Publicis Groupe relies on artificial intelligence for its new Ask Profitero tool

Publicis Groupe’s Profitero has released a version of its generative AI-powered business analysis software called Ask Profiter or, an AI application that appears to be the first of its kind in the industry and may open up to much broader use in marketing and other business functions. Among the first beta users is Colgate-Palmolive Co. Todd Hassenfelt, the company’s director of global digital commerce strategy and execution, explained that the goal is for more employees to use voice queries to obtain insights based on feedback trends. of customers, in order to shape everything from online product description pages to product development. Profitero collects data on pricing, nationwide and inter-retailer stock levels, sales trends, performance of various paid search queries, and other types of advertising, reviews, and competitor advertising plans, among other things. But it’s not always easy to find a way to extract useful information from all that data. According to Hassenfelt, opening things up to an almost limitless range of verbal queries could help. For people who already use Profitero data on a daily basis, “this will allow them to get insights faster,” Hassenfelt said. “They’ll be able to appropriately allocate resources more quickly than trying to do it manually.” The types of queries that users might enter include ideas like “list my top five best-selling products for the past month” or “what images make people buy” for example. According to Hassenfelt, generative AI also has the ability to make decisions that are not limited to e-commerce. “Maybe it’s wrong to call it digital linear, because it also influences the physical. Profitero has done a great job with the reports they are doing on digitally influenced sales.” A verbal inquiry-based system also makes it easy to create A/B tests online or in-store, or simply pull trends from online reviews to identify marketing propositions or product development needs,” he said. Two types of problems Ask Profitero was created to solve two types of problems, explained Sarah Hofstetter, president of Publicis Groupe. One is managing a wide range of data, including sales, supply chain and media spend data, so that it can be used by a wide range of users within a company. “We can have a client with 300 or 400 users of its own data in a given month, but how do you democratize it so that the right people use it in the right cases?” detailed. The second problem, related to the previous one, is to help marketers understand the role that retail digital media plays in pre-sale purchase decisions, to go beyond the problem of last click attribution, which attributes each sale to the last advertisement or promotion a shopper sees online or in stores, without taking into account the full range of marketing actions that led to that decision. Ask Profitero’s ad coincides with a study conducted by the company showing the impact elements such as e-commerce reviews, retail search purchases and other retail media have on broader sales outside of the sites on which they appear, including physical stores. For example, Profitero found that 58% of shoppers visit retailer websites to check prices and deals before buying in stores and 51% to check product reviews before buying in stores. The percentage of shoppers who say they research retailer websites before buying in stores is nearly identical between those 18-44 (78%) and 45+ (76%).