Category: General Content

Guinness Uses VR To Enhance Sampling Experiences At Tesco

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Guinness is adding a little VR fun to its in-store sampling promotion to entice shoppers to try out its latest line of beers. Working with R/GA London, the Irish brewer created a 360-degree video designed to transport viewers into a world of colors, shapes, and sound that Guinness says are “scientifically proven” to enhance flavors of each of its new beers. This unique campaign will take place in selected Tesco stores in the U.K. starting this month, with plans for international roll-outs set for later this year.

What Brands Need To Do
This campaign offers an innovative take on in-store samplings as it shows how a CPG brand can leverage immersive content to add some flair to your product experience. With VR technologies continue to mature and become available for mass consumers, brands should consider exploring this type of experiential marketing that truly engages with your target audiences through the kind of immersive storytelling that VR content enables.

 

Source: CampaignLive

 

Facebook Ramps Up Live Content With Weekly MLB Games

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook continues its aggressive push for more live video content as it signs a new streaming deal with the Major League Baseball (MLB) to stream 20 games this season. The broadcasts, drawn from a feed from one of the participating team’s local broadcast rightsholders, mostly consist of nationally telecast games and will go live weekly on Friday nights, starting with the match between the Colorado Rockies and the Cincinnati Reds tonight.

What Brands Need To Do
Rumors of Facebook talking with sports leagues and media owners to get more live sports content have been swirling around since this February. This MLB deal confirms the social giant’s play for live sports, which mirrors Twitter’s sports-focused strategy for live video as well.  Facebook has started to monetize its live video content by adding mid-roll ad breaks, which provides brands with a valuable channel to reach sports fans who are not reachable via traditional TV ads.

Live sports are widely regarded as the last bastion against the declining live TV ratings, but with more and more sports leagues signing deals like this one to make their content available on digital platforms, more and more viewers are migrating to those new platforms as well. Therefore, brands seeking to reach sports fans will need to follow along by adjusting their media mix.

 

Source: The Verge

Amazon Debuts 4K TV With Fire TV OS And Alexa

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On Tuesday, Amazon announced a new lineup of 4K smart TVs that run on the updated Fire TV software. Integrated with Alexa support, users can evoke Amazon’s virtual assistant to conduct voice search for content or access Alexa skills via the remote control. As is the case with Amazon’s Fire TV streaming devices, Alexa will show you many results visually instead of just speaking them back. Working with two TV manufacturers, this new Amazon Fire TV lineup will be sold under either the Element or Westinghouse brand depending on the regional market, with prices ranging from $449 for the 43-inch model to $899 for the 65-inch.

What Brands Need To Do
This announcement continues Amazon’s hot streak of integrating Alexa in smart home devices. In the past month alone, the ecommerce giant introduced two new Echo devices – the Echo Look and the Echo Show – to push deeper into the conversational home gadget space. The Alexa-powered smart TVs are but another way for Amazon to make Alexa omnipresent in a connected household. As conversational devices continue to conquer the smart home space, brands that wish to stay ahead of the curve need to start leveraging the developer tools available to create voice experiences for the likes of Alexa in order to reach customers at home.

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: Fortune

Coca-Cola Targeting Ads According To Your Instagram Posts

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In an innovative twist of using social listening for targeting, Coca-Cola’s new ad campaign is targeting people the photos they shared on Facebook and Instagram, instead of the text they posted. The idea is to gauge user interests based on the images they share on social media and serve up relevant messages across other digital channels. For example, if you posted Instagram photo of the picnic you had over the weekend, and there happen to be a jug of iced tea somewhere in the mix, Gold Peak, a Coca-Cola-owned ice tea beverage brand, could target you with ads while you read an article online or checked the weather on a weather app.

What Brands Need To Do
We have entered an image-first era on social media where many people have chosen to prioritize sharing photos and videos over texts. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. And thanks to the recent advances in image recognition and machine learning technologies, this trend provides brand marketers with a new opportunity to discern the interests of their audience and get a better understanding of contexts they are in. More brands should start expanding their method of customer data acquisition to incorporate image-based data collection and leveraging it to optimize the relevance of their ads.  

For more information on how brands may tap into the transformative power that machine learning will bring to marketing, please check out the Augmented Intelligence section of our Outlook 2017.

 

Source: Digiday

Wayfair Launches Visual Search For Finding Similar Home Goods

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Online home goods retailer Wayfair has launched “Search with Photo,” a visual search tool that leverages artificial intelligence to enable shoppers to find matching home furnishings to the items they take photos of. Available across mobile and desktop devices, shoppers can access the feature via the camera icon in the Wayfair.com search bar, which allows them to snap a photo or upload one from their photo library. The search engine will quickly returns visually similar items available from Wayfair’s inventory for direct purchases. Users can add the products they like to an Idea Board to save for later or share with others.

What Brands Need To Do
This new visual search engine should help Wayfair maintain a competitive edge over other ecommerce sites. With the quick advancement of machine learning and AI-powered solutions, we are starting to see examples of brands primarily using the camera as an input source of the mobile user interface and leverage images to learn about user intent. Previously, Pinterest and Amazon have both launched similar visual search feature that uses the camera as the input source for better understanding what users are looking for and optimize the product discovery process. Brands looking to stay ahead of the digital curve will need to start formulating a “camera strategy” and broaden their methods of customer data collection.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Alexa Will Soon Support Notifications To Grab Your Attention

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon announced in a blog post on Tuesday that notification feature will soon come to Alexa,  allowing the voice assistant to alert customers with information that’s important to them. Soon, Alexa users will be able to enable notifications for select skills and shopping updates from Amazon on most Alexa-powered devices. Once activated, users will be alerted when there’s new information to retrieve by a chime and a pulsing green light on their Echo devices.

The notifications will be manageable individually via the Amazon Alexa App. Skills made by AccuWeather, The Washington Post, Just Eat, and Life360 are among the first to be using notifications. AVS is set to launch a developer preview in the coming weeks to ensure Alexa-enabled device makers can update their products to support notifications.

What Brands Need To Do
The addition of notifications opens up exciting new opportunities for Alexa developers to make their skills more proactive and capable of delivering updates and brand messages in a timely manner. For example, a travel booking company can create an Alexa skill that alerts users when the price of a tracked flight drops, and a healthcare brand can use notifications to remind customers of taking their meds. The arrival of notifications will significantly expand Alexa’s use cases, which brands looking to explore the conversational space should leverage to create more useful Alexa skills to provide added value to their customers.

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 Blog

Instagram Adds Snapchat-Style AR Selfie Lenses And Tests Location-Based Public Stories

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
It looks like Facebook is not done copying Snapchat just yet. With its latest update on Tuesday, now Instagram users can try out so-called “face filters” in the Instagram camera, which works similarly to the Selfie Lenses that Snapchat popularized. Instagram users can tap the new face effect icon to try out eight different filters, including animated crowns, cute animal features, and other AR effects that track your face and respond to motion.

In addition, Instagram has also started testing a new feature that allows users to view all publicly shared Stories with same location sticker. Users can then visit that business, landmark or place’s Instagram page and watch a slideshow Story of posts from there shared by strangers they don’t follow. Snapchat used to have a similar local Stories feature that compiles together user-generated content based on locations, but it has discontinued the feature to focus on more on live events.

What Brands Need To Do
Both new features are part of the homogenizing trend in social and messaging app design, led largely by Facebook’s relentless efforts to curb Snapchat’s growth. For brands, the rapid growth of Instagram and its camera-focused update signal the increasing opportunities for brands to conquer the smartphone’s camera screen. With the quick advancement of machine learning and AI-powered solutions, we are starting to see examples of brands primarily using the camera as an input source of the mobile user interface and leverage images to learn about user intent. Combined with the upcoming developments on Facebook’s Camera Effects Platform, announced last month at its F8 developer conference, this trend means brands should be looking into camera AR features as a way to update their digital user experience to be more intuitive and convenient for mobile users.

 

Source: Amazon Alexa Blog

Snapchat Debuts Sponsored World Lenses And Readies Branded Stickers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On the heels of a less-than-optimal earnings report, Snap Inc. is releasing two new AR camera ad products as it aims to drum up more ad revenues. The popular messaging app introduced a new World Lens feature in February to let users embellish their surroundings with cute animations, now brands can sponsor those World Lenses in the same way they did with the face-altering Selfie Lenses. The sponsored lenses can now be targeted to specific audiences with a guaranteed number of impressions. Netflix and Warner Bros. are among the first advertisers to try out the AR-powered ad unit.

In addition, Snap is also making it easier for brand advertisers to customize Sponsored Geofilters down to specific locations, such as a school or a movie theater. Warner Bros. is promoting the film Everything, Everything with a branded geofilter, in addition to the sponsored World Lens, targeting high schoolers by featuring the name of their school. Moreover, the company is also reportedly ready to unleash branded stickers such as ones that feature Hello Kitty.

What Brands Need To Do
While slowed installs of Snapchat have worried some brand advertisers of the platforms’ growth potential, recent studies and surveys commissioned by TechCrunch concluded that U.S. Millennial and Gen Z users are staying loyal to Snapchat and in no hurry to jump ship to Instagram. As Snapchat continues to lead the charge in exploring AR camera effects and monetization, brands should consider taking advantage of the new camera-based ad products it offers to reach younger users active on its platform.

 

Sources: Marketing Land & AdWeek & Mashable

 

AmEx Brings Voice Banking To Alexa With Branded Skill

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
American Express is the latest financial service to dive into voice banking with the release of its first Alexa skill. AmEx cardholders can search and sign in with their American Express online account to activate the skill, which allows customers to check their balances, access discounts and offers, pay bills, or hear about recent transactions, all delivered via voice through Alexa. For an added layer of security, users are also asked to create a four-digit PIN code that they will need to repeat every time they access their account via the skill.

What Brands Need To Do
As Amazon and their developer community continue to build out Alexa’s capabilities, the Echo is becoming an increasingly business-friendly platform for brands to connect with consumers via a conversational interface. As Amazon continues to expand the Echo lineup and push for Alexa integrations into third-party devices, brands need to take a proactive approach and create an Alexa skill in order to connect with customers at home.

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: Fortune

Audi Sponsors The Washington Post’s First Entry Into AR Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The Washington Post is launching a new mobile content series that uses AR technology to learn more about cool stories behind famous buildings around the world. The first installment is a 10-second-long AR experience that readers can activate on their smartphone via the Post’s iOS app to learn about the unique ceiling design in the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, Germany. Audi is the sole brand sponsor of the series. Its first ad will appear as a visual, but the Post it will work with Audi to create branded AR stories in upcoming installments.

What Brands Need To Do
This is an exciting example of a brand leveraging a publisher’s AR efforts to experiment with new ways to reach mobile consumers. While Snapchat has been credited as the pioneer in popularizing AR camera effects, Facebook made a big AR move last month with the launch of its Camera Effects platform, which offers brands a platform and the tools they need to create interactive experiences which use the camera as an input. As more and more media platforms and publishers start to get on board with mobile-based AR technology, it is up to brands to find the right content creator to partner with to explore camera-based AR experience to reach customers.

 

Source: Digiday