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<\/p>\nWhat does the US Constitution have in common with the connected marketing platform Opal?<\/p>\n
They\u2019re both trying to form a more perfect union!<\/p>\n
Jokes aside, Opal has spent years trying to develop a campaign planning solution that unifies the layers of media and tech within a marketing org, according to co-founder and CEO George Huff.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Opal launched Gem, an AI solution built to align marketers on things like overall brand strategies and the particular nuances of a product line. It also allows for natural language processing so that product or project managers and more media-savvy campaign planners might collaborate using natural language prompts. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A sneaker company, for instance, might have an annual marketing plan built around major product releases and specific cultural moments. It may also have always-on online advertising campaigns and different marketing priorities for different sub-brands, like skateboarding, tennis and basketball shoes.<\/p>\n
The idea with Gem, Huff said, is to simplify the \u201ccall and response\u201d between the holistic brand and sub-categories within it, without the slowdowns and entanglement that can happen when all these changes are hashed out on the fly by product managers and media buyers who aren\u2019t even speaking the same jargon or TLAs.<\/p>\n
Associated Luxury Hotels International (ALHI), an Opal client of four years, now has a \u201ctransparent flow\u201d of information between project management and campaign planning, said VP of Marketing Meghan Hanna.<\/p>\n
Originally, Hanna was introduced to Opal in 2015 as a regional marketing manager at Top Golf. She recommended it to ALHI as a way to unify data and planning without having to jump between hundreds of spreadsheets.<\/p>\n
Paying the tax<\/p>\n
Large-scale marketers face an \u201calignment tax,\u201d Huff said, which they end up paying \u201creactively.\u201d<\/p>\n
What does that mean?<\/p>\n
For example, marketing teams within the same company might have very different visions for their own campaigns, metrics of success or branding strategy. When one person asks a question regarding another team\u2019s campaign or performance goals, it can \u201csend pins scattering,\u201d Huff said.<\/p>\n
ALHI has a \u201cscrupulous\u201d CRM that tracks the sales process from a lead\u2019s early interest through conversion, Hanna said. But the issue was understanding how those leads arrived in the first place, and managing the different purchase journeys across more than 400 hotels.<\/p>\n
With Opal, it only takes a couple of minutes to pull \u201ca presentation that is board ready with clean data,\u201d Hanna said, including trackability for lead generation campaigns and creative assets for various channels, she added.<\/p>\n
ALHI\u2019s CRM isn\u2019t integrated with Opal, she said, so that the leads being analyzed don\u2019t trace back to specific customers. Instead, ALHI examines details like when a campaign ran, how many people engaged with the ads and how many leads were generated within a specified period.<\/p>\n
Previous versions of Opal required clients to upload data in a particular format, with \u201ca lot of spreadsheets and decks,\u201d said Huff. Gem, on the other hand, processes natural language and can generate full briefs and media plans from data submitted in any format.<\/p>\n
Hanna said that ALHI is most excited about Gem potentially improving its \u201cspeed to market\u201d for new campaigns. After a brief back-and-forth prompt-fest between the marketer and Gem, including specific guidelines or instructions (like a successful former campaign to emulate the results of), Gem will produce a template that gets \u201c85 to 90% of the way there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
A person might only need make small tweaks to differentiate a new campaign from a previous campaign that Gem has been told to replicate.<\/p>\n
Gem will \u201cremove a lot of the redundancy\u201d for ALHI by creating templates without manually uploading data that is already accessible within the platform, Hanna said.<\/p>\n
Choose your own adventure<\/p>\n
By default, Opal isn\u2019t connected to the open web, nor does it work with third-party data providers. Unless a customer directly asks Opal to scan the internet for certain information, like pulling statistics on industry trends or a brand\u2019s competitors to strengthen a brief, Huff said the analysis is based on the brand\u2019s own historical data within the platform.<\/p>\n
Opal\u2019s clients can choose which LLM their AI infrastructure runs on, such as Claude, OpenAI or Gemini. The \u201cunder the hood\u201d tech, which Huff said is used for more complex queries, such as analyzing data over a multi-year period, can also be changed out based on a brand\u2019s preferences. But Opal\u2019s default is Claude.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the long run, people will probably want to bring their own models,\u201d Huff added, \u201cso we have to be really, really flexible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does the US Constitution have in common with the connected marketing platform Opal? They\u2019re both trying to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,4589,25,4590,182,155,4591,4592,4593,4594,4595],"class_list":{"0":"post-4991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-alhi","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-associated-luxury-hotels-international","12":"tag-claude","13":"tag-featured","14":"tag-gem","15":"tag-george-huff","16":"tag-meghan-hanna","17":"tag-natural-language-processing","18":"tag-opal"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}