Author: Lab Team

Facebook Messenger Updates Platform Policies To Allow Unprompted Messages

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has updated its Messenger Platform policies to offer brands more agency in their efforts to reach customers on the chat app. Customers still need to be the one of initiate the contact, but now brands have a 24-hour window since the customer’s last message to send unprompted messages. Facebook has also removed a previous restriction on promotional content for this type of standard messaging, allowing brands to send customers an ad or a value offer within a day of their chat.

Moreover, a new subscription messaging is now in being tested to allow communication with a user outside of the 24-hour window. It specifically disallows all promotional content and only open to limited use cases such as news and productivities. Notably, these two updates seem to be inspired by WeChat, which divides all commercial accounts into subscription accounts and service accounts so as to differentiate their use cases and limit how many messages a brand can send users within a month.

What Brands Need To Do
As Facebook loosens its policies for brands to reach Messenger users with promotional and unpromoted messages, it would be smart for brands to adopt a responsible approach and develop a communication strategy for reaching customers on Messenger. The promotional message allowed within the 24-hour window is particularly important for re-engaging them. If the use cases fit, brands with a repertoire of non-promotional content should also consider using subscription messaging to create a consistent brand presence on Messenger app.

How We Can Help
Based on our extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers, the Lab has developed 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 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’re interested in learning more about this or have a client opportunity, please reach out to our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Facebook Developer News

 

YouTube To End 30-Second Unskippable Ads Next Year

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has announced that it will stop supporting 30-second-long unskippable pre-roll ads on YouTube in 2018, as it aims to provide a better ad experience for viewers. Instead, it will focus on “formats that work well for both users and advertisers,” including the 6-second unskippable “bumper” ads. 15-second and 20-second unskippable pre-roll units are also here to stay for the time being.

What Brands Need To Do
Google’s announcement is a tacit acknowledgment of the annoyingness of unskippable ads, which often plays out against at viewers’ vexation. Fortunately for brand marketers, our recent media trial with Magna shows that even skipped ads have considerable impact on persuasion metrics and brand attributes. Plus, our study also found that attention to pre-roll ads is typically high regardless of ad length.

For more information on how brands can get ready for a skippable future, check out our media trial report Turbocharge Your Skippable Pre-Roll Campaign.

Source: The Verge

Google Home Adds Shopping Capabilities To Take On Amazon’s Alexa

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The competition between virtual assistants heats up again as Google adds ecommerce functions to Google Home, allowing users to buy products via voice from select Google Express partners, which includes Costco, Whole Foods, Bed Bath & Beyond, Fry’s, and Walgreens. This move signals Google’s intention to further challenge Amazon’s Alexa, which had enjoyed a high degree of integration with Amazon’s ecommerce infrastructure. Delivery fees start at $4.99 unless you have a Google Express membership that costs $95/year (or $10/month).

What Brands Need To Do
While it is unlikely that Google will be able to truly compete with Amazon in the conversational commerce space, considering Amazon’s strong advantage in this arena, this still marks an important addition to Google Home as Google continues to buff up its functions to hold its ground against Amazon’s Echo lineup. Earlier this week, reports indicate that both Amazon and Google are working on turning their connected speaker products into landline phone replacements. As smart speakers gain more functions and new selling points, more mainstream consumers would be sold on their increasing use cases and therefore become addressable via conversational interfaces. So, it is time for brands to either seek out similar partnerships with Google and Amazon or explore other ways to reach customers via voice-based interfaces, such as with a branded Alexa skill.

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: TechCrunch

 

IBM Partners With Visa To Make Its Waston IoT Platform Commerce-Ready

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
IBM will equip its Watson IoT platform with Visa’s token technology to allow trusted connected devices to complete online orders for users within preconfigured permissions. This partnership will allow IBM to integrate Visa’s token service, which assigns a unique digital identifier to information found on payment cards, with connected devices that are plugged into IBM’s cloud infrastructure. The end result is a lot like Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service (DRS), only replacing the need for a physical push to trigger the purchases with automation enabled by IBM’s cloud computing and Watson’s A.I. smarts.

What Brands Need To Do
While this partnership hasn’t developed any consumer-facing product yet, both companies see new business models emerging from the inspection of IoT and ecommerce. For example, a retailer can leverage this platform to manage their in-store stocks and optimizing the restocking process. CPG brands, on the other hand, could explore the possibility of leveraging this new platform to bring auto-replenishing packages into consumers’ homes. As A.I.-powered solutions start to percolate into a wide range of devices and platforms, brands will need to pay attention to the new possibility in automation and personalization they are set to unleash across industries.

 

Source: ZDNet

HBO Launches Campaign On Whisper To Turn Secrets Into Branded Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
HBO has launched a hybrid content campaign to generate buzz for its upcoming new series Little Big Lies. Partnering with anonymous secret-sharing social network Whisper, which has since pivoted into a “digital media publisher that helps brands develop content,” HBO will images from “Big Little Lies” will pair with people creating Whisper posts about lies they told.  Whisper employs machine-learning technology to analyze the site’s data and identify the most popular posts. The popular and most interesting ones will then be curated into stories and videos to be posted on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Whisper’s homepage.

What Brands Need To Do
This campaign smartly combines organic user-generated content with branded content (in this case, images from the show) and repackage them into share-worthy content with the help of algorithms powered by machine learning. With subpar mobile ad experience drives many users to use ad-blockers, it is becoming more and more difficult for brands to reach their desired audience via traditional digital ads. In fact, a new study shows that over 40% of millennials now browse the internet on a device that has an ad blocker enabled. Therefore, brands should take a cue from this HBO campaign and be open to exploring new forms of advertising such as sponsored or branded content.

 

Source: AdAge

Media trail - Skippable ads

Media Trial Report: MAGNA and IPG Media Lab Turbocharge Skippable Pre-Roll Campaign

Posted on by Lab Team

MAGNA, the intelligence, investment and innovation unit within IPG Mediabrands, and IPG Media Lab, its creative technology arm, today announced the results of a scientific media trial that analyzed audience behaviors around ad skipping and identified critical steps to help advertisers maximize the impact of their skippable video ad campaigns.

The report, entitled Turbo Charging Your Skippable Pre-Roll Campaign, used experimental design to replicate online video experiences in order to measure attention, emotional response, and impact on traditional brand metrics for skippable pre-roll ads. The study involved over 11,000 consumers and 23 types of ads along 8 different industry verticals to reach widespread conclusions for the advertising industry as a whole.

 

Click here to download the full report.

 

Jaguar Partners With Shell To Launch In-Car Payment App At U.K. Gas Stations

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Soon, Jaguar drivers in the U.K. will be able to pay for their gas refills without leaving their cars. The British auto maker announced on Wednesday that it is rolling out a “world’s first” in-car payment system that enables drivers to fuel up their vehicles and pay via the integrated Shell app on the car’s touchscreen dashboard.

Based on Shell’s existing “Fill Up & Go” payment app, the new integrated payment app uses location data to determine which gas station you are at and allows for one-tap authorization through a saved payment method. Jaguar will roll out the app via an over-the-air software update to select Jaguar models starting this week.

What Brands Need To Do
This partnership serves as one recent example of auto brands working to enhance driving experiences with connected services. As connected car technologies continue to mature, auto brands will need to seek out suitable technology and brand partners to build out the services enabled by in-car connectivity. For other brands, this represents new opportunities for them to reach customers behind the wheel and in the back seats by establishing an in-car touchpoint and integrating loyalty programs via similar partnerships.

 

Source: Engadget

Wells Fargo Is Developing A Voice Payments Service

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Wells Fargo is working on a voice-based interface that will let customers handle their basic banking needs and transferring funds via speech command. While the San Francisco-based bank says the service is still in development and will be ready in “a shorter time frame than three to five years,” it is also exploring how to further apply artificial intelligence in developing conversational banking abilities, as well as its biometric authentication practices central for mobile voice banking to work.

What Brands Need To Do
Previously, several banks and financial services have dipped their toes into conversational interfaces to better serve their customer. Capital One has created an Alexa skill to let customers check their balances while Bank of America is set to launch a voice assistant service named Erica later this year as a mobile app. Last week, PayPal launched its first Slack bot to allow users to send each other up to $10,000 with one message. With consumers become getting accustomed to voice interfaces, 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 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: Digiday

 

Taco Bell Rings Wedding Bells For Its Next Live Streaming Event

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
To promote the grand opening of its Las Vegas Strip location, Taco Bell has launched an ambitious social campaign that will culminate with a real wedding in the fast-service restaurant’s new Las Vegas flagship store.

Aiming to stage a spectacle that will drive traffic to the restaurant location, Taco Bells is asking prospective newlyweds to share their love stories on social media with the hashtag #LoveAndTacosContest. The entries will then be able to public votes, and the company will select a winning couple on March 1st for an all-expenses-paid trip to Vegas to get hitched in its restaurant. Taco Bell plans to live stream the ceremony for fans worldwide, and Taco Bell customers who voted in the contest will be invited to attend in person.

What Brands Need To Do
While this is certainly a bit on the side of “out there” as far as branded events go, this campaign is illustrative of brands’ increasing need to come up with bold and creative ways to stage live events so as to grab consumer attention in today’s fragmented media landscape. This campaign cleverly ties the event to a physical store location to drive local traffic while also incorporating live streaming to amplify the reach of the event. As live videos quickly become a crucial component of social media marketing, brand marketers need to think outside the box to come up with share-worthy events that can capture the mobile audience and get them talking.

 

 

Source: GeoMarketing

 

Facebook Announced Free Video App For Apple TV And Amazon Fire TV [Updated]

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
After a week of speculations, Facebook has finally confirmed that it will be soon launching a free video app for OTT streaming devices such as Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV devices, and Samsung Smart TV,  with more platforms to come. This way, viewers will be able to watch the videos they already see on Facebook on their TV screens. In addition, Facebook also added some tweaks to video playback, including defaulting the autoplay videos to play with the sound on, picture-in-picture video when people want to watch a video while scrolling, as well as a wide rollout of vertical video format.

Update: On March 1st, Facebook officially released new Video app for fourth-gen Apple TV.

What Brands Need To Do
This announcement reaffirms Facebook’s commitment to building out its video offering in order to vy for a bigger piece of the ad dollars pouring into digital video. Earlier this month, the social network announced an expansion of partnerships with third-party ad tech companies, promising to provide advertisers more data and a clear comparison between social ads and TV ads. And these new video initiatives are all about positioning Facebook as a video destination across platforms.

Once launched, the app would offer brand advertisers a valuable new video channel to leverage Facebook’s audience data to reach targeted customers. As Facebook continues its push into the digital video space and challenges YouTube for a piece of the growing video ad budget, brands should carefully consider their video strategies and take into account Facebook’s growing video ad products.

 

Source: Facebook Newsroom