Author: Lab Team

Marriott Revamps Mobile App Based On User Activities

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Looking to enhance its customer experience on mobile, Marriott Hotel has updated its app based on guest feedback to offer a more intuitive user experience. The revamped app sports a “one-button” ergonomic design that is easy to navigate, along with a swipeable home screen that let users easily switch from different scenarios such as checking-in or planning future stays. Each swipe will bring up a new page that brings up the most relevant information for their needs within those contexts, such as access to Marriott Rewards account information or personalized content delivered via the app’s built-in messaging service called mPlaces. The international hotel chain has achieved some early successes with its mobile app, which drives $1.7 billion in annual bookings.

What Brands Need To Do
Marriott is certainly not the first brand to adopt the swipeable designed popularized by dating app Tinder – cosmetic retailer Sephora also opted for a swipe-based interface for its mobile app, – but the way the hotel chain used this mechanism to let guests easily navigate the app through different stages of their travel and quickly get to what they need. As more brands rush into the mobile space, they should take note and learn to design it in a mobile-intuitive way that presents a user experience that matches with consumer behavior.

 

Source: Travel&Tour World

PayPal Debuts Slack Bot For Convenient P2P Payments

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
PayPal ventures deeper into the world of conversational services by launching its first branded bot on team communication platform Slack. Designed to facilitate easy peer-to-peer payments among coworkers and friends, the PayPal bot let Slack users send and receive up to $10,000 with one simple message of the shortcode “/paypal” and a Slack user handle. The bot is now available to Slack users in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K.

Although this is its first entry into branded chatbot, PayPal is no stranger to conversational platforms. Last October, PayPal joined Facebook Messenger’s beta program to allow bots to accept payments via its service. A month later, it integrated with Siri to let iOS users send and receive p2p payments via voice command.

What Brands Need To Do
Slack currently enjoys five million daily active users and 1.5 million paying subscribers. While that pales in comparison to Messenger’s one billion monthly active users, Slack’s unique positioning as a popular workplace chat app gives it an edge to help brands reach a certain upscale, professional demographic at work. Thanks to semi-open productivity tools like Slack, the workplace is becoming newly accessible to brands. While it’s an obvious place for B2B brands to explore, it may also make sense for some consumer-facing brands to reach their target audience in a work context.

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 chatbot 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: VentureBeat

Mastercard Creates Experiential Record Store For Grammy Tie-In Campaign

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
To promote its digital wallet service Masterpass, Mastercard has created a record store in Los Angeles that offer interactive music experience for music fans. As part of its #ThankTheFans campaign for the upcoming Grammy Awards, the credit card company transformed Gibson Brands Sunset into an experiential record store where Masterpass users will have exclusive access to shop for rare and unique vinyl for just $10. They will also get to unlock special offers for $1 during the live broadcast whenever a Grammy winner expresses gratitude to the fans in their speech.

What Brands Need To Do
This campaign is a cool example of how brands may combine experiential marketing with real-time event marketing to create a truly unique customer experience. This year, we have seen some retailers embracing experiential marketing by partnering with fashion brands to open pop-up shops in their stores, providing shoppers with a more varied in-store experience. As mobile technologies continue to blur the line between physical and digital marketing, brands will have to figure out how to leverage their digital assets to reach customers in the real world with exciting experience activated via mobile.

 

Source: BusinessWire

YouTube Opens Mobile Live Streaming To More Influencers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
YouTube is now allowing content creators with over 10,000 subscribers to live broadcast directly from their mobile devices. This marks the latest roll out of YouTube’s mobile live streaming products, which the company first started limited testing in June. YouTube also noted it is working to roll out this feature to all users soon. In addition, YouTube also created a new “Super Chat” feature to let fans amplify their comments by featuring them atop the chat window and highlighted in various colors.

What Brands Need To Do
According to a recent AYTM Market Research survey, over 56% of U.S. internet users have viewed live video content from others on social media or livestreaming apps, with 11% reporting that they do it regularly. With this update, YouTube is finally catching up with its mobile-friendly rivals like Facebook Live and Twitter, making it easier to YouTube influencers to go live and monetize their content. Despite being late to support mobile livestreaming, YouTube still commands significant traffic as the world’s leading video destination site, making it the default choice for many digital marketers. For now, brands with a substantial following on YouTube should consider taking advantage of this update to connect with fans in a more spontaneous way, whereas other brands may consider teaming up with influencers to get their messages across with a sponsored live event.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Google And Ivyrevel Developing App That Design Dresses Based On Personal Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google is teaming up with Ivyrevel, an online-only women’s fashion brand backed by H&M, to develop an Android app that can design a dress for you based on your contextual and activity data, such as location, weather, and physical activity.

Dubbed “Data Dress,” the app will analyze the personal data input, including their activity data once the users opt in. Specifically, the app will use the Google’s Snapshot API to monitor the person’s daily activities, including things like where they went, where they eat dinner or hang out, how often they work out, and so on, for a week and come up with a dress design that best fits their lifestyle. Users will be able to buy the personalized dress directly from the app if they like what they see.

What Brands Need To Do
This app presents an interesting case of how brands can leverage machine learning to offer personalized products and services. For brands, especially those in fashion and retail, it is important to recognize the possibility that AI-powered solutions unleash, which very much relies on the kind of customer data that brands can supply. Therefore, brands should start thinking about what kind of customer data they can feed into machine learning services to gain consumer insights and supplement their targeting and personalization effort, as well as coming up with a clear value exchange they can offer consumers for that data.

 

Source: TechCrunch

 

Header image courtesy of Ivyrevel

H&R Block Enlists IBM’s Watson To Help With Preparing Tax Returns

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
IBM’s supercomputer Watson can now add “tax accountant” to its expanding resume, as the company formed a partnership with tax preparation service H&R Block to apply Watson’s cognitive computing power to helping people maximize their tax returns. The two companies created a merged Block-Watson system that uses Watson to analyze the notes that tax preparers put in based on their conversations with clients and suggest possible tax solutions in real time. H&R Blcok says the AI-powered system will serve as many as 11 million clients who visit its offices during this tax season, which the tax preparation company also created a Super Bowl ad to promote.

What Brands Need To Do
This is a new example of brands plugging AI and machine learning solutions into their services to enhance customer experience. Last month at CES 2017, we saw many brands, such as Carnival Cruise and Under Armour, that incorporate AI in one way or another. From the fast development in autonomous cars to smaller home gadgets, artificial intelligence of varying degrees is being integrated to a wide range of products to enable smart automation and personalization solutions. For brands offering services and experiences, the implementation of AI-powered solutions is set to unleash a new kind of customer experiences that they will need to adapt.

 

Source: MarTech Today

Intel’s Drone Fleet Shines Bright During Super Bowl Halftime Show

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
During the opening moments of last night’s Super Bowl halftime show, a fleet of over 300 drones amazingly swarmed and swirled in a smooth, coordinating manner to form various background images such as the U.S. flag to support Lady Gaga’s performance. The drones, dubbed “Shooting Star” and launched by Intel last year, are a foot across and weigh just eight ounces. The performance is coordinated by a central computer that can do unlimited UAV animations in three dimensions.

IBM wasn’t the only companies that brought drones to the Super Bowl broadcast. Amazon also teased its “delivery by drones” Prime Air service in its Super Bowl ad last night, telling customers to “look for it soon.” Previously, Intel has worked with Disney to deploy this drone fleet for performances at the Disney World at Orlando.

What Brands Need To Do
This marks a high-profile debut of drones for entertainment use on national television and heralds the great potential that drones are set to unleash across major industries including entertainment, logistics, travel, and agriculture. For brands in those industries, now is the time to start exploring the new use cases that coordinated UAVs can unlock and figure out how drones may be integrated into your services and content production. As drone fleet management continues to mature, we expect to see more interesting and exciting use cases of drones to emerge for brands to take advantage of.

 

Source: Wired

Header image courtesy of Intel’s YouTube

Baskin-Robbins Gears Up For Super Bowl With In-App Promo

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Gearing up for the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, Baskin-Robbins is aiming to drive more customers to try out its mobile app with a digital coupon for its Polar Pizza. The brand is hoping that by offering a discount for a popular party item it can cater to the football fans hosting Super Bowl parties and establish a mobile touch point. The app features a store finder that can help customers locate the nearest BR shop.

Moreover, Baskin-Robbins is also leveraging third-party weather data to deliver relevant messaging to customers in different locations. For example, the company would surface messaging in its digital channels to drive people to local BR locations when an unseasonably warm day occurs.

What Brands Need To Do
As brands continue to leverage mobile to reach local customers, it is important that they take big media events like the Super Bowl and local contextual data into account. Last October, IBM began to integrate weather data it acquired from The Weather Company into its marketing solutions so as to improve the relevance of targeted ads for its clients. With more and more contextual data at disposal, brand marketers will need to adopt a mobile-focused, data-driven strategy to reach customers in the right context at the right time.

 

Source: GeoMarketing

Beer Giant AB-InBev Partners With Pitchfork To Create Content Site

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In its latest content marketing move, beer giant AB-InBev is teaming up popular indie music site Pitchfork to launch October, a new online publication that will focus on draft beers. The company will work with the Conde Nast-owned publisher to create beer-related content such as reviews small-batch brews, essays on topics like beer trading, a directory of beers and, eventually, a regular lineup of events and podcasts. Aiming to broaden awareness and interest in beer-brewing culture, the site won’t carry any AB-InBev branding and the Pitchfork team will have full editorial control.

What Brands Need To Do
This is an interesting development in branded content marketing. Previously, for example, when Diageo partnered with Thrillist Media Group’s CoLab to launch cocktail recipe site Supercall, the site has to devote a set percentage of its content to Diageo brands such as Tanqueray gin. As brands continue to leverage branded niche content to effectively reach their target audiences, they will need to expand their work with content creators to ensure the authenticity and credibility of the content they produce.

 

Source: Digiday

ESPN To Air FIFA eSports Championship Ahead Of Super Bowl

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, ESPN announced that it will broadcast the Paris Regional Finals for FIFA’s Ultimate Team Championship Series this Saturday, marking the first time the network has aired an eSports event on its flagship channel in the U.S. Previous eSports telecasts, such as the 2016 Street Fighter World Championship, were aired on ESPN2. In addition, the Championship Series will be available via live streams on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

What Brands Need To Do
In recent years, eSports has grown from a niche media platform into a massive global phenomenon that brands are starting to tap into to reach the tens of millions of fans around the world. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that a sports channel like ESPN is starting to incorporate eSports into its programming, despite the wide availability of live streams. Nevertheless, as media companies rush into the eSports space, brands gain new channels to reach the young, male-skewing eSports audience, brands, especially those seeking global recognition, need to start leveraging the massive reach of eSports events and platforms via sponsorships and ads.

 

Source: VentureBeat