Author: Lab Team

Snuggle Turns To User-Generated Videos For Valentine’s Day Campaign

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Fabric softener brand Snuggle found a lovely way to generate branded content that people want to share – by lending the voice of its mascot Snuggle Bear to people looking to create their own Valentine’s Day video. The company launched a dedicated website that allows people to generate a customized serenading video by select a classic love song and uploading up to four photos of the recipient. The site will then generate a short video with the Snuggle Bear singing the song and the uploaded photos displayed throughout the video. Since the launch of the campaign on Jan. 21, over 50,000 customized videos have been created and the effort has reached an estimated audience of over 140 million.

What Brands Need To Do
A recent study from Marvck shows that user-generated content drives nearly seven times higher engagement than video ads on Facebook. And this new campaign from Snuggle serves as a good example of how crucial it is for brands to inject some customizable options into their branded content to make it more appealing and engaging to consumers. With more and more companies start to explore the vast potential of machine learning and AI-powered solutions, including the capability of transforming customer data into insights for personalization, it is time for brand marketers to start thinking about new ways to engage digital audiences with customizable, dynamic branded content.

 

Source: Marketing Dive

Header image courtesy of Snuggle’s YouTube video

Rebecca Minkoff Debuts Handbags That Unlock Access To Fashion Show

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Ahead of its Fashion Week show taking place in L.A. last weekend, fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff launched 10 limited edition “Midnighter”-style, “connected” handbags at an exclusive pop-up shop at The Grove. Each handbag comes with a scannable tag that unlocks a ticket to the brand’s spring/summer 2017 runway event. This The initiative is one of the first products to come out the brand’s partnership with fashion branding service Avery Dennison and IoT platform EVRYTHNG, as a part of the companies’ #BornDigital concept that aims to digitize 10 billion items of clothing and accessories over the next three years.

What Brands Need To Do
This is the latest example of fashion brands leveraging IoT and wearable technologies to enhance their design and engage with digital-minded customers. Rebecca Minkoff has been consistently tech-forward in its marketing efforts, previously introducing a new line on Snapchat and leveraging VR and AR technologies to attract online shoppers and promote its Fashion Week event. While this “connected handbag” is admittedly very low-tech in comparison, it nevertheless showcases the tech-savvy marketing strategies the brand employs. More fashion and CPG brands can benefit from adopting a similar approach of using connectivity as a marketing hook and unlock added value for customers at a premium.

 

Source: Forbes

Molson Canadian Packs VR Viewers Into Its Beer Cases

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Canadian brewing company Molson is targeting hockey fans with a VR hockey experience that they can unlock with the makeshift VR viewers that Molson is including in some of its beer cases. Lucky customers will be able to use the VR viewer to watch six upcoming NHL games in 360-degree view from a front-row seat. The company partnered with sports media company Sportsnet to distribute the VR content via the latter’s VR compatible mobile app.

What Brands Need To Do
The immersive power of VR makes it a natural match for sports viewing, and Molson is smart to strike the media partnership with Sportsnet to cash in on the growing consumer interests in VR and 360-degree content. With the quickening pace of VR content development and an increasing number of ad platforms testing new formats in VR and 360 video, brands need to start working with content creators today to produce branded 360-degree and VR 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 (s[email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: NHL

Cathay Pacific Gifts Loyalty Members With Personalized Artwork Based On Travel Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Cathay Pacific is sending its loyalty program members a unique birthday gift – a piece of contemporary artwork created by a special algorithm based on their travel data. Working with McCann Worldgroup, the airline is presenting members of its Marco Polo club a mini-site that visualizes their travel in the past year into a abstract painting, which also comes with built-in options for people to easily share their personalized “artmaps” via social media.

What Brands Need To Do
This serves as a new example of how brands can find interesting ways to utilize the customer data they collect for marketing purposes other than retargeting. By employing a low-level artificial intelligence – in this case, a computer algorithm that generates artwork based on travel data – Cathay Pacific is able to transform data into something personal and share-worthy to its most valued customers.

As marketers continue to explore the possibility that machine learning and AI bring to marketing by powering conversational services and next-level personalizations. brands need to start identifying the kind of unique dataset that they own and feed it into machine learning services to either learn more about their customers or deliver a more personalized customer experience.

 

Source: Creativity Online

 

Facebook Agrees To Independent Audit, Grants Advertisers More Control Over Video Ad Buys

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following a series of blunders in video ad measurement and performance reporting in the past few months, Facebook announced on Friday that it has Facebook has agreed to let Media Rating Council (MRC), the media industry’s independent measurement monitor, audit the measurements it provides advertisers. In addition to being open to the audit, Facebook will also appease advertisers by offering more granular measurements for display ads, along with new ad buying and payment options for their video ads on its Audience Network ad network, such as only paying for viewers that watched the video with the sound on.

What Brands Need To Do
Facebook has received considerable flak for misreporting its video content performances, and it remains to be seen whether these new initiatives can help repair some of the damage to Facebook’s credibility as a video ad platform. That being said, Facebook still makes a compelling case for itself as a digital video channel, especially as its Live Video start to take off, which Facebook users are spending three times more time watching than non-live videos. As Facebook continues to make amends and improve its accountability, it would be wise for brand marketers to take a cautious and diligent approach to video ads on Facebook.  

 

Source: AdExchanger

Dunkin’ Donuts Plans Valentine’s Day Campaign Via Social & Messaging Channels

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Dunkin’ Donuts is going all out in the name of love with a multi-channel Valentine’s Day campaign that will run across Instagram, iMessage, Facebook Live, and Snapchat. Besides the conventional social marketing tactic of hosting a selfie contest on Instagram, the quick-service restaurant chain is also looking to launch an iMessage mini-app, an emoji keyboard on its app, two Snapchat geofilters, and a Facebook Live music performance by Us The Duo on the upcoming V-day.

In particular, the iMessage card builder will allow users to create custom Valentine’s Day cards with a Dunkin’ Donuts themed sticker before sending it via Apple’s default messaging app. Other iMessage users will also be able to respond to the card by making one of their own.

What Brands Need To Do
This campaign showcases how brands need to adopt a multi-channel approach to maximize their reach across the fragmenting social and messaging landscapes. In particular, the iMessage mini-app, which Apple introduced with iOS 10 just last year, provide a valuable way for brands to tap into what is typically considered a dark-social channel that has pretty much been part of Apple’s walled garden. By handpicking the most popular features unique to each social platform – live video on Facebook, selfie contest on Instagram, and Geofilters on Snapchat – Dunkin’ Donuts shows that it truly understand the strength of each platform and how to use them to reach their customers, a smart approach that more brands can benefit from.

 

Source: GeoMarketing

 

NBA Jumps Into eSports With A Professional Gaming League

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has become the first major U.S. sports league to operate an eSports league by launching “NBA 2K eLeague” in partnership with video game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. NBA franchises will be able to form and manage teams that will compete against each other, just as the real teams do, in Take-Two’s popular “NBA 2K” video game starting next year. NBA says all 30 NBA franchises “have expressed interest” in forming teams for the league.

What Brands Need To Do
While professional sports teams and athletes have independently invested in or get involved with eSports teams before, this new league marks the biggest tie-up yet between traditional and digital sports. Over the past few years, eSports has rapidly grown into a significant media segment that is drawing attentions from brands such as Gillette and Audi. Earlier this week, E3, the world’s biggest video game trade convention, announced it will be open to the public for the first time this year, a move that signifies the mainstream status of the industry. And this new NBA-sanctioned league should provide a new channel for brands looking to capture the overlap between video game enthusiasts and basketball fans at a global scale via team sponsorships or, presumably, in-stream ads.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal

A+E Networks To Develop Original Content Series For Snapchat

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
A+E Networks announced on Friday that it will be developing an original dating series for Snapchat, as the ephemeral messaging app continues its transformation into a mobile video content destination. The series, titled Second Chance, marks the app’s first network-produced show not based on an existing TV franchise. Snapchat has ordered eight episodes, which will be available for its users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia in April. The show is the first of a larger multi-show development deal between A+E, its in-house branded content agency 45th & Dean, and Snap Inc.

What Brands Need To Do
As Snapchat’s ad business start to catch up to its popularity, the company now has more resources to spend on content so as to not only compete for more ad dollars with not just from leading sellers of digital ads like Facebook and Google, but from TV advertisers as well. And with this original series and more to come, it is surely betting big on video content. Therefore, it is time for brands to reconsider their media mix and consider adjust the ad budget to include emerging global channels like Snapchat so as to reach a global audience at scale.

 

 

Source: Hollywood Reporter

Amazon Launches Alexa In U.K. & Germany, Starts Sharing Limited Alexa User Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa is going to Europe as the ecommerce giant announced the launch of Alexa Voice Service (AVS), which was launched in the U.S. in June 2015 and allows device manufacturers to install Alexa inside their products, in the U.K. and Germany. With this international expansion, Alexa now also understands German and British English, making it possible for Amazon to reach more users in foreign markets.

In related news, Amazon has also started sharing some high-level Alexa data with third-party developers, digital consultancies, and analytics startups as it continues to woo developers to develop more Alexa skills. Developers and brands now can track usage patterns such as the number of unique customers accessing the skills or the total number of “utterances” related to their skills, to help them gauge user intent and track skill performance.

What Brands Need To Do
Expanding Alexa into global markets offers internationally-minded brands a new channel to leverage conversational experience to reach foreign markets at scale. Although Amazon is still very tight-lipped about the user data that Alexa collects, the high-level information it now opts to share is a welcome start. Alexa dominated CES this year, and 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 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 & AdAge

Pinterest Launches Mobile Visual Search Tool In Public Beta

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pinterest has launched its Lens virtual search tool on its mobile app as a public beta test. Starting today, Lens allows iOS users to point their smartphone cameras at anything, and Pinterest’s A.I.-powered algorithm will automatically pick apart the objects in an image and categorize them down into foods, animals, clothing, or even patterns like hexagons. Then users will be presented with a slew of pins featuring identical or visually similar items. Building on the visual search function it previewed last year, Pinterest says Lens will also come with a “Shop The Look” feature that isolates each fashion items, from hats to jeans to shoes, in an image that surface shoppable pins featuring each of those pieces.

What Brands Need To Do
According to a recent study by Millward Brown, 83% of active Pinterest users have purchased a product because of something they saw on the site.As Pinterest continues to build out its ecommerce features, brands interested in social commerce, especially those whose target audiences overlap with Pinterest users, should leverage them to boost direct sales by adding support for the “shopping cart” and experimenting with Buyable Pins.

Moreover, with the quick advancement of machine learning and AI-powered solutions, we are starting to see examples of brands primarily using the camera as an input source of the mobile user interface and leverage images to learn about user intent. Snapchat is a prime example of leveraging the camera to engage with mobile users. This trend should provide some inspiration to brands looking to update their digital user experience to be more intuitive and convenient for mobile users.

 

Source: TechCrunch