Category: General Content

L’Oreal Taps AR To Let You Try On 64 Red-Carpet Looks From Cannes

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
L’Oréal continues to embrace augmented reality technologies to promote its beauty products. As part of a cross-promotion with the Cannes Film Festival, the cosmetic giant is allowing users of its popular YouCam Makeup app to project 64 glamourous red carpet makeup looks from the festival onto their own face and learn makeup skills. In addition, the app also shared livestream directly from the event, hosted by beauty influencer and L’Oréal’s brand ambassador Liza Lash.

What Brands Need To Do
Increasingly we are seeing beauty brands incorporating AR technology into their services to optimize their customer experiences. L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app and Covergirl’s BeautyU app are good examples of how beauty brands can leverage the advanced capabilities of smartphones to provide extra utility throughout the consumer journey. With Apple introducing mobile AR to iOS apps with the launch of ARKit, brands should now be more even incentivized to explore AR so as to add a little reality-bending magic to their mobile experience.

 

Source: Glossy

Amazon Allows Brands To Surface Video Content Via Alexa

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Thursday, Amazon introduced a Video Skill API to its Alexa Skills Kit to allow developers to create Alexa skills that are integrated directly with Alexa’s video capabilities. This means that Alexa users can easily find and consume video content without invoking a specific skill. Through this new API, Alexa is aware of the video devices and services your customer has or subscribes to. While most Alexa-enabled devices are screenless speakers, Alexa does support devices like the Fire TV lineup and new Echo Show that are capable of displaying videos.

What Brands Need To Do
Brands can make good use of this new API to better integrate their video content with Alexa, making it easier for your existing customers to engage with your video content in their home. For brands with an established roster of video content, this is a great way to boost content discovery for existing fans. Entertainment brands in particular should integrate with this API when developing a voice experience for Alexa to make sure their content is easily accessible for users.

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

 

 

Source: Amazon Alexa Developer Blog

Rémy Martin Develops HoloLens AR Experience To Promote High-End Champagne

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Spirits brand Rémy Martin is embracing augmented reality with the roll-out of a unique experience powered by Microsoft’s HoloLens headset. The AR experience, named “Rooted in Exception,” is designed to introduce customers to elements of its Cognac Grande Champagne and Cognac Petite Champagne vineyards in the Fine Champagne region, with a voiceover from the brand’s Cellar Master. Rémy Martin worked with AR studio Kazendi to create this AR experience, which is set to launch at a private party in Los Angeles on June 15 before rolling out to luxury retail stories and events worldwide.

What Brands Need To Do
This is the latest example of brands experimenting with augmented reality technologies as an eye-grabbing way to demo their products and craft an engaging brand narrative. While AR headsets, such as the HoloLens, are still far from mass adoption, they are already great tools for this type of experience marketing efforts. Given that all major tech companies are already starting to support mobile AR functions on their respective platforms, now is a good time for brands to formulate an AR strategy and start leveraging this reality-altering technology to supercharge your campaigns and add value to your customer experience.

 

Source: PressWire

Header image courtesy of Microsoft’s promotional image.

Honda Teams Up Epix To Stream Movies To The Back Seats

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Backseat passengers in Honda’s  2018 Odyssey minivans can now stream over 2,000 movies from MGM’s Epix network, including the “James Bond” and “Star Trek” franchises, as the two companies announced a content deal on Wednesday. This marks the first time an OTT service is available directly through a connected vehicle’s rear-seat entertainment systems, as Variety notes. However, Honda owners will need to have an Epix subscription through a participating pay TV provider in order to access the content.

What Brands Need To Do
While it remains to be seen whether the partnership will actually result in increased subscriptions for the network, this deal between Honda and Epix could harbinger more similar partnerships between auto and entertainment brands to supply content for connected cars. Research firm McKinsey estimates that connected cars could account for 22% of all vehicles on the road by 2020, which is set to unleash an influx of additional media time and attention that brands can capitalize on to reach consumers. While it is still a few years off till the technology fully matures, smart brands should start thinking about how to conquer this emerging in-car media space now.

 

 

Source: Variety

 

BET Debuts Messenger Bot To Promote Branded Summer Festival

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
BET network is launching a Facebook Messenger bot to serve as a companion to the BET Experience, a four-day festival in Los Angeles that will culminate in the BET Awards, which air June 25. Working with bot-building startup Conversable, BET designed the bot to be capable of answering common inquiries such as directions and set times. It will also serve up content like GIFs and other media of the festival as they happen, providing attendees with fun, shareable content to post to social media to amplify the event’s earned reach.

What Brands Need To Do
Previously, entertainment brands such as Sony and NatGeo have created chatbots to engage fans via conversations with fictional characters, be it a villain from the Resident Evil franchise or Albert Einstein. In contrast, BET’s take on chatbot is a lot more utilitarian, functioning primarily as a customer service bot and content dispenser to improve the event experience for the festival attendees. This is a cool take on how an entertainment brand can use conversational services, like a chatbot or an Alexa skill, to improve the customer experience in a fun, innovative way.

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

 

Source: Digiday

Snap Buys Placed To Improve Offline Ad Attribution

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Monday, Snap Inc. announced its acquisition of Placed, a mobile location analytics startup that delivers location-driven consumer insights. Placed gathers its data from a panel of mobile users who opted in to allow the startup to track their whereabouts in return for small cash payments. By acquiring Placed, Snap Inc. can benefit from its data to gain audience insights and measure the offline effectiveness of its ads.

In related news, the Venice, CA-based company also bought a drone manufacturer, Ctrl Me Robotics, last month, hinting at the possibility of developing a selfie-drone for Snapchatters.

What Brands Need To Do
Back in April, Snapchat launched a “Snap to Store” attribution service, which lets brands see if their ad campaigns on Snapchat is successful at driving people to visit their brick-and-mortar stores. Buying Placed will undoubtedly buff up Snapchat’s offline attribution and help the popular messaging app better make its case to retail advertisers. If your brand is thinking about advertising on Snapchat, this acquisition should come as welcome news. Placed is remaining independent and will continue serving its existing client base and all data is separate from Snapchat. 

 

Disclosure: The Lab’s parent company Interpublic invested a minority stake in Placed in 2014.

Source: AdWeek

Walmart Trials Automated Grocery Pickup Kiosk At Oklahoma City Store

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Walmart is testing a new way for shoppers to pick up their online orders with a 24/7 automated kiosk, the brick-and-mortar giant announced on Tuesday. It unveiled a pick-up kiosk outside the Walmart Super Center in Oklahoma City. More than 30,000 grocery items, including fresh produce, meats,and dairy products, can be ordered online for the same price they cost in the store and can be picked up free. Barring a minimum purchase of $30, the online grocery ordering process for customers will be the same.

What Brands Need To Do
Walmart has been taking measures to modernize its online retail experience in order to effectively compete with Amazon, including launching a mobile payment app and rolling out an online order pickup program. This new move marks a significant step in Walmart’s continuous experiments to improve its customer experience and streamline the offline shopping process. More retailers should be leveraging new digital tools to improve their customer experience to meet the growing consumer demand for convenience and instant gratification.

 

 

Source: NewsOK

 

What To Expect From Apple’s 2017 WWDC Event

Posted on by Lab Team

Apple is set to kick off this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) with a keynote presentation on Monday at the San Jose Convention Center. Historically, the WWDC events are typically dedicated to introducing software updates, covering iOS and macOS, as well as tvOS and watchOS in recent years. On this front, Apple is expected to unveil the next iteration of iOS, with enhanced security and productive features, along with a refreshed design. The other OS’es should receive their respective updates as well, although details have been scarce.

Notably, however, this may be the year when Apple announces a new hardware product at WWDC, as reports on Apple starting production for a Siri-enabled smart speakers started to emerge earlier this week. The Cupertino company has long been speculated to be working on an Amazon Echo competitor, and Monday could be the moment of truth for Apple to reveal its first conversational smart home product.

For now, the Echo lineup dominates the smart speaker market with an impressive 70.6% market share, according to an eMarketer study. Late to the market, Apple will have to produce a superior user experience and significantly improve Siri’s capabilities in order to catch up.

As always, the Lab team will be watching the event live on Monday and bringing you all the marketing-related implications coming out of Apple’s announcement. Follow us on Twitter @ipglab for our live updates, and remember to check back later this week for our in-depth analysis of all the things marketers need to know.

 

Source: The Verge & Bloomberg

 

Dunkin’ Donuts Tries Out Branded Selfie Lenses On Snapchat & Kik

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In honor of the National Donut Day, Dunkin’ Donuts became the latest brand to experiment with sponsored selfie lenses, a novel, camera-based ad unit that has been gaining traction among brands seeking to reach younger consumers on messaging platform. To celebrate the unofficial holiday, the Boston-based brand is running its first sponsored selfie lens on Snapchat, which will turn a user’s face into a donut. Along with the lens, the brand is also placing sponsored Geofilters in various locations around the country and will be running Snap Ads to promote a frozen coffee drink.

Meanwhile on Kik, Dunkin’ Donut will be the first brand to try out the branded video sticker, which, similarly to the selfie lenses, overlays a sticker on a user’s face during video calls (although it does not integrate the facial features as the lenses do). The brand created three different donut-themed video stickers that Kik users can have fun goofing up their video chats with.

What Brands Need To Do
With the proliferation of face-altering lens feature across messaging and social platforms, mainstream consumers are increasingly getting accustomed to these camera-powered AR features as a result. This is what is laying the groundwork for mobile-powered augmented reality to take off, which will allow brands to infiltrate their target audience’s photos and videos via sponsored Lens or branded AR objects.

Besides, this is a good time to think about ways for augmented reality to drive new opportunities for your brand. AR can, for example, be a great way for customers to envision your products in their lives and to launch digital experiences from signage or product packaging. What we can do now through a smartphone is just the beginning. As Microsoft’s HoloLens, Magic Leap, and the rumored Apple glasses roll out over the next few years, a lot more will become possible.

 

Source: AdWeek

Instagram Ads Can Now Link To Messenger Accounts And Bots

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook is ramping up the cross-platform promotion among its popular properties by allowing brands to buy ads from Facebook to run on Instagram that link to a brand’s account in Facebook’s messaging app. This means that brands can now add deep-linking codes to their photo, video, and carousel ads on Instagram, which will open up a specific messaging thread on Messenger for users clicking on them, enabling brands to drive conversations and promote their chatbots on Messengers.

What Brands Need To Do
This update reveals two things about Facebook’s conversational strategy. First, this indicates that Instagram probably won’t be getting chatbot anytime soon, a reasonable move considering that Instagram’s messaging section is already getting a bit crowded after incorporating Snapchat-inspired ephemeral messaging features. It helps to uphold the distinction between Instagram, the visual-heavy social sharing app, and Facebook Messenger, the all-in-one chat platform. Secondly, Facebook is betting on Instagram as a lead generator to rev up consumer interest, but opts to leave all the customer service tasks to Messenger, which has some advanced features such as payment support that Instagram lacks.

Messaging apps has become an increasingly important channel for brands to effectively reach mobile customers. Sephora recently launched a Facebook campaign with in-feed ads that directed people to Messenger, resulting in an 11% increase in makeup booking sessions. Bots can be a powerful and cost-effective tool for handling basic information requests, managing business bookings, and facilitating direct purchases. More brands should be coming up with a conversational strategy that include not only how to use bots to improve their brand messaging and services but also how to properly promote the bots.

 

Source: Marketing Land