Announced at MarTech East: Watson Assistant for Marketing availability, CaliberMind’s B2B analytics suite and an NFC white paper

Here are highlights of announcements made at this year’s MarTech East conference in Boston:

Watson Assistant for Marketing Availability. IBM is announcing the general availability of Watson Assistant for Marketing, a virtual agent it unveiled late last month. Via voice or text interaction, the Assistant lets marketers query the Watson Campaign Automation email and digital marketing platform.

The idea is that the Watson Assistant can, via machine learning, become an expert on the campaigns of a specific organization, replacing spreadsheets and query building.

In the IBM announcement, Ingersoll Rand Digital Engagement Leader Mel Fox said that Watson Assistant “makes every-day tasks that are unnecessarily complex significantly easier,” adding that “it has been a game changer for our campaign managers” because it provides quick access to marketing performance data and insights to support decision making.

CaliberMind’s new analytics suite. In another route to marketing insights, Boulder, Colorado-based customer data platform (CDP) CaliberMind unveiled the release of its self-service B2B marketing analytics and attribution suite for inbound, outbound, demand gen and account-based marketing.

“B2B CMOs struggle to prove revenue and this proof gap is an existential threat to CMOs,” CEO Raviv Turner told me via email.

The new suite was built from the ground up, he said, “has been in beta for few months and our customers are seeing 10x faster time to revenue insights at 10% of traditional IT/ BI [business intelligence] cost.”

As a result, he said, “this is a Tableau killer,” referring to the popular BI platform.

The new offering is built on the company’s existing CDP, and is designed to automatically grab marketing and sales data from customer relationship management tools, marketing automation, web analytics, social ads and other sources via one-click integration. It automatically cleans the data and populates the dashboard, so the marketing team can ask simple business inquiries.

The company suggested sample questions such as: Which marketing programs generate the most revenue? How is my marketing campaign performing? How fast are we driving revenue through the pipeline? How’s our close rate trending over time?

NFC as a bridge. The NFC Forum, which acts as a global standards body for Near Field Communication, released at the conference a white paper on ways to bridge digital and physical retail using the technology. (Free; registration required.)

The short-range wireless tech, which is built into more than two billion devices, can exchange payment and other info via hundreds of millions of contactless readers and cards in physical stores.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.