If it seems this is sort of a counterpoint to our post earlier this week defending the GOOP-esque, hyper-personalized, risky gifts – yes, it absolutely is. Because you’re probably giving gifts to the mainstream, too, and what better way to know what to give them than to harness the power of big data?
Your own social network might or might not be on point, so you might as well get a bigger data set than that. IBM’s created Watson Trend to do just that for you – they’re using Watson to parse oodles of unstructured data from all across the Internets, giving you real-time top overall trends and predictive analytics into how long a particular trend might last (because as nice as it is that everyone wants a beauticorn *today*, you’d also like it to still be relevant a few weeks from now when you’re actually giving it as a gift). The app allows you to scan top overall trends as well as categories like tech, toys, and health, and to save trends you want to keep an eye on.
We gave it a shot and it looks like everyone wants the Apple Watch and Beats by Dre (still??!) this year. As an aside, this is also good stuff for investors to take a look at which brands are most highly represented on these lists as well as which ones are outranking each other for similar products.
Check out the IBM “Be a Holiday Hero” advert:
