Category: General Content

Expedia Plans To Use VR To Let Customers Tour Hotel Rooms Before Booking

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Popular travel booking site Expedia is testing a new VR initiative to allow customers to take a tour of the hotel rooms they are interested in before booking. Designed to be an interactive experience, users will be able to slide open a room door or step out onto the balcony to get a full 360-degree view of their prospective accommodations.

Details are scarce on when and how Expedia is planning to roll out this VR feature, but the company has long history of experimenting with virtual reality in its marketing efforts, including a campaign last year that uses a room-scale VR installation to transport sick kids to exotic locales and one launched this January that takes viewers on a mesmerizing VR train ride through rural Norway.

What Brands Need To Do
This is the latest example of the diversification of VR content as virtual reality gadgets start to percolate into the consumer market. VR’s immersive power makes it a powerful tool for travel and hospitality brands to sell prospective customers on the experience they offer. Hotel chains such as Marriott and St. Giles have been experimenting with VR and 360-degree content to attract consumer attention As mainstream adoption picks up, immersive content is emerging as a medium that brand marketers can capitalize on.

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: Mashable

Google Starts Surfacing Buyable “Similar Items” In Image Search Results

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has quietly rolled out a new “Similar Items“ feature within Google Image Search on both the mobile web as well as Android‘s Google app, which uses machine learning to surface similar looking products matching what users are looking for. So far, this is limited to fashion and lifestyle products, such as sunglasses, handbags, or shoes, but Google says it will expand in the coming months to cover other apparel and home & garden categories. The feature will not only recognize what the objects in the image are, down to their brand and model but also find out about their price and availability. The feature also includes links to buy those similar-looking items on ecommerce sites.

What Brands Need To Do
This is an interesting play on Google’s part to build out its shopping-related features and explore how computer vision may help it breath new life into its search ads. This new feature revitalizes image search as a viable product discovery channel that brands will need to pay attention to. As users can also search by images, this can easily become a way for consumers to snap a picture of a physical product and quickly find similar items to buy online. While this feature currently runs on machine learning algorithms and is not monetized in any way, it is not hard to imagine how this could easily become a new ad product where online retailers selling the same items can bid to appear in the front end of the carousel.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Instagram Integrates Ephemeral And Permanent Messaging In Direct

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
With its latest update released today, Instagram revamped its private messaging feature Direct to unite both ephemeral and permanent messages in one inbox. Previously, the disappearing Direct Messages would appear as circular icons atop the inbox like Instagram Stories. Now,  disappearing ephemeral photo and video messages with traditional permanent text and image messages in the same one-on-one and group threads. Instagram introduced ephemeral messaging in Direct in November, and has since seen Direct usage spike from 300 million to 375 million monthly active users.

What Brands Need To Do
The update significantly enhances the messaging experience on Instagram, giving it an edge over Snapchat and other competitors. The fast growth in active users is a strong indication that Instagram has the potential to be more than a photo-sharing social network and branch out into the messaging space. Given that messaging apps has overtaken social networks in usage as mobile user behaviors shift, brands will need to develop a conversational marketing strategy to reach customers on the messaging platforms.

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 new NiroBot we build 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 Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Sony Creates HoloLens Mixed Reality Game To Promote New Smurfs Movie

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
To promote the release of the new Smurfs reboot movie, Sony Pictures is inviting moviegoers to explore the Smurfs village in a mixed reality generated by Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets. Collaborating with media agency OMD, AOL advertising content creators Partner Studio, and VR production company UNIT9, this mixed reality experience asks players to explore various exotic locations taken from the movie and eventually find a “Lost Village.” After placing on the headset, players can use flat surfaces and tabletops as foundations to activate the experience.

What Brands Need To Do
This is a commendable effort on Sony’s part to leverage interactive HoloLens content to drive engagement and interests. While HoloLens is still limited in its availability and therefore low in consumer adoption, it provides a platform for brands to create cutting-edge immersive experiences that will stand out from the run-of-the-mill VR content many brands have started dabbling in. In the long run, this type of interactive experience will provide the digital assets crucial for establishing franchises. When it comes to picking the right immersive content platform to develop content for, brands need to take its long-term value into considerations and chose one that best fits their 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.

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 Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VRScout

Header image courtesy of AOL Global Partner Studios

Carl’s Jr. Updates Its Ad Creatives With A Twitch Livestream Of Explosions

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Carl’s Jr., notorious for some of its provocative and exploitative ads, is looking to update its brand image by promising its future commercials will focus on “food, not boobs.” The fast food chain chose to broadcast that creative transformation on Twitch with a tongue-in-cheek demolition session of the props featured in its previous ads. The branded livestream took over Twitch’s homepage on Saturday, April 8 from 11 a.m. – 1 p.m. EST, and featured the chain’s fictional founder Carl Hardee Sr. and his son obliterating bikinis and tanning oil with the help of YouTube stars “The Slow-Mo Guys.” The experience also takes advantage of Twitch’s interactive features, allowing the audience to chime in during the live broadcast to help the characters choose their methods of destruction.

What Brands Need To Do
This is not the first time Carl’s Jr. has leverage Twitch’s platform to reach consumers in its online campaigns, as the company has hosted branded gameplay sessions with influencers and teamed up with Vice to create live commercial breaks. With 9.7 million daily active users, Twitch is a formidable force in online media that most brands have yet to tap into.

In recent years, the competitive gaming industry has grown into a media opportunity that brands should not ignore. Some early-adopting brands, such as Coca-Cola and Geico, have been sponsoring eSports events to reach its young, male-skewing audience. More brands should consider leveraging sponsorships and branded live streams to reach the growing number of viewers on eSports streaming sites.

Source: Creativity Online

The Next Digital Interface Could Be Controlled By Your Facial Expressions

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following the rise of voice-activated conversational interfaces powered by the personal AI assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant, the next big thing in digital interaction could be hand-free devices controlled by facial expressions.

Denys Matthies, a computer interaction researcher, created prototype earbuds that can detect the wearer’s facial expressions and turn them into commands to control your phone. As The Verge explains:

The earbuds come with special electrodes that recognize the shape of the user’s ear canal using an electrical field. This bends and flexes in a consistent fashion when people pull certain faces, allowing the earbuds to detect specific expressions. So far, they can pick up on five separate movements with 90 percent accuracy: smiling, winking, making a “shh” sound, opening your mouth, and turning your head to the side. With these hooked up to your phone, you could open texts, play and pause your music, and so on, all without using your hands.

What Brands Need To Do
While still in early stage of its development, this earbud prototype gives a glimpse into the future of digital interactions, enabling a more intuitive and private user experience. It would be especially be suitable for hearable devices to allow for non-verbal feedbacks.  Moreover, this kind of facial expression-powered interfaces can also theoretically be achieved by face-tracking technologies, making it viable for devices other than earbuds as well. If realized and mass-commercialized, this type of devices could usher in a brand era of brand-customer interactions.

In the larger picture, the earbud is but one example in the kind of emerging advanced interfaces that are changing the way that brands will deliver their customer experiences and marketing messages. The smartphone supply chain has given rise to powerful, cheap computing components that can augment many parts of our bodies, our homes, and our cities with intelligence. We think about these things as IoT devices or wearables, but when backed by machine learning in the cloud, and down up with other devices, they create totally new kinds of advanced interfaces for media. For more on this topic, check out the first section in our Outlook 2017 report.

 

Source: The Verge

HTC Debuts VR Ad Service That Tracks Head Movements To Count Views

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
If an ad is placed nearby but no one actually turned around to see it, does it still count? HTC aims to solve this good ol’ ad visibility issue in virtual reality with a new VR ad service it introduced at the 2017 VIVE Ecosystem Conference. The VR Ad Service will make it easier for developers to integrate a number of ad styles into their games hosted on Viveport, the company’s digital distribution platform. It uses the headset’s integrated head tracking technology to track whether the users have actually seen them or turned away their gaze, and therefore determining ad revenues based on verified impressions.

What Brands Need To Do
This new ad product for HTC’s platform points to the future of accountable VR advertising, incentivizing VR developers with a solid monetization tool to produce engaging content and games for its Viveport platform. For brands, this opens up a valuable channel that they can leverage to explore immersive ads in virtual reality and start figuring out what kind of creatives draws most eyeballs.

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 Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: RoadtoVR

Facebook Adds Call-To-Action Buttons To Instant Articles

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has added some long-anticipated call-to-action units to Instant Articles, its program for fast-tracking web page loading on mobile. Facebook opened up Instant Articles to all publishers last year, making it possible for brands to put their branded content as Instant Articles as well. But the design of Instant Articles stayed “read only,” with limited options for publishers and content creators to engage further with the readers, until today. Now, thanks to the call-to-action units, Facebook is allowing content creators to drive signups for newsletters and subscriptions.

What Brands Need To Do
Instant Articles is an important tool for brands pushing out content on Facebook because it promises to significantly shorten the page loading time on mobile, which is a big factor in page abandonment. According to surveys conducted by Kissmetrics, about half online consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and tend to abandon the ones that failed to load within 3 seconds.

This Instant Articles update provides publishers and content creators a direct way to communicate with their audiences and establish a long-term relationship with them. This new feature makes Instant Articles a much more valuable channel for brands to invest their branded or sponsored content in, and more brands considering using Facebook’s social platforms to reach customers on mobile need to take advantage of this new tool.

 

Source: AdWeek

Facebook Rolls Out M Assistant To All Messenger Users

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook’s AI-powered chat assistant M is finally ready to meet the public, just in time for its upcoming annual F8 developer conference. M will analyze your messages in the Facebook Messenger app to understand your intent and, when applicable, will pop up into chats to make suggestions or complete tasks on your behalf, such as calling an Uber or setting a reminder, based on the context of the conversations. Facebook has started rolling out M to iOS and Android users in the US, with a broader expansion around the globe in the coming months. Facebook first announced the AI assistant service in September 2015 but only started testing it in a limited capacity since last December.

What Brands Need To Do
The arrival of M on Messenger marks an important milestone in Facebook’s development of a conversational assistant service that can help it stay in competition with rivals such as Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri.  Having a contextually aware smart assistant on standby would certainly bares huge potential in making Facebook’s messaging apps more brand-friendly, but for now, Facebook is taking a decidedly neutral approach to designing M with little room for brand integrations as of now. Nevertheless, the deployment of M still marks Facebook’s determination of building Messenger as a platform that brands of all types could benefit greatly from. And it is time to start expanding your customer service from phone call-based to include text-based messaging, reaching consumers on the platforms they already use.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive knowledge about reaching consumers on mobile messaging apps and building branded chatbots. The new NiroBot we build in collaboration with Ansible for Kia delivers comprehensive product information about the all-new Niro model via friendly chats. We’ve also built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue to 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 Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Verge

Twitter Releases New APIs To Boost DM-Based Customer Services

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday, Twitter released several Direct Message (DM) APIs and announced plans to unify its API platform as it aims to make it easier for businesses “to deliver faster, richer and more engaging human- and bot-powered customer service, marketing and engagement experiences.”

The new APIs released include a beta Account Activity API for subscribing to real-time activities related to an account, a new DM POST endpoint for sending DMs with supporting features like quick replies and shared media, as well as a welcome message endpoints for creating and managing welcome messages in DMs.

What Brands Need To Know
Twitter has been steadily adding customer service tools to its platform, and this introduction of chatbot services is a natural step for Twitter as it builds out its DM as a customer service platform to appeal to the growing needs of brands. A study by Twilio found that most consumers now prefer to use messaging to interact with businesses rather than calling. As Twitter continues to make its platform more brand-friendly with new messaging features, we expect to see more brands utilize the tools to provide better customer service.

To learn more about how brands can reach and engage with customers and deliver hyper-personalized experiences with AI-powered chatbots, check out the Augmented Intelligence section of our Outlook 2017.

 

Source: AdWeek