- WPP Open for B2B is powered by IBM's watsonx AI and data
platform to solve complex B2B marketing challenges
- IBM is the first user of the platform to
accelerate its AI-driven marketing and communications
transformation
- WPP and IBM will collaborate with LinkedIn to better
understand buying groups
CANNES, France, June 19, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- WPP (NYSE: WPP) and
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced the launch of a new
business-to-business (B2B) solution powered by IBM's AI and
data platform watsonx designed to reinvent how B2B marketers
identify and engage clients and prospects across the buying
journey.
WPP Open for B2B will help marketers solve complex B2B marketing
challenges, accurately identify and engage buying groups, and
improve clients' return on investment. Buying groups are made up of
multiple stakeholders with different priorities who influence key
purchasing decisions both inside and outside of organizations,
which can make it difficult to deliver a consistent message over a
long sales period. Traditionally, understanding how to adjust that
message across the right channels to guide buying groups to
purchase is challenging and often leads to inefficient marketing
spend.
WPP Open for B2B is powered by watsonx – an AI and data
platform designed to accelerate the impact of AI across businesses
– and will bring together market-leading, proprietary capabilities
from both organizations. WPP and IBM will strategically collaborate
with LinkedIn to help brands better understand buying groups so
they can market more effectively and reach target buyers.
Alan Webber, Program Vice
President – Digital Platform Ecosystems at analyst firm IDC
believes "this product and partnership have the potential to be an
exponential force multiplier for the Fortune
1000."
Stephan Pretorius, Chief
Technology Officer at WPP, said: "Our clients want to get
in front of the right people, at the right time, on the right
channels, with the right message. However, most solutions in the
market today are designed for consumer marketing, targeted at sole
decision-makers at a single point of purchase. WPP Open for
B2B, and our collaboration with IBM and LinkedIn, will help
solve some incredibly complex challenges in the B2B marketing
space, using the best of WPP and IBM technology and expertise."
Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice
President of Marketing and Communications at
IBM, said: "B2B marketers have been focused on
creating truly personalized, relevant and consistent experiences
for buying groups at scale for years. Our collaboration with WPP
and LinkedIn provides real-time, actionable insights that are based
on trusted data. We are excited to create and use these new,
powerful and trusted AI solutions to deliver a force multiplier for
B2B marketing."
Penry Price, Vice President at
LinkedIn, said: "With success in B2B requiring customers
to reach between 6 to 10 stakeholders, building relationships and
'collective confidence' among the entire buyer group is key. We are
looking forward to working with WPP and IBM to determine how our
unique knowledge of buyer groups can help inform WPP Open for B2B
and help clients deliver more effective advertising campaigns."
WPP and IBM have used watsonx to build capabilities for the
platform including:
- AI-powered Buying Group Brain™ – a WPP AI
model that can more accurately identify target buying
groups in a B2B client account, built with IBM watsonx.ai and
trained on trustworthy data from the client and third parties
through IBM watsonx.data. It can also inform how marketers
deliver personalized and consistent experiences across channels and
across the duration of a long-term influencer campaign.
- Orchestration and optimization – using insights
from WPP's Buying Group Brain™ AI model to optimize engagement and
opportunity progression for buying groups. That includes providing
recommendations for channel mix and content to ensure buying groups
experience a cohesive, consistent and relevant message. It can also
help marketers track marketing activity effectiveness with a buying
group and adjust messaging or influencer targeting on
demand.
- Chief Marketing Officer command center – an AI
assistant that serves as a command center for CMOs, bringing
forward data and insights and connecting underlying systems so
senior marketers can plan and model scenarios, predict results,
make more data-driven decisions and execute recommended
actions.
These capabilities are supported by the IBM watsonx.governance
toolkit to help clients govern and transparently track the
performance of the AI models.
Accelerating IBM's AI-powered marketing and communications
transformation
IBM has already begun deploying the new platform within its
marketing and communications organization. WPP's creative and
technology expertise alongside the joint innovation on the watsonx
platform is expected to support IBM's objective to accelerate
growth through AI-driven marketing.
An open approach with embedded governance
WPP Open for B2B powered by watsonx is designed for enterprise
scale, security, governance and easy integration into clients'
existing systems, combining the open capabilities of WPP Open, IBM
watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift1.
IBM Consulting is the primary change management consulting
partner for the solution. That includes helping clients
customize and operate the platform, integrate it into their
marketing workflows and build employees' skills and adoption of the
platform, using the collaborative engagement model IBM Garage.
IBM consultants can help clients select and deploy the right AI
models for the platform based on their requirements, including
enterprise grade models like IBM Granite, open source or other
third-party models.
About WPP
WPP is the creative transformation company.
We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our
people, planet, clients and communities. For more information,
visit www.wpp.com.
WPP Open for B2B is part of WPP Open, WPP's intelligent
marketing operating system powered by AI. Applying WPP's decades of
experience serving enterprise clients, WPP Open is designed to
integrate with any client, partner or technology vendor to create
optimised and automated marketing capabilities.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid
cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more
than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data,
streamline business processes, reduce costs, and gain the
competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and
corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as
financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's
hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital
transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM's
breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing,
industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and
flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's
long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility,
inclusivity, and service.
1 Red Hat® and OpenShift® are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in
the United States and other
countries.
Media Contacts
WPP
Niken Wresniwiro, SVP Global Communications
niken.wresniwiro@wpp.com
IBM
Michelle Mattelson,
IBM External Relations
morrison@us.ibm.com
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