There’s been plenty of handwringing from advertisers since the major browsers announced they would retire third-party cookies by 2023. The push for a more holistic digital consumer privacy approach forced the move.
Yet, it raised concerns for tens of thousands of companies that rely on third-party data to inform both digital advertising strategy and attribution. How are they going to find high-value customer segments and motivate them to engage with their brand without it?
The reality is that third-party data has always been an imperfect solution to the thorny challenge of motivating customers to engage with your brand and build a relationship. Third-party data offers a usable, behavior-based view of customer digital activity, but it’s still only a rough outline of the human being behind those actions. It gives an indication of what that person may want, but not what motivates them.
For that reason, the death of third-party cookies is an unexpected gift to marketers. It’s forcing a transition away from third-party data toward more reliable and robust data foundations. That transition doesn’t have to be painful either. It could instead herald an era of stronger customer relationships grounded in a consensual give and take of value for information. A key enabler of this shift will be motivation AI to enable personalized communications at scale.
What is motivation AI?
Motivation AI refers to the capability of a machine to identify, leverage and make use of factors that nudge people to take action. One of the most powerful factors that motivate is language because it’s a primary way for human beings to communicate ideas and emotionally connect.
For businesses, generating the variety and volume of motivational language you need to communicate to all your stakeholders across all your channels is pretty much impossible without motivation AI. Human creatives would have to get the exact words and tone right every time and do it at massive scale. No company has enough talented creatives to do it.
In this way, AI-based language generation is a key member of your creative team—one that can identify the exact combination of words, narratives, emotions and other messaging elements to inspire and motivate.
Motivation AI is enabled by three technology principles:
- Unique language classification that allows the machine to “understand” when language is emotive vs. when it’s descriptive, for example.
- Predictive capacity, coupled with advanced decisioning engines, that select the messaging elements that are likely to perform the best.
- Machine learning capabilities that integrate insights from the success (or failure) of tested messages.
Motivation AI also doesn’t need third-party data to drive performance. It relies instead on a combination of a proprietary knowledge base and first-party data.
The role of first-party data in motivation AI
First-party data is defined as data about a company’s customers that is collected or owned by that company. This data is compiled through customer interactions with the company, like purchase history or content downloads. It includes contact details such as an address or email, demographic details like age and gender identity, or even preference information like the kind of clothes they wear, food they like or vacations they take.
Experts broadly tout the importance of a first-party data strategy to thrive in the post-cookie era. Mary Pileki, vp principal analyst at Forrester, for example, has said, “There will be no ‘find and replace’ for the third-party cookie. … Keep investing in first- and zero-party data assets because consumers will share personal information in exchange for some type of value.”
One of the benefits of AI is that it has the large-scale analytical power to crunch huge volumes of data in short order to draw conclusions about what people want based on how they react.
There’s a difference, however, between first-party data you can capture and the motivation data captured by a motivation AI. You can capture preferences by asking a customer directly what they like. For example, when a retail subscription provider prompts you to fill out a questionnaire detailing your style or flavor preferences, this is zero-party data. You can also arrive at preferences indirectly by analyzing patterns in a customer’s past engagement with your brand.
Arriving at motivation, in contrast, is more challenging. Steve Jobs once famously said that customers can’t tell you what they want until you show it to them. “Our job is to figure out what [customers are] going to want before they do.”
One of the most powerful benefits of AI is that it has the large-scale analytical power to crunch huge volumes of data in short order to draw conclusions about what people want based on how they react. Motivation AI’s combination of machine-generated language variants and machine learning enables it to capture real-time customer reactions to messages.
When brands marry that message performance data with their first-party demographic and preference data, they can drive personalized communication, build out data on personalization for individual customers at scale and, ultimately, achieve higher performance.
Leading the movement in motivation AI
Persado is the only motivation AI platform that enables personalized communications at scale to inspire customers to engage and act. Our work with leading brands like JP Morgan Chase, GEICO, Michaels, Vodafone and dozens of others has produced an average 41% uplift on every campaign and 10-times faster campaign-to-conversion cycle.
Some brands achieve even stronger results. For example, a top fashion retailer achieved $78 million in revenue lift, a Fortune 50 bank increased revenue by $98 million and an auto insurance provider acquired 300,000 new policies —all with language generated by Persado’s motivation AI platform. In addition, Persado’s PreScribed has taken unique insights from its Motivation Knowledge Base, containing 10 years of experimentation and billions of data points, in order to build out-of-the-box patient communications content that inspires engagement and drives an immediate action.
The AI language revolution is already here, giving companies that are prepared to leverage content an opportunity to discover what motivates customers and gain a transformational advantage. In fact, this transformational advantage is valued at $800 billion worldwide, according to Boston Consulting Group. Motivation AI is the answer to engaging customers without third-party cookies, and inspiring them to act with personalized communications.
