A startup is working with IBM's Watson to tell marketers exactly where they should spend their media budget, and it claims it 'can predict the future' - CLONE (IBM)

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Influential, a company which helps marketers figure out which digital influencers to work with, thinks it can help these companies better spend their ad budgets overall.
The startup is rolling out Social Intelligence, a product backed by IBM's supercomputer Watson, which pulls data from billions of interactions on social media.
"If you can actually structure this data, you can basically predict the future"

The ad business has longed pined for the future depicted in the movie "Minority Report," where ads addressed people by name and data could precisely predict people's behavior.

The influencer marketing startup Influential – with help from IBM's supercomputer Watson – says that future is now.

The company is set to release a product that it's calling Social Intelligence. According to CEO and founder Ryan Detert, Social Intelligence can not only help marketers figure out what digital influencers they should partner with, but it can help them determine the best places to spend their ad budgets on a macro level – and even given them assurances that their ad campaigns will work.

Influential isn't promising that its data and intelligence will definitely help car brands sell more cars or soda brands sell more soda. But it is making the bold promise that it can take the guessing out of ad budget allocation.

"We are living in a time where we essentially have the largest crowdsourcing of opinion in human history," he told Business Insider. Per Detert, Influential pulls in data directly from 10 social platforms, including Facebook, YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat.

With the help of its own proprietary tech and Watson, Influential says it can crunch this data in a way that can literally tell marketers what people really think of their products, who those people are, and how best to reach them with advertising.

"If you can actually structure this data, you can basically predict the future," he said.

Detert said that Influential's Social Intelligence product came from running thousands of ad campaigns with major advertisers such as Coke, Nestlé, General Mills, Kia Motors, Fox TV and Sony Pictures. For the most part, the company was using its data to figure out which digital influencers those brands should partner with – which was not unlike what many social influencer companies offer.

For example, recently the company announced a partnership with the media buying agency OMD which promises to keep advertisers away from controversial social media stars.

But over time, brands kept asking to tap into Influential's data for other uses, such as listening in on what their consumers were saying about them (good or bad) and whether the demographic groups they were targeting with ads were actually the folks that were most likely to purchase their products.

Influential started to realized that its data supply, along with Watson's computing power, could yield a far-more powerful product.

"You might find that people that follow your brand also like these kinds of web publications, and that could help you figure out how you spend your budget," said Detert. "This applies to media buys, digital sponsorship, whether you should spend more or less in traditional media, etc."

"This is the largest crowd sourcing of public opinion," he said. "It's predictive and prescriptive."

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