Author: Lab Team

Google Home Tests Audio Ads With A Partner Message For Beauty And The Beast

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Starting on Thursday, some Google Home users started receiving a short message informing them of the upcoming release of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast live-action remake when they ask for a summary of their day ahead. The message is delivered via the regular Google Assistant voice, so it blends in seamlessly with the other information typically included in the “My Day” summary such as weather, commute, calendar, reminders, and news. Some Android users are reportedly also getting the ad through Google Assistant on mobile.

The message does not appear to be targeted based search history or movie interests, and some users have expressed their dismay at the random insertion of this message into the “My Day” summaries. Google released a statement denying that this is an ad, claiming instead “the beauty in the Assistant is that it invites our partners to be our guest and share their tales,” which seems to categorize this message as a sponsor message. Whether Disney paid for this Google Assistant integration is still unclear.

What Brands Need To Do
As voice-activated digital assistant services start to take off and reach more and more customer, figuring out how to monetize them with ad products seems like the natural next step for a company like Google, whose lion’s share of company revenue comes from advertising. So, it makes perfect sense that Google has started testing this type of audio ads on its Assistant service. Unfortunately, Google failed to consider how intrusive an unprompted brand message would feel to customers who don’t find the message relevant to their interests, which sparked a minor online backlash among users. Down the road, Google will certainly have to start fine-tuning the targeting of such messages if they want this type of audio ads to work. For now, chatbots and branded voice skills are still the best bets for brands to reach customers via conversational interfaces.

 

Source: The Verge

GrubHub Launches Alexa Skill For Quick Food Reordering

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Online food delivery service GrubHub has created an Amazon Alexa skill to allow users to quickly reorder a recent meal. After activating the skill, users can get food delivered simply by asking Alexa to “open Grubhub” or “tell Grubhub I’m hungry,” before choosing between their three most recent GrubHub orders for delivery. Once confirmed, Alexa will also tell users how long they will have to wait before the food shows up.

What Brands Need To Do
This is not the first food delivery skill that Alexa has added to its fast-growing list of capabilities. Both Pizza Hut and Starbucks have created their own Alexa skills for voice ordering. As tech giants such as Google and Amazon continue to make strong pushes for their conversational products, more and more mainstream consumers will soon become reachable via those emerging voice-based devices. Therefore, brands will need to explore opportunities in building advanced applications for these emerging platforms with highly engaging user experiences and conversational interactions.

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: The Verge

 

SXSW 2017: Visa Puts An NFC Payment Chip On A Pair Of Sunglasses

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Visa has been experimenting with mobile and IoT payments for a while now, previously launching a digital commerce app and collaborating with Brita to built payment into water filters. Today at SXSW, the credit card company showcased its latest creation – a pair of sunglasses with an NFC chip built into the frame. Once linked with a Visa user profile, it can replace plastic cards to complete purchases at NFC-equipped terminals. Visa says it is scouting for a fashion eyewear brand to collaborate on turning this prototype into a viable product.

What Brands Need To Do
While it is highly debatable whether it is a good idea to integrate a credit card chip with easily misplaced items like sunglasses, this prototype points to a future where ordinary devices and objects can become connected via 5G, Bluetooth, or other proximity technologies, and thus able to perform tasks and complete transactions. In fact, Visa has already inked a partnership with IBM to plug Watson’s machine learning smarts into its payment solutions for connected devices.

Imagine a future when your connected home appliances can search for local handyman services when it detects a repairing need, or when your smart fridge automatically order milk from local grocery stores when you’re running low. That future of IoT-powered ecommerce may seem far from us now, but it is an inevitable future that all brands need to start strategizing for. By expanding their messaging to connected devices, brands can establish a consistent presence guiding consumer throughout their customer journey.

Source: Engadget

Coke Refreshes Digital Loyalty Program With March Madness-Themed Rewards

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Coca-Cola has launched a new digital promotion called NCAA March Madness Bracket Refresh in support of its long-standing sponsorship of the college basketball tournament. As part of the promotional campaign, the company is offering limited-edition bottles customized with team names exclusively on ShareACoke.com. Fans enrolled in Coke’s loyalty program can unlock an NCAA team on Coke’s NCAA tournament brackets when they scan a Coca-Cola or Powerade product code by using their phone’s camera or by manually entering the code online. Fans with the winning teams on their brackets can unlock rewards such as digital content, movie gift cards, online retailer gift cards and an entry into a sweepstake for $25k cash.

What Brands Need To Do
In January, Coca-Cola announced it is phasing out its My Coke Rewards loyalty program and promised to replace it with a more “digitally focused” loyalty program, which is set to debut on Coke.com this July. This March Madness-themed promotion, therefore, seems to be positioned as a transitioning program to tide over the fans till the new loyalty program arrives. Nevertheless, this promotional campaign puts a personalized spin on NCAA brackets challenges by allowing fans to purchase customized bottles to show support for their team and earn rewards. It demonstrates a clever way to devise a sports event tie-in promotions, an approach that many other brands can apply to make their loyalty programs more engaging.

 

Source: Business Wire

 

SXSW 2017: All The Cool VR Experiences To Try Out

Posted on by Lab Team

As with the last few years, it wouldn’t be South by Southwest without all the virtual reality experiences. Here’s a selection of the noteworthy immersive experiences that brands and VR players brought to Austin this year.

• Sony’s Future Lab division created a multi-person VR experience called Superception that allows up to four players to share their perspectives with each other in real time. Built with a network of interconnected VR headsets, the game is to figure out where the other players may be by analyzing the others’ perspectives.

• Sony is also showcasing several other PlayStation VR experiences at its “Wow Factory” activation site, among which is space shooter game called Rez Infinite that comes with a “synesthesia suit” that adds haptic feedback to the gaming experience.

• Famed astronaut Buzz Aldrin also came to SXSW to educate event goers about the space. They will also get to try some VR space travel and learn about how humans may one day colonize Mars by putting on a headset to watch a 360-degree video called “Buzz Aldrin: Cycling Pathways to Mars” created by experiential agency 8i.

• AOL’s VR production unit RYOT set up a pop-up space at SXSW to showcase some of their latest VR and AR work. On the VR front, they produced short films on refugees that aim to evoke empathy and emotions, showcasing VR’s great storytelling potentials. On the AR front, it is working with magazine publishers to make print covers and ads come to life.

If you missed out on going to SXSW this year, and want to try some of latest VR experiences, come to the Lab and see for yourself what powerful marketing tools they can be. We here at the Lab are always looking out for new developments in the VR space, and currently we five VR headsets — an Oculus Rift, a PlayStation VR, an HTC Vive, and two Samsung Gear VRs — all ready for demos. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood, so come by the Lab and figure out how your brand can use it to excite and engage with consumers.

 

Microsoft Launches Teams With Bot Integration To Take On Slack

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Microsoft has officially launched Teams to take on other enterprise chat apps such as Slack and Hipchat. The app is now available on iOS and Android smartphones and also downloadable for desktop devices running Windows and Mac. At launch, Microsoft Teams comes with about a dozen chatbots, most of which are also available on Slack.

Among the usual suspects, there is the Polly bot for conducting a quick poll among coworkers, the Statsbot for pulling data and reports from sources like Google Analytics and Salesforce, a Zenefits bot for managing vacation days, and a Kayak bot for checking flight information, all without leaving Teams. Microsoft says around 150 integrations with software and service are planned and will be added to Teams over the rest of the year.

What Brands Need To Do
The rise of workplace chat apps, influenced by the mass adoption of messaging apps as the primary communication channel on mobile, is quickly changing the way people communicate at work or in other professional contexts. They also offer brands a valuable inroad to reach customers at work and provide value. As they continue to overtake email as the primary communication tool at work and blur the line between private and professional communications, it is important that brands take the initiative to come up with a chatbot strategy to more effectively reach their customers via conversational interactions.

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 NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia 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: VentureBeat

Header image courtesy of Microsoft Team’s website

Snapchat Invades Homescreen With New Bitmoji Widgets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat is trying a new way to make its service easily accessible for Snap-addicted users. The latest update of the popular messaging app, for both iOS and Android, comes with a new Bitmoji widget. Users who opt to activate the widget will get a panel of Bitmojis –  personalized avatars that users can customize based on their appearances – representing their most frequently “snapped” friends, which they can start chatting with by simply tapping on one of the Bitmojis. On iOS, this shortcut widget is accessible from the “Today” view in Notification Center, which can be pulled down from homescreen or the lock screen. while on Android it’s a homescreen widget.

What Brands Need To Do
This new addition comes as Snapchat puts an increased focus on private messaging, and the shortcut access may just help it encourages more off-the-cuff sharing among users. By creating Bitmoji-based buttons for each friend, Snapchat is able to customize the shortcuts and put some friendly faces on them, literally. All brands looking to connect with mobile customers can learn a thing or two from Snapchat’s personalized approach and apply it to offering customers easy access to products and services. For example, a travel brand should consider creating an app widget that enables travellers to check for flight and hotel availabilities with the destination and airline selections customized based on their profile or most recent searches.

 

Source: TechCrunch

SXSW 2017: Camera-Enabled Interfaces Usher In New AR Possibilities

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
One trend that is evident at this year’s SXSW festival is that camera-enabled interfaces – digital interfaces that rely on cameras to work – are being adopted by more and more tech companies to deliver an AR-powered user experience.

There’s the YouCam smart mirror that can apply virtual makeup to your face and switch between different looks as a preview tool. They are teaming up with e.l.f. Cosmetics to host a livestream event to showcase the makeup brand’s product aided by its AR magic. Equally fun is the Philm app, whose live art filters will turn your boring selfies into artfully rendered images several styles, such as French oil painting or comic book drawing.

On the more sophisticated side of the AR spectrum, Sony brought back its projector-based touchscreen technology to SXSW and combined it with some unique user interface design to allow users to control holographic objects by gesture. Similarly, there is Lampix, an AR startup whose motion-sensing technology and cloud-based platform can transform any surface into a touchscreen that people can interact with.

What Brands Need To Do
All these serve as the latest examples of how brands can leverage the advanced capabilities of smartphones, especially the ease of image input via the phone’s camera, to bring the user experience to the next level. Such camera-enabled advanced interfaces are a great way to introduce AR technology to your brand’s digital assets and deliver an engaging customer experience. Brands should take advantage of this trend to experiment with camera-enabled AR interfaces and interactive experiences.

If you’d like to get some help to figure out how augmented reality can enhance your customer experience and drive new opportunities for your brand, or simply to try out the HoloLens demo we have to experience the transformative power of AR, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Sources: as linked in the article

SXSW 2017: Kasita Aims To Commodify The Smart Home Experience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Kasita is an one-year-old startup based in Austin, TX that wants to transform the way people think about home ownership and interior design by providing the perfect modern home experience. The startup developed a prototype unit, a compact modular home that can be transported from city to city without the need for boxing up everything first. The company announced at SXSW today that it has started taking orders for units based on the prototype, which will cost around $139,000 each.

Catering to its millennial customers, Kasita’s prefab units will come integrated with many advanced smart home devices, including an Amazon Echo smart speaker, a Doorbird smart doorbell, glass windows with adjustable transparency, and many other smart home appliances. The entire smart home experience will be manageable via the Kasita app, allowing for a unified control and user experience.

What Brands Need To Do
According to IHS Markit, 80 million smart home devices were delivered worldwide in 2015, a 64 percent increase compared to the year before. As mainstream consumers start to embrace smart home devices, Kasita’s unique approach to designing a holistic smart home experience should serve as an inspiration to hospitality and travel brands, who need to strive to provide guests a convenient and personalized experience. They can deliver a modernized guest experience by leveraging the slew of smart home devices and on-demand services, and truly makes the guests feel at home by letting them talk to Alexa or log into Netflix the same way they would at home.

 

Source: AustinInno

Header image courtesy of Kasita’s website

Google Created A Video Intelligence API That Analyzes And Logs Video Content For Search

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has added a new powerful AI-powered cloud service to its growing arsenal. The search giant unveiled a Video Intelligence API at its Cloud Next conference, which uses machine learning technology to analyze video content, down to the objects or actions shown in a scene, logs those data, and makes that information searchable for users. This API should be particularly useful for media companies and brands looking to leverage digital video to deliver their messaging, as it allows them to easily categorize and manage their video content for targeting and personalization purposes.

What Brands Need To Do
While similar technologies exist for both image and speech recognition, this API from Google is the first of its kind to bring AI-powered cognitive analytics to videos. 87% of online marketers now rely on video content to reach their audience, and people are watching over 500 million hours of videos on YouTube alone every day. In order to stand out from the crowd, brands should work with content creators and media companies to figure out what kind of video content is resonating with their target audience, and learn to leverage the AI-powered solution to supercharge the process and deliver more personalized content.

 

Source: VentureBeat