Pereira O'Dell and Plan.Net Americas Harness the Power of Natural Language Processing with New AI Tool

The Insights Machine is a platform that harnesses the power of AI and natural language processing, blending proprietary and general consumer data to create rich and vivid audience personas. Whereas before, Pereira O’Dell’s brand strategy teams would pour over data to carefully develop fictional marketing personas, with The Insights Machine, we can seamlessly develop and actually engage with a proxy representation of a brand’s target audiences – unlocking insights to inspire and inform strategies and gain a competitive edge.

The process starts by incorporating behavioural, media and social metrics. Then, personas are enriched with distinct voices and personalities, becoming virtually alive and ready for real-time interactions – essentially creating an Artificial Consumer that is always available to talk to us.

With The Insights Machine, you can ask multiple personas the same questions at the same time, allowing for an easier understanding of the business impacting nuances that come from different types of consumers. With the ability to ask questions and follow up with ever evolving language and precision, we are able to get a better understanding of not only how the audience might respond but the way they respond when spoken to in a variety of ways. 

“Our industry loves to talk about innovation, but rarely do we do anything without knowing exactly what the goal is. In this case, we jumped into something that we thought might be interesting and luckily it turned out even better than we thought,” said Todd Thiessen, managing partner at Plan.Net Americas. 

“At the heart of the Insights Machine is an advanced AI engine built upon the latest machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques. The chatbot is trained on vast datasets, ensuring it can understand and generate human-like text. Its self-learning capability means it continually refines its responses based on new interactions,” said Todd.

Marketers and strategists have always relied on personas for two reasons: 1) it keeps their decisions more consumer-centric and 2) it allows them to take very complex data sets and turn them into an emotional avatar that we can relate to on a human level. With these artificial consumers created by The Insights Machine, we have a way more advanced version of that “analog” system.

With the technology in its early stages, we’ve implemented a rigorous fact-checking protocol that ensures every piece of information is validated before we use it to influence critical business decisions. However, the experience of developing the tool thus far has already influenced so many stages of our strategic processes — from having a “consumer” in the room during creative brainstorms, to helping us make connections between complicated data sets and even serving as a conversational interface to explore new research data.

“I was personally so impressed when I first saw this tool. Not by the technology itself, but the way it allows us to speak to data – ironically, it allows us to have a more human connection to it. It’s a powerful tool our strategists now have access to, and we’re in the early stages of rolling it out to accounts and across new business. We’re feeling ambitious about where this data will take our creativity moving forward,” said Natalie Nymark, president at Pereira O’Dell.