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The effectiveness “revolution” is colliding with the AI-spawned efficiency uprising and it’s leapfrogging the early consensus on AI use cases in marketing around automating personalised content and communications. So much so Mark Ritson choked on his Wellfleet oysters when Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg told him they were leaving top jobs at LinkedIn-backed thinktank, the B2B Institute. Then they told him why. Ritson promptly joined their venture, along with what Weinberg calls “the advisory board to end all advisory boards”.  Thus the synthetically-enhanced AI marketing outfit Evidenza was born. The founders claim their new piece of “synthetic customer” tech – which starts with creating AI copies of target customers – creates 95 per cent accurate customer responses. I.e. it mimics company CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CIOs, CROs and the rest with strong correlation to the real thing. Those customers are really hard to find within B2B markets, which is why research is so expensive and takes so long. EY’s CMO – and a long list of others – verify that claim, because they’ve tested it head-to-head. “It can imitate essentially anyone by gathering and synthesising massive amounts of data,” per Weinberg. Evidenza claims it can also synthesise marketing strategy, science and the “pantheon” of effectiveness gurus, like Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Karen Nelson-Field, Les Binet and Peter Field. Which means marketers can ask them what they ‘think’ of their plans. Evidenza has already cloned Ritson to deliver “a finance friendly marketing plan that used to take months in minutes”, per Lombardo. “Well, maybe a day.” Weinberg acknowledges cussing is a challenge. But they are actively debugging.

Retail brands are facing no less than a complete reimagining of what it means to be a consumer by 2030, according to a fresh report from The Future Laboratory in partnership with Afterpay. It’s a near future requiring commerce to not only recalibrate around community, values and experience, but necessitates empathetic technologies and systems that operate in the service of people, not transactions or zealous CFOs, according to E&S customer experience chief, Barry Mowszowski, plus futurist and academic, Dr Catherine Ball, speaking at an Afterpay event last week. It’s also going to mean rewiring outdated financial systems and processes that are increasingly shutting down access to credit to ensure they can deliver solutions rather than create more problems for consumers, agreed fellow panellist, Mark Bouris, the founder of Wizard Home Loans, executive chair of Yellow Brick Road, and recognised financial and business commentator.