Category: General Content

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

 

Mercedes Launches In-Car Wellness Initiative With Wearable Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Mercedes-Benz is looking to improve the driving experience with a new health and wellness initiative that taps wearable data to improve a driver’s mood and comfort level. After setting up a Mercedes Me profile, Mercedes drivers can adjust climate control, lighting, seat massagers, entertainment systems in their vehicles. If they wear a fitness tracker, they can connect it to the profile and receive automatic adjustments on the in-car environments according to their stress level and other physiological stats. For example, if the system detects a driver is sleepy, it will play some energizing tunes to keep the driver alert. Moreover, drivers will also receive personalized health and fitness tips from Mercedes’  Fit and Healthy Coach, even when they stepped out of the vehicle. Mercedes says these features will be released “in the near future.”

What Brands Need To Do
This serves as the latest example of how brands may incorporate fitness and biometric data into AI-powered digital experiences and provide added value to their customers. By launching this wellness initiative, Mercedes is adding a new dimension to its driving experience and, because the initiative can reach drivers even when they’re not in the car, establish a holistic brand presence in customers’ daily lives. More brands can benefit from this approach and expand their services by leveraging those customer data to power new services and brand experiences.

 

Source: PSFK

Header image courtesy of Mercedes-Benz’s press release

 

Lyft Provides Businesses With White-Label Ride-Hailing Service

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Lyft has launched a dispatch developer program to let brands and businesses integrate its ride-hailing service into their own services. By providing a white-labelled ride-hailing service, Lyft allows service brands to provide their customers with rides operated and controlled by brands themselves independent of Lyft. According to Lyft, this program aims to provide brands with greater flexibility by offering “the ability to request on-demand and scheduled rides without the need for a smartphone or Lyft account.” One Call Care Management and Logisticare, two businesses specializing in health care transportation, is already using this dispatch program to help patients get around.

What Brands Need To Do
Developers have long had the option to integrate Lyft’s service into third-party apps, but this new program will give them control over the supply side of the ride-hailing service and own the entire experience from billing to notifications, thus controlling the whole customer experience instead of relying on Lyft or other third-party ride-hailing services. Brands can use this to drive traffic to their local stores or events, but the bigger opportunity lies the possibility of integrating this on-demand service into connected devices to bring seamless, automated ride-hailing into new areas.

For example, a hotel brand can use this to set up a system where rides are automatically requested when the guests lock the door of their room. As more and more devices comes online, brands need to figure out how to leverage programs like this Lyft one to provide an optimized customer experience.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Shazam Adds AR Capabilities To Its Music Recognition App

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Shazam has launched an augmented reality (AR) platform to its eponymous music recognition app, allowing users to unlock 3D animations and product visualizations by scanning Shazam codes in the app. The company first branched out to visual recognition in 2015, letting users scan a mini-Shazam code (think QR-codes) to unlock extra digital content on their smartphones. Shazam’s new AR code-scanning technology will be powered by Zappar, a London-based AR startup, and will be available for users and brands worldwide.

What Brands Need To Do
While the AR technology that Shazam is integrating is not exactly new, what it does bring to the table is the massive global reach of its app, which recently surpassed the milestone of one billion downloads. By launching this AR platform, Shazam effectively gave tens of millions of smartphone users a quick and easy way to unlock AR content on their mobile devices. Brands should take advantage of this new platform to experiment with AR content and add fun, interactive experiences to their posters and packagings.  

If you’d like to get some help to figure out how augmented reality can enhance your customer experience and drive new opportunities for your brand, or simply to try out the HoloLens demo we have to experience the transformative power of AR, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Business Wire

Header image courtesy of Shazam’s press release