(MENAFN- ValueWalk) Jordan Bitterman, CMO of IBM's The Weather Company, talks with Wharton's Catharine Hays about marketing in the realm of technology.
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As the digital revolution keeps on turning, cutting-edge companies are looking to artificial intelligence to spur the next wave of change. This specialized technology holds great promise for those willing to employ it, but it also comes with challenges. Consumers are familiar with AI in the form of Google's Alexa, Apple's Siri or IBM's Watson. Jordan Bitterman is the chief marketing officer for The Weather Company, an IBM business. He recently spoke to Catharine Hays, executive director of the , about creativity and marketing in the realm of technology for a segment on the Marketing Matters radio show, which airs on . (Listen to the full podcast using the player above.)
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An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Catharine Hays: We like to say that marketers have some of the most interesting backgrounds. Tell us about your journey to get to this role.
Jordan Bitterman: Mine has been a little nontraditional. I spent most of my career at large advertising agencies. That part isn't necessarily nontraditional, but I did it as a media planner and media strategist. My job was not to create the ads but to determine where the ads go. Most people who follow a CMO track come from account management, which is the team that leads all of the client relationships.
My past was through media, and I started at a time when media was beginning to change in major ways. It was back in the time when a media person simply had to understand an audience, a demographic such as women or men, 18 to 34. But early in my career, understanding audiences started to get far more dynamic and more sophisticated, and that was largely driven by the advent of digital. It became harder to reach people, and it meant that those of us who did media for a living had to become far more strategic ourselves.
Digital media changed everything throughout the advertising industry. I have found that being involved in these leading-edge areas, whether it be web or mobile or social or content, really interested me and helped me along in my career.
Hays: How did you get connected with The Weather Channel?
Bitterman: I joined Weather after the acquisition with IBM. I've been here for a little less than a year. I had started thinking about, what does the second half of my career look like? Is it on the agency side or somewhere else? I really zeroed in on the publisher side. But I didn't want to just work for a publisher who was a content creator solely, I was really drawn to the idea of weather, but more importantly the idea of AI and the Internet of Things. I saw both of those areas incredibly burgeoning. They were areas that I really wanted to focus on. The idea of data as a business, not just content as a business, was something that really appealed to me.
Hays: Maybe you can give us a little background? I've been calling it The Weather Channel, but it's The Weather Company. Why did IBM acquire The Weather Company?
Bitterman: It's a confusing point that a lot of people mistake from time to time. It requires a very simple explanation, which is that IBM acquired The Weather Company inclusive of everything The Weather Company has with the exception of the cable network that is The Weather Channel. They are now a client of ours. We license them our meteorology, and that's how they run their cable network. But everything else — the app, the website, all of the data — were purchased by IBM. The main reason for that is that weather is a huge driver of business outcomes.
If you were to look at the earning statements from companies across the board, weather is often a primary reason cited for businesses not hitting their targets for a quarter. IBM, being in the business of helping businesses make better decisions, drive outcomes, obviously saw that as an opportunity. We're not just forecasts. There's an underlying platform that fits as a foundation element. IBM is now investing heavily in IOT and cognitive analytics. That was the reason why we were an attractive acquisition for IBM.
Hays: Tremendous amount of data, tremendous impact on businesses, and a tremendous predictive capability as well — those are three really powerful reasons for gaining all of that wealth.
Bitterman: Absolutely. I'll give you a couple of statistics. These are things I did not know when I took this job, and they are data points that I have put in front of our clients and customers. We do roughly 25 billion forecast calls per day, and those originate from all sorts of data sources around the world. We do around two to 2.2 billion on an average day of location. Those 25 billion forecast calls are originating, pinging to and from two billion locations a day. It makes us one of the largest IOT platforms in the world.
Hays: In what regard is that IOT?
Bitterman: For instance, we do a lot of business with the airline industry, so the data sources need to come from not just Chicago, Illinois or Philadelphia. They need to come from towers and sensors and pings all over the place in order to be able to realistically have a chance at identifying whether they should put a plane in the air or if they should keep it on the ground. There are sensors inside of the planes. There are sensors throughout the United States. That is the Internet of Things at least in many ways…. When we get down to it, the real mission-critical, bread-and butter elements of IOT are what is sitting in elevators and airplanes and turbines.
'Digital media changed everything throughout the advertising industry.'
Hays: Watson is The Weather Company's new best friend. Give us a brief history of Watson, which I think really has been this country's first interaction with artificial intelligence.
Bitterman: It's almost a foregone conclusion that someone who talks about Watson will start with talking about 'Jeopardy!' It started as a way of demonstrating whether it could work or not, and almost internally than externally. It started as one natural language, QA, question and answer, application program interface (API). Today, it is represented by a whole diverse set of Watson's services that span everything from language to speech to vision, etc.
You may recall that Watson went on 'Jeopardy!' and won. It was the first time that we, as a technical society, really started thinking in many ways that computing can get into more than just binary. Watson is best understood by thinking about it through the three eras of computing. The first was the tabulating era. Think about Imitation Game, the movie about Alan Turing. It was essentially calculations. That's practically up to the 1950s. Punch cards, etc.
From there we went into the programming era, and that was about using computers to help solve equations where we know what the answers are, or we know generally where the answers are going to lie,
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