The data spotlight turned back to sentiment analysis last week after IBM Corp. pulled the curtains back on a new cloud-based service that can infer attitude from natural language communications. It’s the latest fruit of its billion-dollar investment in bringing the cognitive computing capabilities of Watson into the workplace.

The aptly-named Watson Tone Analyzer is also one of the most ambitious yet, not only due to the sheer complexity of emulating such an inherently human trait but also the tremendous potential of the service in improving how organizations engage their audiences. What has historically required the careful attention of a salesperson can now be accomplished automatically for a fraction of the cost.

The resulting economies could benefit every aspect of marketing, from customer segmentation through lead conversion to public relations. But the grunt work of putting the insight to use still has to be done by hand, although Zeta Interactive Inc. hopes to automate that as well with the help of a $125 million round announced against the backdrop of IBM’s launch.

The capital, which came in its entirety from private equity giant The Blackstone Group L.P. will help fuel the development of its namesake customer acquisition platform, which uses a combination of machine learning and stream processing not unlike that powering Watson to optimize ad delivery. In particular, Zeta plans to make more strategic acquisitions to help expand upon that core value proposition with more targeting features.

Meanwhile, a different marketing startup called Origami Inc. marked a milestone of its own last week after launching a new service to help organizations make sense of the vast amounts of data coming off their campaigns. The Marketing Signals Framework collects and sorts engagement metrics based their relevance to a certain goal – such as spreading brand awareness or boosting retention of existing customers – in order to spare users the hassle of putting together everything on their own.

Photo via Intel Free Press