IBM Accents Digital Marketing at Amplify 2015

By Darryl K. Taft

At Amplify 2015, IBM targeted marketers with new tools to enhance customer engagement.

At the Amplify 2015 Innovation Studio, IBM invited attendees to try out the company’s new technology in a relaxing atmosphere that included refreshing beverages.

Alex Banayan, author and venture associate at Alsop Louis Partners, hosted the opening keynote at IBM Amplify 2015.

Deepak Advani, general manager of IBM Commerce, kicked off the conference, noting the importance of digital marketing. “Marketers must embrace technologies that offer them the opportunity to build two-way engagements with each customer and deliver a meaningful and relevant experience,” Advani said. “IBM is providing innovations such as Journey Analytics to allow marketers to gain insights into customers at depths they could never have imagined just a few years ago. Teams can then turn these insights into campaigns to deliver powerful experiences that engage customers in-context and ultimately build advocacy.”

Advani said it is time to move from business-to-business (B2B) to customer-to-business (C2B) relationships. “You have to get your customers to love what you’re offering,” he said.

Advani said marketers must cull through all kinds of data—interaction data, attitudinal data, descriptive data and behavioral data—to gain the proper mix of insights to reach customers.

A key to personalized marketing is the ability to pivot between aggregate trends and individual behavior.

At IBM Amplify 2015, IBM introduced its Journey Analytics and Journey Designer tools.

IBM Journey Designer is a virtual whiteboard where practitioners on multiple teams within an organization can collaborate and make more informed decisions by working with a single view of a customer’s journey.

Elaine Kuo, a user experience designer at IBM, came onstage to introduce IBM Commerce Insights, a new marketing capability from IBM Commerce.

IBM Commerce Insights is a new capability that provides business executives with insight into the performance, operation and growth of their digital commerce business. With this insight, brands will be informed of opportunities to drive more sales and ways to improve key business metrics such as conversion rate, average order value and various customer issues, such as problems at checkout.

Blake Chandlee, vice president of global partnerships at Facebook, took the stage to talk about the IBM and Facebook collaboration to provide brands with tailored marketing capabilities that reach the right people at the right time with the right message.

Facebook’s Chandlee said the IBM-Facebook collaboration is right in line with Facebook’s mission “to make the world more open and connected.”

Advani said IBM Commerce not only helps customers with marketing but with all sorts of other commerce-related issues, including customer analytics, B2B integration and more.

Neil Pierce, head of eCommunications at Humana, said Humana is using IBM’s Silverpop technology to transform its email system. “Email has been and continues to be the No. 1 messaging channel on the Internet,” he said. “The mere reach of email far outperforms SMS and mobile.”

Andres Wolberg-Stok, global head of emerging platforms and services for Citi Commercial Banking, spoke of how Citi is working with IBM and using IBM Commerce technology.

Wolberg-Stok said Citi tapped into the expertise that came out of the IBM-Apple mobile partnership to deliver the first banking app for the Apple Watch.

Jonah Berger, author and professor at the Wharton School of Business, spoke at Amplify 2015. Berger said only7 percent of word of mouth is online. However, word of mouth generates more than twice the sales as advertising, he said, citing a McKinsey & Co. study.

IBM used the Amplify 2015 press conference to drill down into the news of the event, including a discussion of IBM Customer Experience Analytics, which is a single platform that unifies IBM’s Journey Analytics, Digital Analytics and customer behavior analytics capabilities.

From left to right, Deepak Advani, general manager of IBM Commerce, moderated a panel that included Ashu Garg, general partner of Foundation Capital; Blake Chandlee, vice president of global partnerships at Facebook; Jo Kenrik, director of marketing at Homebase; Jonah Berger, associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of Business; and David Walmsley, director of M&S.com for Marks and Spencer.