DaaH – Data as a Human. (Episode 262)
What happens if you take all the vast amounts of data and feed it to an AI that analyses it and communicates insights as a human?
Those are questions that Mark Krebs, Chief Product Officer at advertising and media giant Publicis, is experimenting with.
Hearing him speak about what they are trying to create makes you think of the character Data, self-aware, sapient, sentient and anatomically fully functional male android in Star Trek.
Having a lot of data is more or less meaningless if you cannot make sense of it.
In its rawest form, it is just numbers in a database.
For us to make sense of it, we need to make it accessible for humans.
The simplest form of that is graphs, or dashboards that makes information more visually easy to understand.
But imagine pulling all the information about markets, consumers, media consumption, media behaviour, advertising results etc and feeding that to an LLM that in turn is prompted to reply as a real-life animated character who speaks back to you!
Suddenly you can have a discussion with the data as if you were speaking to a human.
The technology is still in development, but it’s getting better by the day.
What is the benefit of “Data as a Human (DaaH)?
According to Mark, advertisers are getting “BBQ”, which stands for “Better, Bigger and Quicker”.
Better insights
Bigger ideas
Quicker response
Advertisers are essentially trying to understand humans. What makes them tick, how do they behave, what do they want?
The digital world we are living in now is giving advertisers all this data, but the problem has been to make sense of it.
With synthetic audiences or synthetic consumers, they can now test ads before incurring media exposure costs.
And – as mentioned above – they can soon have a conversation with the data itself to get insights in the format that humans learn from the best: as stories created by an AI.
All the advertising data in the world funnelled down to one human conversation between the advertiser and Data – sorry, I mean “the data” itself in the form of an AI.
Real life Star Trek – to “go where no ad-man has gone before.”
The ability to turn raw information into colourful conversations that help you get new insights is a potentially huge creativity booster for anyone with access to data.
Time to start thinking about how to build a Data as a Human (DaaH) solution for yourself?
ps. If you could have a conversation with data, which data would you like to talk to?
18
Sep