when you talk about digital marketing you always talk about, you can target customers a lot more precisely, you can, you know, send targeted ads, you can measure, you can track all their usage through the entire entire journey and a consumer journey, you can also tweak the message through the entire journey, right a kind of forms a forms of, you know, kind of a basic, you can say, a foundation for tweaking, and, you know, changing the messages in real time, and kind of providing the right message at the right point in time. So, if you talk about, for instance, search engine optimization, so you have a, a proper landing pages that are dynamically created, based on use trends in what what is being searched, right, for instance, if fewer people are searching for a particular product in a city, right, and, you know, and this can, and you know, that, you know, 15% of searches in Google everyday, kind of something that Google has not seen before. So kind of people are searching for a lot more information on a daily basis. And they're all you know, coming up with innovative very, very new ways to search for information. So What happens when you, when you have a power a power dynamic landing pages, you kind of understand what is the trend in your particular domain. And then you kind of create landing pages on the go. And then you kind of, you know, let Google kind of, you know, crawl it, and you have those pages dynamically created and presented in front of the user. So that's just one use case of you know, how a dynamically generated a proper landing pages can contribute to search engine optimization. The other part, which is quite, quite interesting is you know, you can take, a lot of companies have done this thing of no reverse engineering, kind of take few keywords, search it in Google find out who are actually coming up on top, go to those pages, and find out the characteristics of those pages, code those pages, and then build an a program to predict what kind of pages are kind of getting, you know, on top on Google for certain kind of keywords, that kind of gives a lot of insights on how you have to find your own web page as well. So this is something that also be covered as part of the course not in detail, but at least we cover the basics of this particular process. The other main part where he can actually add a lot more value is chatbots. Right? So where you can build in some sort of predictive algorithm, and you can process the language now we call it natural, natural language processing, and you can process the language, you can find out what kind of questions they're asking them, the system can actually build and build certain responses based on that. Alex is one great example. And you have several of the chat bots that are there in the market. So Google, Google Home is another example google assistant. And you know, why recognition in your automobile? So all of these are actually running based on artificial intelligence? Apart from that in, in retail, obviously, you know, when you talk about Amazon, when you talk about Flipkart a has a huge role to play in terms of displaying the right products to the customers like we discussed, but that's another use case for for a in the in the in the domain of digital marketing. Right. So this is these are just some examples. Right. So in terms of how a can actually augment your digital marketing efforts, yeah. Absolutely, um, you know, you kind of covered that. And, you know, I was reading this research recently, I think almost one out of four Google searches these days are voice searches. Or, you know, use Google Voice or the voice option to actually search for it. Similarly, we're seeing a lot of, you know, new users like content curation, like you have conquered buzzsumo. They are actually allowing artificial intelligence to curate content while it's at its infancy, but I think with time, it's only gonna get better. And the regular things about you know, predictive analytics, content generation is again, pretty new, but rate of analytics is something which is one very important aspect of AI in marketing. Is that right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. So buzzsumo is an interesting use case to actually look at what kind of content actually gets a lot more, you know, coverage in different social media networks and they kind of reverse engineer and they try to figure out what will new build new countries That can actually gain a lot more popularity in social media. So that way, you know, even in content generation is being used up dramatically. And the other part is, you know, consumer sentiments understanding consumer sentiments in social media. So were, you know, looking at you, if you have like 10,000 comments that have been posted in your page, you obviously can't go through each one of them to identify, you know, what kind of message is coming through. So sentiment analysis kind of picks up all the positive ones and tells you these are the kind of positive comments that are getting and these are the kind of negative ones and you need to address to kind of automate all of those, so they experience becomes a lot more, and you can manage a huge volume of, you know, huge volume of comments and posts across different platforms in a simple way, using the sentiment analysis and bag of words. Yeah, absolutely. So again, he kind of spoken about this, you know, channels, marketing campaigns, how do you operationalize and, you know, make your budgets, more effective channels, identifying opportunities, we've kind of spoken about this. So what I'm going to talk about Right now about is the program that the professor was talking about. And you know, this is the iPod marketing program for the advanced program in artificial intelligence, pod marketing. That's the full name of the program. We are in the process of recruiting for the first cohort of the program. Classes are starting from sixth of September, the induction is going to be there at the end of August. And so, this is these are some of the modules that are there in the program. Professor, would you want to run us a little bit and give us a broad overview about all of these modules and how they are important in terms of from a marketing

perspective.

The first model we start up is actually data driven marketing decisions, where we take you through you know some of the basics of marketing and then we related to how, you know, how it has changed with the big data, how this certain process have changed, you know, and be related to marketing related to artificial diligence in each of those sessions. So data driven marketing decisions is basically about, you know, segmenting, targeting and positioning decisions and marketing, creating a marketing strategy, and how to utilize market research to build a strategy. So those kind of things that we covered. But at the same time, we also related to how big data and artificial intelligence can enhance that particular how they've actually transformed these particular, you know, data driven marketing practices, right. The second one is where we get into the different algorithms. So fundamentals of artificial intelligence and machine learning, we you will not be looking at a lot of equations, you will not be looking at anything, a lot of mathematical stuff for anything that is on anything, we'll try to cover it in a most simple and intuitive manner where we get you to understand the algorithm. So what exactly is algorithm trying to accomplish? What are the major algorithms out there and what are they trying to accomplish? So that's what we're planning to cover. You don't really need to have a mathematical background to understand because we'll be taking a more common sensical approach to explaining The intuition behind those algorithms. The third is where we give you some sort of hands on experience and are where you don't need a coding experience to actually work with our will be giving us, we'll be guiding you through certain templates. And we'll ask you to run certain algorithms and see how to modify certain parameters that to, you know, fine tune certain to your requirements. So that's basically what we'll be covering in the module on AI and ml using AR. Then we go into digital and social media marketing, where we talk about this is why we talk about a lot more about applications of AI in digital marketing and social media marketing. Then we talk about marketing in the world of Alex, we also talk about, you know, how we can help with search engine optimization, how it can help with the, you know, bid optimization in Google and Google ads and stuff like that. So, we talk about all those in that particular module. Then we go into a ml applications in marketing, where we take you through each of those use cases, for instance, you know, predicting customer defaults, predicting churn rate in a particular organization, and how do you retain those customers predicting the Or, you know, evaluating promotions and kind of planning for the future. So those kind of applications will be taking you through case by case. In that particular model. That's a huge model where we'll cover the bulk of AML applications and marketing. In the futuristic marketing. We talked a little bit about blockchain and smart contracts, application of blockchain and smart contracts and marketing. We also talk about neuro marketing to some couple of sessions on neuro marketing. So these sessions on blockchain, Internet of Things and augmented reality and virtual reality those would be covered by my co director process. devashish Aha. And finally, we have amin through the entire program will also be doing a capstone project where we'll be putting you into groups and you can work with work with the group and you will have to, you can come up with your own question that you want to, you know, address using the methods that we've taught you during the course. And we'll be guiding through the entire process and the faculty assigned to you one of the directors and be assigned to a particular project and they will be guiding you through the entire process. If you have any difficulties in terms of running algorithms to address your question, if you have any different in obtaining data to, you know, run few algorithms and see how they're performing, then we will be helping you through the entire process. So that's what we have in mind for the different models. Yeah. So thank you so much. It's Yeah, give getting the overview of the program from the program director. These are some operational things that are there, which is it's a six month long program. We're going to have classes twice a week, I believe on Tuesdays and Sundays. And there is a plan for a campus visit, but it depends on safety, and government regulations at that point in time. So these are the modules, you can actually go on to the talentsprint website and you can you will be able to figure out the link to go to the page. What I'm going to do is I'm going to open up, you know, q&a for the audience we have, you know, so you can you can ask your questions in a couple of ways. You can send it as a chat window and You know if you can also raise your hand and we can ask you will allow you to unmute yourself and ask the question in person. So we have a couple of questions from that are coming in. So Pooja has raised her hand Pooja, I even I have allowed you to you can unmute yourself and you can ask your question.

Yeah, hello everybody. I'm Pooja Sharma thrombotic petroleum. So, though I have already spoken to Nikhil, the person from talentsprint But I would also like to know Professor starblast take on this question, though he has already answered that maths and statistics are not required as a necessary skill to succeed as a marketer as a marketer. But then what are the necessary skills that I think we as participants would be needing in the next six months to be successfully a marketer? That is my question one and the other question is, your world also spoken about capstone projects. So that would be in the groups as you said, so this would be a project that we would be taking on on on our companies, or would it be something that you would be giving us as a life project? And we would be working on it.

Okay. Thanks, Pooja for the first question. Right? So what we meant to say was, you know, many of the potential candidates who come to us, they kind of ask us, we look at artificial intelligence, and they immediately think, you know, it's kind of it's going to be math theory, it's gonna be that's gonna be a lot of equations that we're not gonna understand it's going to be, you know, based on mattresses, and are we going to take the approach that it is or technical institutes they are going to take or so that's the first question that we get. So that's why to, you know, make it very clear, we say that we're not going to get into the math behind the different algorithms, you're going to talk about a little bit about, you know, the intuition of each of those algorithms. So how do these algorithms work? So we understand the basics of those algorithms, but we will not be getting into the math behind it. And so when you ask about, you know, how to be a successful marketer, that's kind of a very, very big Question, right in the sense of you are when we talk about, we have a particular You know, this thing, eligibility criteria where we say you need to have at least two years of work experience, to understand the dynamics in the industry, you at least have some experience to be able to relate to it, and currently in the marketing domain, then well and good, you will get a lot more out of this program. But even if you are a newcomer to marketing, and you're trying to get the basics, so that's why we have this one particular, you know, a module, which is data driven marketing decisions, where we'll be covering the basics of marketing, as well as you know, how they relate to this particular program, how he can actually help you take those decisions in a better way. So, to answer your question, the program the Oh, the six months, what we're trying to do is, you know, make sure that you understand the concepts of marketing, different applications of marketing and you understand how a what are the different algorithms that are out there, and how this can actually enhance your users experience, how we can actually employ it in our organization to make better marketing decisions. So that subject to the overall objective of the program so to answer that, Second question, right the capstone project, typically what we do is, like you mentioned will bring you into groups, you are free to go and, you know, take a project from your own company, and the company is willing to share the data with you guys and you're willing to work on it. And we will obviously be guiding you, one faculty will be assigned to in one directory, we are sent each of those groups so you can work with us to you know, solve that particular issue and present it. So in case, let's say, worst case scenario, the six members or seven members in the group are not able to find a company or they don't, their company is not willing to share the data with them to do a project of this site, then in that case, you can obviously reach out to us and we'll be able to help you out from finding out a real real life project where you can actually get some data and we can work on it accordingly. Right. So I hope that answers the second question. So overall, I think till now, we have not had we not faced, we run a lot of other programs, you know, face any issue of in terms of, you know, finding some sort of real life real life problem that groups can take over and work on. So Do capstone projects across all different programs. So we've never had an issue till now. And usually participants are able to find, you know, some sort of issue that they can work with from their own companies. If not, we'll obviously be able to help you out with kind of industry contacts that myself order for the database, so we'll be able to help you out over there as well. And I hope that answers your question. Yes. We just sent out a message in the chat saying that, you know, thanking you for it. And thank you, is a very comprehensive answer. So I just got a couple of questions that we are getting from the chat. So there are a couple of questions around the use of artificial intelligence in b2b marketing. What's your take on that Professor? See your questions that I see on b2b marketing? And yeah, yeah. So one of the questions that typically come up, even in digital marketing is, you know, how can b2b market you know, b2b companies can benefit out of, you know, digital marketing. So it's not about the domain that you're actually in. It's about you know, by If you know that b2b is also quite a, you know, broad area to focus on, but you're still dealing with an end customer for you, that particular client is still the end customer and you are, you know, depending on the scale that you're working on a can actually add a lot more value. For instance, I think in one of the webinars, one particular person that was raised is we are in the oil industry, we typically work with b2b companies, how do we actually why do we use AI? So predictive maintenance, so that's where a comes in predictive maintenance and with all your clients and trying to figure out where you can actually add more value to them as well. So in b2b Also, there are several use cases we'll be covering those.

Not in detail, though, but we'll be covering at least a couple of cases of b2b applications as part of the course as well. So we've identified two use cases where we'll talk about predictive maintenance. We'll also talk about how you can actually predict the ordering demand demand from each of your clients. In b2b, the only thing is both the scale right in b2c, you're dealing with a huge set of data, I mean, customer data, but whereas if a few clients Wow, how do we use? Ai? That's typically the question that we get right? You can also like someone is actually saying in the chat, you can also facilitate to, you know, use AI to facilitate end customers as well. You can predict the end consumers kind of, you know, requirements, and you can actually work backwards through the value chain to figure out where you can add value in that entire process. So that's another area where we can actually contribute a lot to b2b as well. Thank you. Thank you so much, professor. I mean, it's a it's a good answer. We always get this b2b question. Yeah. Whenever we do a webinar, I remember when we did with the version Chahal. So a couple of weeks back, the same question that come, Robbie, you have raised your hand, I have unmuted yourself. I have unmuted allowed you to speak you can unmute yourself and ask a question.

Yes. Yeah. So I'm Ravi. I have like a diverse experience that I started with it. So I worked on market basket analysis and all while working in that industry. Then I came into this digital marketing Both for public policy sector and now currently invited Junior sir, here I'm into sales practice. But before this I also worked for a startup where I heard that the future of sales and marketing practice is going to be different because till now, teams are working in silos, beat a sales team beat a marketing team or be a data science team. But in future, I heard that there are going to be the management practices going to change that these teams are going to come together. We anyhow discussed on marketeers and data scientists. Can we also discuss something on sales and market sales and marketing as well as a practice? How the future of industry or workforce is going to be?

Yeah, so that's an interesting question, the contrast between sales and marketing, right? So we don't differentiate between those two. You know, when we talk about marketing, we just talk about marketing includes sales and marketing. So one of the things to notice, you know, a few years ago, if you didn't think about why not take b2b as a itself as an example, a few years ago, or let's say 10 years All right, if you think about b2b or any sort of purchase that you need to place an order, the first thing that we do is we kind of try to figure out, if you're a company and you want to find out potential vendors, right, you take up the phone call phone and you make a call, right? You make a call, and then the sales team takes over. So the marketing is just that to create that awareness to get that phone call in. So that was what people thought, you know, traditionally, marketing's role is to get the phone call. And once that phone call comes in, it's handed over to the sales team. And the sales team is going to take over and sales team is going through the entire education, you know, that comparison across evaluation, and close the purchase. But now with the now we are in a different landscape, right? So that entail its marketing is not just about creating the getting the phone call, because most of the comparison evaluation, everything is done by the customer by that particular player, before even making the phone call. They find all the information online, they try to gather as much information as they can, and they try to you know, compare and contrast. And before they take that phone to make that call or you know, fill up the call Practice for a while already made up their mind I'm going to make out of this my shortlist, these are the two players, I'm going to choose one of these two players. So it's like 80% of the patient, and the research for that decision is already done in the current landscape. So 10 or 15 years ago, that was not the case. So you can say 20% or that's just a, you know, hypothetical number, but 80% is something you know, you can say that 80% of the research is done before even reaching out to the end customer. So that way, they enter, you know, balance between sales and marketing, you can say, has changed. And these two, these two have to come together to work together as one to actually deliver that particular value to that end customer. So we don't differentiate between sales and marketing is two different you know, but departments are just you know, you give the name to these different different departments is operations, everything to conduct the day to day operations. But when you go one level higher as a CEO of the company, or the you know, the one who is running the entire company as a whole. Oops, I think we lost the professor. We wait for him to join back on I believe, I am audible

Yes, in the chat window would be helpful.

Okay, so we wait for him to come back. Just take a couple of more questions. While you know while we wait for him to get the internet sorted. One is, these are some questions in terms of okay. It's some question program related questions. Similarly, like, Is it a PG certificate or, or a normal certificate? Well, it's an advanced certificate. It's a regular advanced certificate program. It's not a PG diploma degree. That's there. In terms of there's a lot of questions in terms of some questions people have in terms of jobs and all that may or may not be there. So there is no job that is there as a part of this program, because you should understand that this program is program for working professionals already so you don't need to you Don't you know, we since you're going to be working while you're doing this program, a job is something that usually doesn't come with a certificate program or a short program, what most people use this program as a solution is to kind of upskill themselves. So you should look at upskilling yourself as a part of this, the job is a function of your skills, you if you have the skills, and I see this across in my entire journey, I've been spending trying to you know, helping professionals upskill themselves be here and talentsprint or my past stints with the Indian School of Business, etc. So it's it's about building those skills and and the job will follow if you have the skills you don't need to worry about a job prospect. That's there.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you. Sorry about that. So it's a weather is really bad in and

I understand. Yeah.

So there is this. So let's, let's take up a couple of more questions we have, you know, about three, four minutes left. So so this this question from

Nick Khan, he asks, Can someone from an offline marketing and sales background take up this course? The answer is yes. how helpful would it be? Professor? Would you ever take a crack at that? And? Yeah, so in a way, you need to, you know, keep up with changing times. Right. So you can so, like we mentioned to the intake process, the kind of research that's being done before what we call us, you know, are the shortlisted or considerations that has been found in the consumers mind. So all those process are evolving as we speak, right? So it's always better for you to take up and understand what are the capabilities so you're actually a Ready. So you can't say that you know, we have in India at least we, the small and medium scale companies are not actually leveraging AI to the fullest possible extent, even digital marketing is still finding its way into these smaller companies and medium companies only now. So in a way, we are actually kind of equipping you for the future as well. So in terms of as other companies are actually catching up and in your company also asked to get into the game and play a major role, or as individual if you are to actually progress in your career, and you won't actually go further in, you know, understanding advanced concept and being able to, you know, equip yourself in these different technologies. And that way it will definitely be useful to market is the budding stages as well, those who are in offline mode, the traditional marketing that we found, yeah, quote, unquote, absolutely. In terms of so there's this question which is there, which is, um, you know, a couple of people have been asking would certificate from Google HubSpot on the AdWords marketing campaigns would that add value before coming to the program or after completion of this program? Yeah, to make it clear, right, so we're talking about a powered marketing, digital marketing is only a part of this particular program that we talk about applications away in for digital marketing, per se. So you don't really need to have any sort of certification from from the digital marketing side, like, you know, Google Analytics or Facebook blueprint, you don't really need to get any of those certifications. So we're going to talk about the applications of a not just in the digital and social media domain, we're going to talk across the board like in healthcare, in, you know, in dealerships in predicting in evaluating promotions in coming up with the market basket, so we're gonna, it's gonna be across the spectrum. So you don't really need to get certified in any of those. There's not a digital marketing program, per se, there's going to be a application of AI in marketing and digital is just a part of that. Yeah. I mean, digital is a small subset, we are anyway going to cover that as a part of this program.

So one question And I think part of it I can answer is that

the D program that is there. Okay, so this program is we will be getting, I think, too many questions are coming in, and we lost it. Small businesses. So this is a couple of people have been asking your questions. Ravi, we get this question across all webinars as well. Small businesses feel that they have, they will not be able to use AI. So what's the use of AI pod Marketing for Small businesses is one question that's there. So, Professor, would you want to, you know, answer this question? Yeah, sure. Sure. Right. So see, it doesn't matter the scale of the business, and we're not talking about cost, per se. So all these, you know, algorithms are not that don't cost you anything to run any of those algorithms. So any of the customer touchpoints you're actually generating a lot of data. If you have a website. you're generating data on a daily basis. If you have no customer interactions and you're actually storing them in a database, we're generating actually data on a daily basis, you have social media presence or generating data on a daily basis. So and all of these algorithms that we're talking about, you know, the A, some of them also asked about it, or is it a very expensive to actually implement a? It's actually not it's not that it's not, it doesn't cost you anything at all, because we're talking about open source platforms, which is our statistical software, which is completely free of cost. And you just need to know the, you know, know how to actually use those platforms, how to actually run those, what are those algorithms, how to run those algorithms, you need to be aware of those. And all of these are completely free, right? So the basic, you know, the algorithms that you have to run for any of these applications, they're all completely free of cost. And anybody can actually take up those platforms learn those and they will be able to deploy that in no time. So it doesn't matter what kind of organization are running in, you will be generating data, no matter what and learning all these kind of algorithms would actually help you to, you know, use the data to generate better insights. sights. So the scale of organization is just doesn't really apply a lot when it comes to, you know, applications of AI. So we're not really talking about huge, you know, upfront investments in terms of, you know, utilizing this AI algorithms. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much for the answer. So this couple of questions around visit an online program or a physical program, it's an online program, sessions will be delivered on the iPhone platform that talentsprint has. It's a tried and tested platform. And incidentally, I am Calcutta is using it for running the full time MBA program. That's Is that correct? Professor? Yeah, that's right. So given the COVID scenario, we're doing the entire MBA program secondary, or MBA in online with dipole platform. Yeah, yeah. So you don't worry about it. It's a very seamless platform, if you give you all features that you will have in the class, from the safety of your own home. So that that's a couple of answers around that in terms of exams, assessments that would be better as a part of the program. Professor, can you share some light around that a couple of questions have come up. In terms of assessments we'll be giving you mainly, we have decided not to keep any exams per se, for this particular drop in different modules, because it's more of an executive program, and it's more about the learning, that's going to matter a lot more. So we're going to give you assignments, a one the capstone project is going to be a huge, you know, part of the evaluation. Apart from that each of those modules will be giving you small assignments, which will be given a, which be graded. So that's how we're going to assess the, you know, part of the, you know, evaluate the participants in the program. Yeah, you're not going to be using an eye exams, or you might use small quizzes, and here and there, you know, we can actually use some sort of, you know, a synchronous content where we have a video for you and then we'll add in some questions in between to get your understanding of those particular concepts, but major US mean assessment will be through assignments and the capstone project. Yeah. Okay. In terms of the tokens a couple of days, we have passed our time at six o'clock, so we will not hold up the professor as well. So thank you so much, Professor, for spending time with us today. I know you're busy. And I know you have a class in the next 1520 minutes. So thank you so much for taking time out and answering our questions today. We look forward to seeing most of these people in class. And thank you again for coming down and spending some time with us. Thanks a lot through and thanks for all the interesting questions. A lot of new questions that do not face before actually came today and it's quite interesting as stimulating. Thank you so much for hosting this. Thank you.

Thank you, professor. Just a small announcement before we leave, we you can email a nickel from my team is available on this call Nicole, I would request you on the webinar because Can you just share your email address? Some questions around pricing was there the price the cost of the program is cheap. lakh rupees, all of the information will be available on talentsprint.com www.talentsprint.com, you can go there and find information about the program, the program details, you know, the modules that are covered, other aspects of the program will be delivered. And you can reach out to Nick Hill as a part of, you know your questions around the program and he will be happy to help you out with that. So, thank you again, everybody, for joining us today. And I wish you all the best we are closing the admissions for the program in the next week or so. So if you are interested in joining this program, I would request you to get in touch with Nikhil and make an application for it soon. Thank you again, thank you, professor. I look forward to seeing all of you in class.

Thank you. Thank you.

Watch the entire interview here https://youtube.videoken.com/embed/BcMqiXPyhno