Mitra QSR, a leading quick service restaurant franchisee running more than 500 KFC and Taco Bell locations, deployed an AI solution to help its adjustment to changing consumer habits in the time of the pandemic.

Hypersonix, an AI-powered business intelligence platform with a focus on consumer commerce industries, helped Mitra QSR develop data-driven responses to a range of issues, including analysing changing customer habits, ensuring workplace safety, and aspects of personnel management.

Transformation within the company has been significant during the last year. It changed to take-out only in many locations, which impacted the efficiency of drive-through lanes. It saw increased demand for bundle meals rather than individual orders and an increase in digital sales, putting pressure product availability and staff productivity. The time of day for receiving most orders changed, and there was much greater interaction with delivery services like DoorDash, Postmates and Uber Eats.

The Hypersonix platform surfaced insights and recommendations in support of the large number of rapid decisions required by the changing environment.

Why we care. This is a story about AI helping a non-tech business respond to a potentially crushing amount of transformation in a short amount of time. It suggests the role AI can potentially play in business management as well as in areas like personalization and engagement.

The global pandemic has confirmed what many already knew: the telephone is an integral part of the consumer purchase journey. More and more enterprise marketers are using call analytics platforms to collect, analyze and act upon the growing volume of caller data now being captured from the billions of inbound calls to businesses. This 44-page report reviews the growing market for call analytics platforms, plus the latest trends, opportunities and challenges.

Learn more »

Auto-applied recommendations are Google Ads’s AI-driven recommendations and improvements for text and display ads. The list, which has expanded dramatically over the last few years, now includes 35 options to toggle on or off from the GAAR dashboard.

Chris Boggs details every single option in the dashboard and his recommendations for each setting. Check out what Boggs says about bid, ads and extensions, and keywords and targeting settings. Tidbits include the following:

• “Add descriptions to your sitelinks.” Based on some AI-recommended short-form content I have seen, I would prefer to handle these unless this is a situation with hundreds or thousands of database-driven product-type landing pages. 
• “Add responsive search ads.” As RSAs have gotten better, I still spend time optimizing each of the ad units driving the most traffic. If your scale — based on past ETA or RSA performance — supports the tool’s ability to create “super ads” like these, it will still require manual maintenance for best performance. 
• “Add audience reporting.” This is useful for the audience data you can grow and reuse to optimize across your Google Ads campaign types, and also because it gives you insight into the audiences that are hitting that you may not have thought about.

Read more here.

If you were wondering how the NFL manages what must be an extraordinarily extensive library of digital assets — photos, video and text — we’ve got the next best thing. A conversation with Paul Murphy, digital image expert at the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). UEFA represents no fewer than 55 national soccer associations, and organizes international and national soccer competitions, including the UEFA European Championship.

Establishing governance over the huge quantity of images created, by different photographers and for many different purposes, was a taxing challenge. Paul explained to us how he approached the task.

Watch a wide-ranging discussion of DAM, featuring Paul Murphy, here.

Data-driven decisions are your key to a more successful 2021 and beyond. Join the Search Engine Land experts online in two weeks at SMX Report, February 23, to learn how to turn your data into actionable insights and achieve search marketing success.

Register for only $149 »

Our spring MarTech event is taking place on March 16-17 and we’re still looking for a few industry experts to fill out our speaker roster. If you have internal expertise in managing CDP or predictive analytics technology for your organization and enjoy sharing your knowledge with others, fill out this short form and let us know.

Read more about the MarTech conference.

“You know you work in marketing when you spend 20% of your time doing your job and 80% explaining your job.” Shama Hyder, CEO, Zen Media.