Author: Lab Team

Facebook Rolls Out M Assistant To All Messenger Users

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook’s AI-powered chat assistant M is finally ready to meet the public, just in time for its upcoming annual F8 developer conference. M will analyze your messages in the Facebook Messenger app to understand your intent and, when applicable, will pop up into chats to make suggestions or complete tasks on your behalf, such as calling an Uber or setting a reminder, based on the context of the conversations. Facebook has started rolling out M to iOS and Android users in the US, with a broader expansion around the globe in the coming months. Facebook first announced the AI assistant service in September 2015 but only started testing it in a limited capacity since last December.

What Brands Need To Do
The arrival of M on Messenger marks an important milestone in Facebook’s development of a conversational assistant service that can help it stay in competition with rivals such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.  Having a contextually aware smart assistant on standby would certainly bares huge potential in making Facebook’s messaging apps more brand-friendly, but for now, Facebook is taking a decidedly neutral approach to designing M with little room for brand integrations as of now. Nevertheless, the deployment of M still marks Facebook’s determination of building Messenger as a platform that brands of all types could benefit greatly from. And it is time to start expanding your customer service from phone call-based to include text-based messaging, reaching consumers on the platforms they already use.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive knowledge about reaching consumers on mobile messaging apps and building branded chatbots. The new NiroBot we build in collaboration with Ansible for Kia delivers comprehensive product information about the all-new Niro model via friendly chats. We’ve also built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue to help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Verge

Twitter Releases New APIs To Boost DM-Based Customer Services

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday, Twitter released several Direct Message (DM) APIs and announced plans to unify its API platform as it aims to make it easier for businesses “to deliver faster, richer and more engaging human- and bot-powered customer service, marketing and engagement experiences.”

The new APIs released include a beta Account Activity API for subscribing to real-time activities related to an account, a new DM POST endpoint for sending DMs with supporting features like quick replies and shared media, as well as a welcome message endpoints for creating and managing welcome messages in DMs.

What Brands Need To Know
Twitter has been steadily adding customer service tools to its platform, and this introduction of chatbot services is a natural step for Twitter as it builds out its DM as a customer service platform to appeal to the growing needs of brands. A study by Twilio found that most consumers now prefer to use messaging to interact with businesses rather than calling. As Twitter continues to make its platform more brand-friendly with new messaging features, we expect to see more brands utilize the tools to provide better customer service.

To learn more about how brands can reach and engage with customers and deliver hyper-personalized experiences with AI-powered chatbots, check out the Augmented Intelligence section of our Outlook 2017.

 

Source: AdWeek

Alexa Users Can Now Activate New Skills Just By Asking

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon is making it even easier for Alexa users to discover and activate new skills, which is Amazon’s way of calling voice-only app for its voice assistant made by third-party developers. Amazon has added a functionality to catch failed launch intents of non-enabled skills and allow users to invoke skills that haven’t been enabled by saying valid invocation utterances. This means Alexa-users will no longer need to pre-enable skills before using them. 

Previously, users have to enable a skill via the Alexa app on their mobile devices before they can use it on Alexa. Those who failed to do will be greeted with an error message and a prompt designed to teach the customer how to enable the skill.

This addition also offers a certain level of flexibility by allowing utterances similar to the rigid invocation pattern to result in skill enablement. For example, users can say either “Open up the Jeopardy game,” “Start up Jeopardy,” or “Launch the Jeopardy skill,” all of which will launch the Jeopardy skill for them even if it has not been enabled before.

What Brands Need To Do
This is a small yet significant update for the Alexa Voice Service, which allows third-party skills to be invoked without prior enablement. This not only makes for a smoother user experience but also removes a lot of the frictions in getting Alexa users to try out the skills made by brands. Now, marketing campaigns can feature skill utterances that work for customers whether or not they’ve enabled a skill allowing for easier discovery and repeated use.

According to a report from analytics firm VoiceLabs, about 33 million voice-first devices will be in circulation by the end of 2017. Therefore, It is up to brands to start working with developers to figure out their brand voice and incorporate conversational tools into their marketing efforts.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: CNET

Alexa Developers Can Now Customize Skills Based On User Locations

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The location API for Alexa skills has officially come out of beta, Amazon announced in a company blog post. This API enables developers to access user locations and use that information to customize the conversational experiences they make, such as food delivery or finding the nearest drugstore. Previously, companies like AccuWeather and Just Eat have been testing this API. It is worth noting that this API is not a location tracker like GPS, but rather allows developers to access the address of the device owner according to their Amazon profile.

In addition, Amazon also launched a new metrics dashboard, which lets Alexa developers track things like unique customers, sessions, utterances and intents so that they can track the performance of their skills in one place.

What Brands Need To Do
As Amazon continues to build out Alexa’s capabilities and improve its measurement tools, brands will have an easier time to design their conversational brand experiences and track their performances in one place. Opening access to user addresses removes friction for delivery-oriented services and allows developers to deliver a more localized user experience. According to a report from analytics firm VoiceLabs, about 33 million voice-first devices will be in circulation by the end of 2017. Therefore, It is up to brands to start working with developers to figure out their brand voice and incorporate conversational tools into their marketing efforts. For more on this, check out the Advanced Interfaces section in our brand new Outlook 2017 trend report.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Amazon Prime Wins Streaming Rights Of NFL Thursday Night Games

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon has reportedly shelled out around $50 million to livestream ten NFL games of the new season, five times more than what Twitter paid last year. Interestingly, Amazon won’t stream the games to anyone who wants to watch online for free as Twitter did. Instead, the NFL Thursday night games will be a new addition to the ever-growing list of perks for Amazon Prime members.

What Brands Need To Know
On a larger picture, this deal signals the continuing shift of live sports viewing from TV to online streaming. Amazon reportedly beat out the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube for the bid, which underscores how determined the ecommerce giant is about growing out its streaming offering. The decision to only allow Prime members to stream this also points to the company’s core strategy that positions the membership program as the lynchpin for fostering customer loyalty.

This marks a very different approach than Twitter, who bought the rights last year to raise its profile as a live-streaming platform and generating revenues from selling the ad slots allocated for local TV ads at a high price. In comparison, Amazon wouldn’t necessarily be interested in selling ads (although it could very well use those ad slots to promote its services and original shows.) Researches have shown that Prime members on average spend two times more than regular shoppers on Amazon every year. Therefore, it makes sense that Amazon would pay the big bucks to secure the live-streaming rights of NFL games and use it to drive signups and retain subscriptions for Prime. Other brands should learn a thing or two from Amazon’s strategy and start thinking about ways to improve and integrate their loyalty programs so as to establish a long-term relationship with customers.

 

Source: Re/Code

YouTube TV Goes Live In Five U.S. Markets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Wednesday YouTube officially launched its live TV streaming service YouTube TV in five regional markets, including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area. This marks yet another high-profile entry of a tech giant into the OTT streaming market, as the battle for retaining TV subscribers and, more importantly, selling TV packages to cord-cutters and cord-nevers, continues to heat up.

Announced a little over a month ago, the “skinny bundle” from YouTube will cost $35 per month and cover live TV programming from all four major U.S. broadcasting networks —  ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — as well as their affiliated cable channels such as ESPN and Bravo. YouTube also says it will soon add several AMC Networks channels, such as AMC, BBC America, BBC World News, IFC, Sundance TV and We TV to the service’s standard tier. Previously, the AMC Networks was reportedly working on an ad-free streaming service of its own for cable subscribers.

What Brands Need To Do
This launch marks another channel for brands to reach the audience that has abandoned linear TV viewing in favor of time-shifted viewing, as YouTube TV will carry all the live TV ads. Taking the vast user data and the sophisticated ad operations that Google owns into account, it seems likely that the search giant will be offering some ad tech integrations with the streaming service and allow brands to target audience in a more granular, personalized manner.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Header image courtesy of YouTube

Nielsen Plugs AI Into Marketing Cloud Service

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
TV ad measurement firm Nielsen has become the latest company to plug artificial intelligence into its Marketing Cloud platform. The company created Nielsen Artificial Intelligence capable of processing multiple external circumstances simultaneously, making it possible for brands and publisher clients using its platform to create dynamic audience segments for real-time targeting. Right now, Nielsen says it is mostly applying the AI internally, but about a half dozen Marketing Cloud clients have started using it.

What Brands Need To Do
Nielsen joins a growing list of marketing and ad tech companies that have incorporated AI-powered solutions into their platforms. Last Friday, marketing personalization company Monetate announced an Intelligent Personalization Engine that uses machine learning to help B2C brands provide individually customized experiences to consumers. As cloud-based services and machine learning technologies continue to mature, brands need to explore the kind of hyper-personalized messaging and experiences that AI-powered marketing solutions can deliver.

For more information on how brands can get ready for the rise of A.I. and tap into the transformative power it brings to marketing, check out the Augmented Intelligence section of our brand new Outlook 2017.

 

Source: AdExchange

Starbucks Launches An iMessage App That Let You Text Friends Gift Cards

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Starbucks is bringing gifting into your text messages with an updated iOS app released on Tuesday. The Seattle-based global coffee chain added a new “Starbucks Gifts” iMessage applet to its mobile app, allowing users send digital gift cards through Apple’s iMessage and pay for them using Apple Pay. Users can choose from a selection of images that fits the occasions and customize the gifted value for the gift card before completing the purchase with Apple Pay. Then the customized gift card is ready to be sent via iMessage.

In addition, the updated Starbucks app come with a few other improvements, such as enhanced push notifications, a revamped mobile order and pay user experience, and a store locator with new filtering options.

What Brands Need To Do
Previously, early-adopting brands like Dunkin’ Donuts and Coach have also developed iMessage app to expand the reach of their mobile apps into texting, but none has bothered to integrate with Apple Pay for a smooth, frictionless user experience like Starbucks is doing now. The payment integration makes it easy and convenient for users to generate gift cards, while he integration with iMessage. creates a more intimate user experience that lends a personal touch to the gifting process. Together, they make for a great branded gifting experience that helps recruit more customers to use its mobile app and elevates Starbucks’ brand equity, Therefore, brands looking to stay connected with mobile customers should take a cue and develop similar initiatives to explore messaging and conversational environments.

 

Source: 9to5 Mac

Roku Offers Advertisers Demographic Guarantees Based On Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Monday, Roku announced it will start offering advertisers audience guarantees for that are based on Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings in an attempt to close the gap between OTT and traditional TV ad measurement.

This makes Roku the first major OTT streaming platform to offer such guarantees for certain audience demographics, such as “adults 18 to 49”, allowing advertisers to buy and plan ad campaigns using the same kind of currency they have grown used to in traditional TV advertising. Previously, Roku ads are sold based on impressions. The streaming set-box maker signed a partnership deal with Nielsen to measure demographics on the Roku platform about two years ago.

What Brands Need To Do
With viewers increasingly choosing on-demand viewing over linear TV, advertisers have been curious about the viewing data that SVOD services are collecting. But since many of those services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are not ad-supported, it is difficult for brands to reach the streaming audience. In addition, Roku says about 40% of its users are cord-cutters, meaning that are not reachable via traditional TV ads either.

Therefore, Roku’s ad offering is valuable for brands as it provides a way to reach those streaming viewers. And now with the new Nielsen ratings-based metrics, advertisers may have an easier time planning and evaluating their ad campaigns on Roku. As advertising on linear TV and digital channels continue to converge, brand marketers will need to reconsider their media mix and perhaps consider leveraging Roku’s ad products to reach cord-cutters and cord-nevers.

Source: Multichannel News

Header image courtesy of Roku

IPG Media Lab Releases Outlook 2017

Posted on by Lab Team

Check out our brand new 2017 Outlook here.

Every year here at the IPG Media Lab, we round up the big ideas that excite us: emerging market trends, new technologies, and consumer shifts that are reshaping the ways we evaluate, buy, and consume media. And today, we are proud to present you with our Outlook 2017: The Next Wave of Computing, which examines the rising challenges and opportunities for brands as we move past the peak of the smartphone era and start to enter an A.I.-powered, globally connected future.

Trends and themes covered include:

  • Advanced Interfaces – The smartphone supply chain has given rise to powerful, cheap computing components that can augment many parts of our bodies, our homes, and our cities with intelligence. We think about these things as IoT devices or wearables, but when backed by machine learning in the cloud, and down up with other devices, they create totally new kinds of advanced interfaces for media.
  • Global Culture – The app-ification of all media has had the consequence of breaking down boundaries in how, when, and where that media is consumed, with little regard for your windowing strategy. How can you effectively reach the cohorts of global consumers which share more in common interest and less in geography?
  • Augmented Intelligence – A growing suite of cloud services and a new breed of machine learning, constantly analyzing those new inputs, is helping us to deliver new kinds of hyper-personalized experiences. Is your brand ready to embrace the rise of A.I. and tap into the transformative power it will bring to marketing?

Take a look and let us know what you think @ipglab on Twitter or contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]); we’d love to hear from you.

Check out the full Outlook report at: https://ipglab.com/outlook2017/