Author: Lab Team

ABC Partners HuffPost To Explore Audio Ads On Amazon Echo And Google Home

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
ABC is teaming up with The Huffington Post to explore audio ads delivered via the voice=based interfaces of Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Aiming to promote the launch of the upcoming season of “American Crime,” the Disney-owned network will work with HuffPost to integrate content into the publisher’s existing Daily Flash Briefing on Amazon Alexa and Weekly News Quiz on Google Home throughout March.

What Brands Need To Do
This partnership marks one of the first advertiser integrations into an existing conversational skill. By plugging American Crime within HuffPost’s news briefing skills, ABC devices a winning strategy to reach an informed and socially invested audience demo via Google Home and Amazon Echo devices. As Amazon and Google begin to build an ad model on their virtual assistant services, it is important that marketers start to develop a conversational strategy and find the right partners to deliver their brand messages.

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 with Drizly 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: AdAge

Capital One Launches ‘Eno’ SMS Chatbot For Basic Banking Tasks

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Friday, Capital One launched “Eno,” a text message-based chatbot for handling basic banking tasks such as checking account balances, managing credit card payments, and reviewing recent purchases and payment history. The bot is now available to a limited number of customers, with further roll-out planned for the coming months. According to Capital One, “Eno” is the first natural language SMS chatbot created by a U.S. bank. Last summer, Singaporean bank DBS launched a chatbot to let customers handle basic banking tasks via text.

What Brands Need To Do
This is not the first time Capital One has experimented with conversational interfaces. Previously, the McLean, Virginia-based bank announced an integration of its banking app with Alexa to allow customers to handle their banking needs via voice command. 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 figure out their brand voice and incorporate conversational tools into their services to provide a better customer experience.

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: 9to5 Mac

 

A Roundup Of This Week’s Biggest News In VR

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
This past week has been a busy week for VR announcements, with Facebook, Vimeo, and CNN all announced noteworthy VR initiatives. Let’s take a look one by one.

On Wednesday, Facebook debuted its first dedicated virtual reality app, Facebook 360. As its first dedicated VR app, the app will serve as a hub for the 360 video and photo content posted to the site. At launch, the Facebook 360 app will be available only for the Gear VR mobile headset.

Also on Wednesday, popular online video site Vimeo announced it has added support for 360-degree videos. 360-degree playback is now integrated into the Vimeo website as well as the iOS and Android apps. At launch, you can view Vimeo’s 360-degree videos in select mobile-powered VR headsets, including Google Daydream, Samsung’s Gear VR, and the Zeiss VR One. Vimeo says support for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive is coming soon.

Earlier this week, CNN launched of CNNVR, a new immersive journalism unit that will put a virtual spin on cable news. The dedicated team will produce videos and live streams of major news events, along with a weekly virtual reality experience that viewers can access via CNNVR on the Samsung VR app, the Oculus Video app on Rift, or on the CNNVR app on Google Daydream.

What Brands Need To Do
This initiative should help further push virtual reality content into the mainstream consumer market. Facebook 360 and the VR support on Vimeo should provide two new valuable channes for brands to distribute their VR content, and CNN’s VR content unit could potentially spell marketing opportunities. As more mainstream tech and media companies rush into VR to capitalize on the booming popularity of the emerging medium, bands should take a cue and start developing VR content that truly enhances brand messaging and contributes to the campaign objectives.

How We Can Help
Our dedicated team of VR experts is here to guide marketers through the distribution landscape. We work closely with brands to develop sustainable VR content strategies to promote branded VR and 360 video content across various apps and platforms. With our proprietary technology stack powered by a combination of best-in-class VR partners and backed by the media fire-power of IPG Mediabrands, we offer customized solutions for distributing and measuring branded VR content that truly enhance brand messaging and contribute to the campaign objectives.

The Lab currently has several VR headsets, including a PlayStation VR, an Oculus Rift, an HTC Vive, and a Google Daydream, all ready for demos. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood, so come by the Lab and ask for a VR demo to get a hands-on experience and figure out how your brand can use it to excite and engage with consumers.

 

Sources: as linked in the article

Facebook Launches Its Latest Snapchat Stories Clone Messenger Day

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After months of testing in select markets such as Poland and Australia, Facebook today started to globally roll out its latest Snapchat Stories-inspired feature in Messenger. Dubbed Messenger Day, the new visual communication feature works in a similar way to the Instagram Stories, as a slew of disappearing photos and videos shared by your Facebook friends sit atop your chat threads. Users can embellish the photos and videos with filters, drawings, and stickers, just like in Snapchat. They can also reply privately to a friend’s Messenger Day with one tap.

One original feature Facebook added for Messenger Day, however, is the “call-to-action” stickers that people can add to their Messenger Day, which includes “who is up for dinner?” or “let’s grab a drink.” According to Facebook, this feature is designed to facilitate real-world meetups between friends by making it easier to communicate the desire for company and see who is free to hang out. Facebook says it will also insert ads in between Messenger Day content down the road.

What Brands Need To Do
This marks Facebook’s latest effort in curbing Snapchat’s growth and copying its camera-focused features. If proven popular, this feature could become a viable new ad channel for brands to reach Facebook Messenger’s one billion active users worldwide, a welcome addition for brands looking to reach mobile customers.  

We are approaching an age where cameras are increasingly becoming one of the primary input sources of our digital life. Beyond the visual communication features pioneered by Snapchat, we are also seeing some brands get in on with the trend. Mastercard is now allowing app users in Europe to authenticate their payments with a selfie, for instance. The surging prominence of visual input is set to bring a new set of opportunities and challenges that brands will need to learn to navigate in order to adapt to the shifting consumer behaviors.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Header image courtesy of Facebook Newsroom

Starbucks Enhances Mobile Reward Program With Bingo Game

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Starbucks added a new feature in its mobile app to make its already-popular rewards program more addictive. Aptly named Bonus Star Bingo, this new feature adds a gaming twist to its mobile rewards program, prompting customers to fill out their bingo cards by using the mobile app to pay for purchases at specific times of the day or for specific items to win more “stars”, which is what Starbucks’ rewards points are called. Customers can win up to 300 stars for filling out the entire virtual bingo card. To promote the launch, the national coffee chain also launched a standalone site to demonstrate the game as well as a social media campaign with sponsored posts and a #BonusStarBingo hashtag.

What Brands Need To Do
This smart addition should help Starbucks continue to fuel its growth in mobile ordering, which accounted for 7% of all transactions in the last quarter. By making a game out of mobile purchases and earning reward points, Starbucks introduces strong incentives for customers to make repeated purchases and boost mobile app usage. This new feature should serve an inspiration for brands looking to more effectively engage their customers on mobile and revamp their rewards program to boost sales. CPG and QSR brands, in particular, should consider tying purchases to a reward program that is easily accessible and manageable on mobile and making it fun and interactive by adding game-like features.

 

Source: Mobile Commerce Daily

MSC Cruises Launches Digitally Enhanced Guest Experiences

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
MSC Cruises, the world’s largest privately-owned cruise line, debuted its fleet-wide digital innovation program at the travel industry trade show ITB Berlin. The company worked with companies including Deloitte Digital, HP Enterprise, and Samsung to develop a new cruise system MSC for Me, which leverages VR content, wearables, and RFID/NFC technology to deliver a connected, personalizable, and holistic guest experience.

Each guest will be given a connected bracelet that will offer guests quick access to the ship’s services and will activate geo-located suggestions through 3,050 bluetooth beacons. Other key features of this new program include digital way finder and mobile concierge services, a VR content for previewing their trips, and a gallery with interactive screens showing the photos and videos that guests shared.

What Brands Need To Do
If this program sounds familiar, it is because MSC’s approach is quite similar to the Ocean Medallion program that Carnival Cruise unveiled at this year’s CES. Together, this two new guest-oriented innovation programs point to the future of travel and hospitality, where new technologies such as wearable and cloud computing work together to deliver a frictionless and highly personalized experience for each guest, guiding them through each stage of their travel.

As AI and wearable tech continue to advance, their potential to transform the travel and hospitality industries is just starting to show. Therefore, brands would be smart to start exploring the vast potential they hold and incorporating them into your guest experiences.

 

Source: Yahoo Finance

Header image courtesy of MSC Cruise’s press release

Lowe’s Uses VR To Teach Customers How To Tile A Bathroom Wall

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Home improvement brand Lowe’s is leveraging VR experience to offer customers a hands-on practice of tiling a bathroom wall. The company is currently running this VR learning initiative, dubbed “the Holoroom How To experience,” at select store locations in Boston and Canada, where a customer enters a virtual room, put on an HTC Vive headset, and uses the Vive controller to simulate mixing mortar and placing tile. Lowe’s says it is planning to offer a broader range of tutorials in more stores to help boost Millennial consumers’ confidence in taking on DIY home improvement projects.

What Brands Need To Do
VR can be a powerful learning tool for educating customers and for demonstrating new products. According to Lowe’s, customers in a trial run scored a 36% better recall on how to complete the tiling project when compared to those who watched a tutorial video on YouTube. This initiative also goes beyond simple 360-degree video content to engage customers with an interactive experience, which more brands should start doing if they wish to fully explore the potential of VR

How We Can Help
Our dedicated team of VR experts is here to guide marketers through the distribution landscape. We work closely with brands to develop sustainable VR content strategies to promote branded VR and 360 video content across various apps and platforms. With our proprietary technology stack powered by a combination of best-in-class VR partners and backed by the media fire-power of IPG Mediabrands, we offer customized solutions for distributing and measuring branded VR content that truly enhance brand messaging and contribute to the campaign objectives.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Lab can help you tap into the immersive power of VR content to engage with customers, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

Source: CNN Money

Header image courtesy of Lowe’s press release

Soylent Creates Conversational Virtual Assistant For Its Online Shop

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Meal-in-a-bottle substitute maker Soylent has created a virtual assistant named Trish for its online shop to guide customers through the purchase process. Instead of using natural language input, Trish offers a menu of topics and answers that customers can click through to learn more about Soylent and its different product flavors. Once they select a flavor they like, Trish will prompt customers with a question of how many bottles they’d like to purchase and redirect them to the shopping cart for checkout.

What Brands Need To Do
Despite being a fairly low-tech version of a chatbot, Soylent’s new virtual shop keeper adds a conversational touch to the process of product discovery and site navigation of its online store. The addition of this conversational layer fosters a kind of user-friendliness that separates the customer experience from other online shopping experiences, where customers are bombarded with tons of options to choose from and left to their own devices. More brands, especially those that sells to customers directly online, need to evaluate their online customer experience and consider adopting conversational interfaces to guide customers with a simpler, more intuitive experience.

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: Soylent

Salesforce Enlists IBM Watson’s Help And Opens “Einstein” AI Layer To All Customers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Salesforce is opening up “Einstein,” the artificial intelligence layer of its various cloud-based CRM software products, to all customers. This allows users of Salesforce product to tap Einstein’s AI smart to analyze and manage customer data, build predictive sales models, and streamline workflows.

The company is also launching the Einstein Vision platform — a collection of APIs that will let developers integrate image recognition capabilities to CRM and apps. This will make images a possible data input for Salesforce’s CRM system, allowing companies to gather insights from photos, such as detecting inventory levels or identifying customer preferences.

In addition, the company is teaming up with IBM to plug Watson into Salesforce’s Intelligent Customer Success platform, mixing customer insights from Watson based on local weather, healthcare, financial services, and retail with Einstein’s customer data to create a powerful data-driven CRM platform.

What Brands Need To Do
These new announcements from Salesforce come at a time when more and more companies are starting to experiment with AI-powered solutions in their business and marketing practices.  In January, Toyota launched a campaign that is partially generated by IBM’s machine learning program Watson, and last month, H&R Block integrated Watson into its tax filing system to helping people maximize their tax returns. As AI and machine learning technologies continue to develop, brands need to explore the kind of personalized user experience and product recommendations that AI-powered CRM solutions enable based on data and user input.

 

Source: TechCrunch & MarTech Today

Honda Experiments With Spatial Audio In New Multi-Scenario 360 Video

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Honda is spicing up its latest 360-degree video effort with the help of spatial audio. The auto maker worked with the agency RPA to create a new 360-degree video Facebook ad for its CR-V model, which features three “sets” of scenarios, each with different audio backgrounds, that users can pan to, including a campfire, children playing in a park with a water hose, and a man doing some handy work in the yard of a suburban home. Honda leverages viewers’ Facebook data determines which of the three scenes will be the starting scenes to play.

What Brands Need To Do
The audio VR mixing feature is a relatively new capability from Facebook, and Honda is commendable for finding a clever way to use it to demonstrate the versatility of its vehicle. Spatial audio can contribute greatly to building a truly immersive experience and more brands developing branded VR experiences and 360-degree videos should consider using it to expand the perspectives of their content.

How We Can Help
Our dedicated team of VR experts is here to guide marketers through the distribution landscape. We work closely with brands to develop sustainable VR content strategies to promote branded VR and 360 video content across various apps and platforms. With our proprietary technology stack powered by a combination of best-in-class VR partners and backed by the media fire-power of IPG Mediabrands, we offer customized solutions for distributing and measuring branded VR content that truly enhance brand messaging and contribute to the campaign objectives.

If you’d like to learn more about how the Lab can help you tap into the immersive power of VR content to engage with customers, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Honda’s Facebook Video