Category: General Content

Facebook Updates Messenger Platform To Enable Menu-Guided Chatbots

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has updated its Messenger platform to allow chatbot developers to disable the natural text input in bot conversations, instead relying on a pre-configured menu of topics and replies to guide users to discover the information they need or perform a certain task. Facebook Messenger first introduced Quick Reply buttons to speed up conversations, and has since expanded it to guide more parts of consumer-bot conversations. With the latest update, now brands can devise a chatbot experience that feels less like chatting to a friend and more akin to navigating a barebone mobile app.  

What Brands Need To Do
The move away from conversational replies, whether already formatted or freely typed, diminishes the magic of chatbots by limiting the conversations to pre-set topics. At the moment, it is too early to tell whether this update marks a shift in Facebook’s strategy in building its chatbot platform, or whether a significant amount of brands will take the easy way out and opt for a less native and conversational experience. Nevertheless, this update reveals two important trends in branded chatbot – one being that brands are having difficulties to craft a natural conversation flow to adequately serve customers, and another being that most AI powering the chatbots not mature enough to handle a freestyle conversation in natural languages.

At the end of the day, this is a symptom of growing pains in the development of conversational services, and Facebook’s update will serve as a temporary fix for brands wishing to establish the presence on Messenger but don’t necessary have the resources or technological capability to build a full-blown chatbot.

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: Marketing Land

Header image courtesy of Facebook’s Messenger blog

Highway Billboards In Moscow Is Targeting Drivers Based On Which Cars They Drive

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Synaps Labs, a startup that focuses on dynamic digital out-of-home ads, has started testing its digital billboard along the highways in Moscow, enabling the billboards to change ads to target drivers passing by based on the models of their vehicles. By combining high-speed cameras and a proprietary machine-learning system that can recognize car models, its digital billboard is plugged into a bidding system then selects the appropriate ads to display as the targeted cars drive by. The company has planned tests for this digital highway billboards in the U.S. for this summer.

What Brands Need To Do
This digital billboard serves as the latest example of how AI-powered digital billboards may transform the OOH ads. Similarly, Smart data storage company Cloudian and Japanese advertising firm Dentsu has started testing similar billboards in Japan that can recognize the car models driving by and serve up targeted ads accordingly. According to a recent research from PQ Media, global OOH advertising revenue grew 6.2% in 2016 to $49.23 billion, with DOOH claiming most of the revenue growth. More brands should look for new ways to bring some interactivity and customizations to digital outdoor ads.

 

Source: MIT Tech Review

Ford Partners With Slingbox To Bring Live TV Into 2018 Expedition Model

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Ford is revamping its in-car infotainment system by integrating traditional TV service into its vehicles, starting with the 2018 Expedition model. To support cable streaming capabilities, the auto company struck a partnership with Slingbox, an OTT streaming set-top device manufacturer. Screens will be built into the back of the Expedition’s headrests, providing non-stop live TV entertainment to passengers on the road.

What Brands Need To Do
The development of connected cars is quickly turning cars into media hubs on wheels. According to market research firm Gartner Inc., there will be a quarter billion connected vehicles on the road by 2020. This not only represents a huge growth area for media companies and entertainment brands, but also opens up a new marketing channel for brands to reach more consumers.

The development in driverless cars is an important market trend that The Lab cares about, primarily because of the incredible amount of new media time it can potentially free up. The average daily commute time in the States is currently about 50 minutes. If and when driverless cars are adopted by mainstream car-owners, it would make it possible for media owners and advertisers to visually connect with consumers on the go through in-car media such as digital video and video gaming.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Pizza Hut Created A Pair Of Connected Sneakers That You Can Order Pizza With

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Pizza hut has taken the one-click ordering concept to new territories with a pair of bluetooth-enabled sneakers that you can order pizza from. Dubbed Pie Tops, the shoe essentially has an Amazon Dash-like button hidden on the tongue, which people can click to initiate the default order that they have configured with their Pizza Hut mobile app.

What Brands Need To Do
While this is clearly a marketing stunt, Pizza Hut’s pizza-ordering sneakers demonstrate how IoT technologies have made it possible to expand customer touchpoint beyond screens. It points to a future where billions of connected devices, be it your home appliances or the public amenities, will become capable of such ecommerce features. In fact, Visa has already struck a partnership with IBM to fast track the development of the so-called “IoT commerce,” i.e. the kind of automated digital transactions initiated by connected devices according to preset, contextual triggers. For brands, this means it is time to start considering developing an IoT strategy and figure out how connected devices can expand your sales or distribution channel.

 

Source: Engadget

Header image courtesy of Pizza Hut’s YouTube

MWC 2017: Discovery Plans To Partner With Local Mobile Carriers For Olympics Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Discovery Communications is taking a mobile-centric approach to producing and localizing the Olympics content, which it owns the exclusive TV and multimedia rights to in 50 European markets. At a press event at the Mobile World Congress, the company revealed it is planning to team up with local mobile providers, who will serve as the official mobile broadcasters of the Summer and Winter Olympics games. Discovery believes this will enable it to provide viewers with the most relevant content and access a “personalized, direct link” with consumers. It also provides Discovery with more data on local interests and media habits, particularly on mobile, that can further inform its ad operations.

What Brands Need To Do
This is an interesting approach that many international brands can adopt to creating and distributing localized content at a global scale. The proliferation of mobile access has given rise to several global mega-channels, such as YouTube and Twitch, that can reach audiences worldwide in ways that traditional media channels can’t. They offer brands new platforms to reach global consumers, but brands still need to localize their messaging and content to engage with customers in each regional market. Therefore, whether for distributing owned content or advertisements, globally-minded brands need to choose partners who can leverage their scale and local expertise to effectively reach consumers.

 

Source:  AdWeek

Google Enters OTT Streaming Market With YouTube TV

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Tuesday, Google unveiled its long-rumored over-the-top TV streaming service, officially taking on the likes of Dish’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue to conquer the shifting TV market.

The service, dubbed YouTube TV, is essentially a “skinny bundle” that covers live TV programming from all four major U.S. broadcasting networks —  ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC — and their affiliated cable channels such as ESPN and Bravo. The inclusion of Missing from the lineup are channels owned by cable pay TV networks such as Viacom and Time Warner.

YouTube Live will cost $35 per month for up to six accounts, and it also comes with an unlimited cloud DVR feature as well as a content recommendation system powered by Google’s AI engine. In addition, subscribers will also have access to YouTube’s original content. Google says it will roll out the service in the U.S. in the coming months.

What Brands Need To Do
This announcement marks another high-profile entry of a tech giant into the OTT streaming market, as the battle for retaining TV subscribers and, more importantly, selling TV packages to cord-cutters and cord-nevers, continues to heat up. It also shows the remarkable journey that YouTube has been on since its founding in 2005 as a website where people upload their home videos. Now, viewers worldwide are watching more than 1 billion hours of video content on YouTube every day, growing at a pace that easily eclipses U.S. television viewership.

As for brands, this means another channel to reach the audience that has abandoned linear TV viewing in favor of time-shifted viewing, as YouTube TV will carry all the live TV ads. Taking the vast user data and the sophisticated ad operations that Google owns into account, it seems likely that the search giant will be offering some ad tech integrations with the streaming service and allow brands to target audience in a more granular, personalized manner.

 

Source: ReCode

Header image courtesy of YouTube TV

MWC 2017: Coca-Cola Wants To Plug AI Into Ad Creation

Posted on by Lab Team

What HappenedIn an AdWeek interview at the Mobile World Congress, Mariano Bosaz, global senior digital director of Coca-Cola, said that he’s partly in Barcelona to check out the latest development in artificial intelligence and see if it can help with ad creations. According to him, Coke is interested in using artificial intelligence to improve content, media, and commerce, especially in streamlining the ad creation process and experimenting with automated narratives.

What Brands Need To DoAs artificial intelligence technology continue to advance, more and more brands are starting to incorporate AI solutions into their marketing and business 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. So it makes perfect sense that Coca-Cola would want to jump on the bandwagon as well. The kind of personalized user experience and product recommendations that AI can offer based on data and user input is valuable for brands. Therefore, brand marketers need to consider how they can use their customer data to provide personalized experiences with the help of an AI engine.

 

Source: AdWeek

MWC 2017: Line Introduces Conversational AI Assistant Clova

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Line, Japan’s leading messaging app with over 217 million users, is working with Naver, South Korea’s biggest internet portal, to launch an intelligent voice assistant service named Clova to serve the East Asian markets.

Line’s CEO Takeshi Idezawa took the stage at a press event at the Mobile World Congress today to announce its plan to launch Clova, which will be accessible via a mobile app, a smart speaker WAVE, and a smart display device FACE. The Clova app is set to launch in Japan and South Korea this spring, with WAVE coming out in early summer and WAVE launching later this year. The company plans to roll out Clova products in other core markets such as Thailand and Indonesia later this year as well.

Leveraging Naver’s search technology and data and combining it with Line’s own user data and communication technology, Clova will able to offer precise, personalized answers to user’s voice commands, adopting local languages, content, and services to better serve its users.

In addition, Line is also in talks with the several companies including Sony and LG to integrate Clova into more consumer gadgets and connected devices, such as a Sony connected headphone, LG connected home appliances, connected toys from Takara Tomy, and even a holographic home robot called Winkle Gatebox that will serve an anthropomorphic visual component for Clova.

What Brands Need To Do
During the keynote presentation, Idezawa acknowledged that the goal behind launching Clova is to bring artificial intelligence technology to consumer gadgets and smart home devices so as to establish Clova as a local competitor to Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant in the Asian markets. This major launch also marks another major tech player entering the battleground for consumer attention with a voice assistant service as non-mobile-centric digital interactions start to emerge and pull the focus off smartphones.

As this trend continues to develop, voice-based conversational services stand to quickly gain more ground in the next few years. 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. Even brands that won’t embed voice into their own product experiences should still look to capitalize on the opportunity by offering complementary services to add value.

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.

 

MWC 2017: Alexa Coming To Motorola Handsets, Will Learn To Distinguish Voices

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Compared to its near omnipresence at this year’s CES, Alexa may appear to have a smaller presence at the Mobile World Congress, the global smartphone and mobile industry trade show unfolding in Barcelona this week. But that doesn’t mean Amazon’s virtual assistant service is taking a break either. Motorola, now owned by Chinese consumer electronic giant Lenovo, announced at a press conference on Sunday that it has struck a partnership with Amazon to embed Alexa service natively into most of Motorola’s devices in the future. But first, Moto says it will focus on developing an Alexa “Mod,” an attachable block for its Moto Z modular handset.

In related Alexa news, Amazon is reportedly working on a “Voice ID” feature that will enable Alexa to distinguish different voices and recognize which user is talking to it. If realized, this individual voice recognition feature would unleash some great new use cases of Alexa and the Echo devices it supports. For one thing, it should stop your Alexa from responding to her name being called in TV commercials. Moreover, this feature can be used to authenticate different users in a seamless way and therefore solidifying Echo’s position as a family living room device.

What Brands Need To Do
Expanding Alexa into more smartphones and multi-user usage shows Amazon’s determination in pushing its voice-activated assistant and bringing AI-powered interfaces to mainstream consumers. It is becoming more evident than ever that voice-based brand-customer interaction is something that brands have to explore and master.

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.

Even brands that won’t embed voice into their own product experiences should still look to capitalize on the opportunity by offering complementary services: recipes, wellness information, and lifestyle content are all popular uses for Alexa, and areas where brands can look to add value.

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 & The Verge

 

MWC 2017: Olay Debuts AI-Powered Skin Adviser Platform

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
P&G’s skincare brand Olay made their debut at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier today to celebrate the global launch of its Olay Skin Advisor platform. Available via Olay’s mini-site, the web-based skin analytics platform leverages artificial intelligence and deep learning to provide skin analysis and personalized product recommendations delivered right on their mobile phones or tablets.

With just one selfie, Skin Advisor can analyze a woman’s face to determine her skin age and the main areas she needs to focus on. The platform will also prompt her to answer a short series of questions on personal skin concerns and product preferences before offering a personalized recommendation on suitable products and skincare regimen based on their needs and preferences.

The global launch of Olay Skin Advisor also means a series of upgrades to the platform in the United States, where a 1.0 beta version has been live since late 2016. The upgraded Olay Skin Advisor 2.0, will launch in the US in mid-March.

What Brands Need To Do
More and more beauty brands are incorporating mobile touchpoints into their customer journey. On the mobile AR front, L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app and Covergirl’s BeautyU app are both good examples of how beauty brands can leverage the advanced capabilities of smartphones, especially the ease of image input via the phone’s camera, to provide extra utility for the customers. In addition, the kind of personalized user experience and product recommendations that AI can offer based on data and user input is also valuable for brands. Brand marketers need to consider how they can use their customer data to provide personalized experiences with the help of an AI engine.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience working with beauty brands to create and implement digitally enhanced retail experiences. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square is a proud showcase of our team’s work in this space and elevated NYX as one of the most innovative digital beauty brands of 2016 named by WWD. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop and implement digital-driven solutions to modernize your beauty retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Business Wire

Header images are promotional image from Olay’s press release