Tag: EVENT

Event Recap: Oculus Connect 3 Highlights

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Oculus kicked off its annual Oculus Connect Event earlier today in San Jose, California, where the Facebook-owned VR company unveiled a series of updates for its products and software. CNET has a good summary of all the announcements the company made, but two of them stood out as brand-related highlights:

First, Oculus introduced two new technical features called “Timewarp” and “Spacewarp,” which create synthetic frames that can keep the image smooth, enabling Oculus Rift to provide a decent VR experience on a PC that costs as low as $499.

In addition, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will invest $250 million in the Oculus developer community, on top of the $250 million it has already spent. $50 million of the funding is allocated for mobile VR content and another $10 million for educational programs.

What Brands Should Do
Lowering the minimum PC requirements to support Oculus VR headsets may help expand its user base, which in turn provides brands with a bigger audience to reach with VR content. And Facebook’s continued investment in VR content not only shows its commitment to the emerging medium but also presents brands with an opportunity to work with developers to capitalize on the impending VR content boom with branded VR content and experiences.

The Lab currently has four VR headsets — an Oculus Rift, an HTC Vive, and two Samsung Gear VRs — ready for demos. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood, so come by the Lab and ask for a VR demo to get a hands-on experience and figure out how your brand can use it to excite and engage with consumers.

Sources: The Verge & VentureBeat

 

IPG Lab Releases SXSW 2016 Trend Recap

Posted on by Lab Team

Every year, the Lab team takes a trip down south to attend the South By Southwest festival (SXSW) in Austin, TX. And this year was no different. Over the course of SXSW Interactive last week, we met up with a number of new partners and startups to learn about some of the cutting-edge marketing solutions they have to offer and uncovered some of the emerging market trends they represent. Here are the main themes.

VR Distribution And Analytics
With the increasing availability of consumer-facing VR headsets, brands and publishers are beginning to think through their VR distribution strategy. The two main strategies are partnering with 3rd-party distributors such as Facebook, Littlstar, or YouTube, or building their own VR player and launching it across the VR devices. While brands won’t see immediate ROI from VR content today, brands will want to know how their VR content is performing. A partner we scouted will begin to work with brands and VR producers to allow them to acquire, aggregate, and analyze audience behavior within 360 videos or VR games.

One partner we met with during SXSW enables brands, publishers, and content creators to easily create and share true VR content across most existing VR devices through their app. Another partner is offering brands a white-label solution to deliver an immersive experience to fans and allowing access to events and festivals all over the world through VR.

Brands Find Their Voice at SXSW
As discussed in our Outlook 2016, conversational interfaces are are powering new applications and devices in the home, car, and in messaging apps. Along with the major tech companies, there are many startups building this future. We met with two companies at SXSW who are building AI personas that communicate with users in messaging apps. These apps use emotional elements layered into automated replies making users feel more comfortable engaging with virtual characters and are therefore more receptive to the AI’s suggestions, including product recommendations. Brands own all the data captured from these interactions, which can mine them for deeper insights.

Another partner we met with creates AI-powered virtual reality avatars that interact with viewers via voice. These characters remember users across sessions and devices so the user can build relationships with users over time, adding a hook that will keep users coming back and extend session times.

Mobile Social Video Messaging
Over the years, SXSW has been a launchpad for social media startups such as Twitter and Foursquare. Last year Meerkat was the breakout app of SXSW, but besides that we began to see the transition from social media to social messaging, and that trend continues this year.

The social messaging partners we met at SXSW focused on communication, content creation, and shareability. The first partner we met with created a video messaging app that delivers one-to-one or one-to-many video messages, even in low bandwidth situations. Another partner we met with is one of the fastest growing video editing apps in SE Asia and is beginning to work with select US brands. They are looking to leverage their face-tracking engine to create animated stickers to be shared on messaging apps. The last partner we met with is a social video content and delivery app that enables users to record, watch, and share videos instantly with friends and other people in the same proximity without Wi-Fi or cellular service.

Passive and Active Audience Data Collection
Brands spend millions of dollars to collect audience data to inform brand messaging and strategy. A number of companies at SXSW provide solutions to acquiring audience insights, with approaches varying from passive to active.  

We met with a number of tech partners whose passive approach allows brands to collect honest, actionable insights through automated conversations at scale in messaging apps that users have chosen to participate in. Using artificially intelligent characters that use natural language, this setup creates an environment in which users are more willing to share free-form answers to open-ended questions than they would in a formulaic questionnaire.

Other companies are employing a more active approach to data collection. One company, for example, prompts users to answer a short question in exchange for access to exclusive content. The questions are pre-approved and designed by brand clients to generate useful insights. Another company captures all the social activity that occurs within a geo-fenced area and identifies power users and influencers, leveraging this information to help clients’ social teams engage on a personal level in real time.

Keep Innovation Weird
“Keep Austin Weird” is a common phrase heard around SXSW. Not only is the city itself a bit peculiar, but there are a number of companies in attendance that are taking very outside-the-box approaches to tech and innovation.

One company, for example, is turning the fruit garnishes that decorate your food and drinks into ad space. Using FDA-approved, natural-light carbon lasers, they brand the skin of lemons, limes, and oranges with logos or messaging. The company has partnered with Sysco to increase their distribution, creating the first and only produce ad network to provide bars and restaurants with free fruit, paid for by ad dollars. Another company we met with is building a gesture and movement database with training, recovery, and healthcare implications. Their SDK allows developers to recognize and track human movements to generate more precise biometric data. These metrics enable brands to connect biometrics with real activity in order to trigger rewards or personalize messaging.

To learn more about the partners we met at this year’s SXSW and find out how their marketing solutions can serve your brand, please contact our Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]).

 

 

Event Recap: “Meet Link” LinkNYC Media Event

Posted on by Lab Team

On Thursday afternoon, IPG Media Lab attended a media event for LinkNYC, an ambitious project that will turn old payphone sites in New York City into a network of state-of-the-art kiosks that offer free services like high-speed Wi-Fi, phone calls, and device charging, along with outdoor advertising displays. Following the debut of the newly designed “Link” kiosk on stage, the event featured a panel discussion on the marketing potential and the social utilities this program could bring to the five boroughs. Moderated by Miko Rahming, SVP of Innovation/Creative at Intersection, the panel consisted of Susan Seller, Head of Design at Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fred Dixon, CEO of NYC & Company, and David Rosenberg, a managing partner here at the Lab.

During the discussion, all three panelists commended the social good this program can bring. Seller singled out the “de-cluttering” effect LinkNYC will have on the city’s appearance by removing old payphone booths, a sentiment echoed by Rosenberg. Dixon, on the other hand, highlighted the “profound effect” that LinkNYC will have on people that don’t have access to high-speed internet, as it provides them with basic connectivity and services and helps the city bridge the digital divide.

Moreover, the panelists discussed the marketing potential of the program. They agreed that, as a dynamic digital experience supported by ad-serving platform and technology, LinkNYC would allow for creative flexibility, real-time ad delivery, and data-driven targeting. It will offer mass connectivity and city services via digital touchpoints, while also enabling brands to reach millions of New Yorkers and visitors with their messages. As Rosenberg aptly pointed out, this program taps into the ongoing trend of brands “starting to move into the space of providing utility and service in order to earn a place in consumer’s life.” After all, when brands provide real value in addition to their ads, consumers would be much less likely to block them out.

Overall, the consensus among the panelists seemed to be that, LinkNYC represents a new breed of hyperlocal ad platform that blends social utilities and branded content, heralding the future of digital outdoor advertising. The program is set to launch later this year, and brands looking to connect with New Yorkers on the go should definitely take this innovative, data-driven OOH ad space into consideration.

Event Recap: IPG Mediabrands’ Advertising Week Panel On Viewability

Posted on by Lab Team

This morning, IPG Mediabrands held an Advertising Week event to tackle one of the hottest topics in the ad industry today, viewability. The event consisted of a presentation of the Lab’s new research results and a panel discussion featuring five industry insiders.

Kara Manatt, our VP of Consumer Research Strategy, kicked off the event with a presentation of  never-before-seen research conducted by the IPG Media Lab in partnership with our sister agencies Cadreon and Magna Global, along with Integral Ad Science. In her presentation, Manatt explained how the new viewability study rigorously tested standard banner, rich media, and auto-play video ads from two brands representing different industry verticals and shared some key findings from the research. The widely accepted MRC standard for viewability, as the research shows, is not a magic threshold for improved ad recall, but rather “a stepping stone for ad effectiveness.” This means even some impressions below the MRC standard have impact on viewers. For example, the research finds that while the MRC standard states video ads need to have at least 50% in view for 2 seconds to count as viewable, our study found that for significant impact auto-play video ads with audio on only need 25% in view for 2 seconds.

Following the insightful presentation, Suzanne Vranica of the Wall Street Journal moderated a panel discussion featuring Gail Horwood from Johnson & Johnson, Mitchell Weinstein from Magna Global, Zach Putman from ABC Television, Ian Wallin from Integral Ad Science, and Howard Mittman from GQ. The panelists talked about a wide range of issues surrounding ad viewability, including vendor standards, ad fraud, and different perspectives on finding solutions for viewability issues. “Viewability is not an entry point, it should be an exit point,” Gail Horwood remarked, pointing out the importance of focusing on delivering ads in an impactful, viewable manner. Mitchell Weinstein concurred by saying that “for agencies, viewability is really about only paying for the ads that are seen.” Overall, the panelists agreed that viewability is a crucial issue that the digital ad industry needs to overcome. While achieving 100% viewability is practically impossible, striving for better viewability via developing new standards and eliminating fraudulent ads is not the ultimate goal, but rather a means for clearing the path to reach the consumer audience.

Event Recap: IAB MIXX Conference 2015, Day One

Posted on by Richard Yao

To kick off this year’s Advertising Week, the Lab attended the IAB MIXX conference held at Crowne Plaza Hotel in New York City. Here are some highlights from the first day of the event, which was focused on the importance of consumer experiences in digital advertising.

Context And Relevancy Influence Consumer Experience
Across panels and keynotes, speakers agreed that digital ads deliver the best consumer experience when they are served at the right moment. “People don’t hate advertising. They hate advertising that isn’t relevant to them in that moment,” Chairman and CEO of Interpublic Group Michael Roth remarked in the keynote. Spotify, a major sponsor of today’s event, also took the stage to demonstrate their capability in ad targeting based on listening behaviors, usually clued in by the name of the playlist. For example, users listening to a “Workout” playlist would be more susceptible to an ad for sports equipment. Touting over 2.5 hours of active engagement every day per user, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek also said that audio ads are vastly underutilized in the industry.

Unifying Ad Experience Across Screens And Platforms
As today’s audience becomes increasingly fragmented, It seems evident that the best way to capture consumer’s attention and leave a lasting impression is to deliver a unified ad experience across multiple devices and platforms. Clear Channel Outdoor also presented results of their #CokeMyName digital outdoor campaign from July in Times Square, which married traditional out-of-home ads with smartphones via Twitter as the mechanic for social lift. An identical experience was replicated on a corresponding mobile site for further interactions and social sharing. Combining OOH display and mobile engagement, the campaign proved to be a hit, logging over 350 million social impressions over 3 weeks. Similarly, Andy Markowitz, General Manager of the GE Performance Marketing Lab, also showcased how they are leveraging digital tools across touchpoints to create a holistic consumer experience, including mapped ROIs using Marketo‘s data inside LinkedIn’s lead generator.

Fighting Adblockers With Better Ad Experience
Now with 62% of digital time spent on mobile devices, user experience on mobile is paramount to the success of digital ads. With mainstream consumers quickly adopting ad blockers, it is important to develop high-quality, content-rich ads that consumers are willing to engage with. As Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer put it, ”if we want to combat ad blockers, we need to offer people transparency, choice, and control.” In a workshop session, digital ad firm Undertone presented results from joint research it conducted with Ipsos Connect on the effectiveness of high impact formats, i.e. full screen interactive ads such as interstitials. Monitoring results from 3,600 participants, their study found high impact ad formats outperform standard digital ad formats, doubling brand recall rates across desktop, tablets, and mobile devices. Native ads and in-app ads were also recommended by multiple speakers as ad formats that delivers superior consumer experience, something that we also suggested all brands look into in a recent Fast Forward analysis.  

 

Twitter Debuts Live Event-Based Targeting

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier this week, Twitter unveiled event targeting, a new ad tool that aims to help brands and marketers reach users tweeting about major live events like the Super Bowl, Grammys, or the FIFA World Cup in real time. Previously, brands interested in targeting those audiences would have to manually set up the targeting metrics with specific hashtags, keywords and accounts that vary from event to event, a tedious process that this new tool promises to simplify and automate.

What Brands Should Do
Twitter has long dominated the social chatter on live events, and this new tool just made it a lot easier for brands to capitalize on the intense buzz around major events to reach the most engaged audience. Different events also reflect various user interests in sports and entertainment, which brands can also leverage into their targeting efforts.

Source: Marketing Land

Event Recap: NPR’s First-Ever Podcast Upfront

Posted on by Lab Team

Thanks largely to the Serial craze, podcast have enjoyed a meteoric rise in both reputation and audience size over the last year. Consequently, podcast sponsorship has become an uncharted platform for brands to reach the desirable Millennial audience. On Wednesday, NPR, WBEZ, and WNYC jointly hosted the first-ever podcast upfront in New York City to demonstrate the reach and influence of podcasting media.

Serial Represents The Tipping Point
In the normally low-profile world of podcasting, Serial, a WBEZ spinoff of This American Life, was a certified global sensation. Since its debut last October, it quickly became the most popular podcast in the world, and has achieved an impressive 82 million in total downloads for its season one episodes. The attention its breakout success brought to podcasting is undeniable, as by now one-third of Americans have listened to a podcast.

Standalone Podcast App Drew In New Attention
In June 2005, Apple released iTunes 4.9 with native support for podcasts, bringing them into public awareness. With the update of iOS 7, Apple extrapolated the podcast features from its music app and created a free-to-download, standalone app for easier podcast listening and discovery. And most recently with iOS 8, Apple has made the podcast app a mandatory app, which is pre-installed on every phone and cannot be deleted. Undoubtedly, this should intrigue and encourage legions of new users to discover podcasts.

Podcast Sponsorships Work Well As Native Ads
Tom Webster from Edison Research also attended the event to share some highlights from their new research on the preferences and behaviors of the podcast audience. “Public radio is in a unique position to deliver podcast audiences to sponsors,” he remarked, “Our new research shows that amongst all 25-44 year-old listeners, 46% consider public radio podcasts to be essential listening.” More importantly, the research also revealed that the majority of the listeners felt better about the sponsoring brands, such as Serial sponsor Mailchimp (or rather, Mailkimp), and are more likely to make a purchase after hearing the brand messages indigenously presented in podcasts.

 

 

Event Recap: MobileWeek 2015 Conference

Posted on by Lab Team

Yesterday, the Lab trekked into the west end of Hell’s Kitchen to attend the first day of MobileWeek 2015. Great talks were given on new developments in the rapidly growing mobile world, and enthusiastic discussion on the future of mobile ensued. Here are the four key takeaways for brands seeking to conquer mobile.

Connectivity is Growing
The evolution of the connected car has long been on our radar and mobile is the current medium fueling it all. Vijay Doradla of Verizon predicted that “by 2025 every car shipped in the world will have some sort of connectivity”. He also believes that the underlying fabric of this revolution is due to low latency and the ability of the network to scale to consumers.

Make Data More Ubiquitous
“There’s too much data out there and too many secrets”. Kurt Collins of built.io explained that if we create a back-end that holds the data of all our mobile devices, we can have a more seamless experience; currently, bowered, data is stuck in silos. In order to have a fully unified experience, Collins believes that the implementation of “personal API’s” that can access all data on all devices will enable personal preferences to continue across all interfaces.

Mobile Security Matters
Gary Davis of Intel put the importance of mobile security in perspective: “the value of the data that sits on your phone is worth 10x that of a stolen or breached credit card”. With the progressive growth of IoT, our connected devices are producing prolific data and the weakest link in this ecosystem of connectivity is the smartphone. Davis states that “30% of people don’t have a pin or password on their smartphone”, which is alarming considering the hypergrowth of malware in mobile apps. Davis also predicts that the “adoption of NFC for digital payments from mobile devices will attract cyber thieves”. Similarly, Andrew Sugaya of APX Labs expressed his concern towards the security concerns of connected devices when discussing the future of wearables.

New Tech To Blend Into The Background
During his presentation on the endless potential of beacons, Kevin Hunter of Gimbal made it clear that the beacon is not only great at sending contextual value offers in retail environment, but can also power new discoveries and experiences at events or venues, seamlessly bridging reality with the digital world. Wearables could be a particularly effective medium for this, but for wearables to go mainstream, they have to seamlessly blend into the background with a natural, intuitive user experience.

 

Event Recap: Ad Age Digital Conference 2015, Day Two

Posted on by Lab Team

In case you missed it, check out our recap for day one here.

On Day 2 of the Ad Age Digital Conference, the panel discussions continued to dissect the impact of post-digital innovations on the advertising and media industry:

Mobile Leads Media Consumption Growth
Ezra Palmer, chief content officer for eMarketer, shared the newest research results on the future of media consumption and ad spending. As TV and desktop hit plateau in terms of media time, mobile has emerged as the only growing platform, whose average daily time spent skyrocketed from 48 minutes in 2011 to nearly 3 hours this year for U.S. users. As a result, ad spending in mobile media categories has been steadily catching up with the media consumption pattern, though major discrepancy in mobile video ads still exists.

Diversification Is The New Digital
Digital has evolved from “good enough” to being expected, and should be at the core of executions, aided by diversification to ramp up meaningful results. In a cross-platform era, its important to understand the power of multi-screen usage as we increasingly move towards one-to-one targeting. As Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg media put it, “niche is your friend,” and publishers should be fragmenting themselves to mesh with moments that matter in everyday lives.

Attention Metrics Emerge In Post-digital Transformation
As AT&T’s CMO David Christopher pointed out, “by definition, the social sphere is fractured and disjointed, so measurement is always challenging.” Therefore, the ideal common currency for digital ads should be attention-based metrics powered by unique IDs and unified views.

Technology Drives Co-Creation
Now more than ever, individuals have the opportunity to be a co-creator for every brand and product that they interact with, representing an important asset to digital agencies. As Tom Adamski, CEO of Razorfish Global, stated, “The advent of technology and its influence…is driving deeper levels of creativity”. More customer engagement encourages digital agencies to be more integrated, interactive, nimble, and innovation-oriented.

 Lead image taken from AdAge.com

 

Event Recap: Top Themes From IAB Mobile Marketplace 2015

Posted on by Lab Team

On Monday, the Lab attended the Mobile Marketplace 2015 event organized by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to hear what industry leaders have to say about some of the biggest challenges in mobile marketing, including measurement, programmatic, and personalization:

Break Down Data Silos To Solve Cross-device Measurement
Cross-device measurement has been problematic, saddled with a reported 30% overstated reach and only 59% accuracy in demographic targeting, according to Mark Trefgarne from Facebook. As George Ivie pointed out during his session on common issues in mobile measurement, “There’s nobody accredited for mobile viewability”. As audience fragmentation will continue with increasing multi-device usage, cookie-based tracking is no longer reliable.

Instead, “mobile is the key to mapping devices back to a single user”, declared Gabriel Chen from M&C Saatchi Mobile, before recommending marketers and brands “break down the data silos” to better understand consumer behavior. Similarly, Trefgarne emphasized the importance of people-based marketing in his presentation: Facebook’s social login equips brands with targeting tools to measure user activities across multiple devices.

Bridge The Gap Between Online And Offline With Actionable Data
Besides difficulties in cross-device measurements, another key point of discussion at the event was how to use mobile-generated data to gain actionable insights into real-world user behaviors. It is estimated that, by 2020, consumers will own an average of 10 connected devices, whose omnipresent network of connectivity could essentially eliminate the concept of “being offline”, according to Mark Trefgarne from Facebook.

But we don’t have to wait for the future: Jeff Malmad from Mindshare pointed out that in our mobile-first age, location, sensors, and context are already providing brands with opportunities to connect with consumers. Similarly, Ravi Pahilajani from MEC also recommended marketers use a wide range of mobile-generated data—location, behavioral, or even devices’ meta data—to paint a holistic digital footprint that bridges the gap between online and offline behaviors.

Engage Mobile Users With New Media Tools
Mobile is driving growth in real-time bidding ad spending, noted Ravi Pahilajani, and as a result, brands can deliver targeted messages at the right moments and places, which has led to alternative forms of mobile engagement. Video ads, for example, can create rich consumer experience with interactive ad units.

Similarly, audio serves as a seamless way of engaging with audience. Karina Montgomery from Pandora encouraged brands think about their sonic brand images—a distinguishable aural identity that can help brands stand out to consumers suffering peak distraction.

Balance Digital and Humanity With A People-First Approach
The Lab’s Josh Shabtai explained how “we’re approaching a new era of intimate commuting” during his presentation of The Lab’s 2015 Outlook. People use their devices in such intimate ways that it has begun to have an actual emotional impact in the brain. Brands must find ways to be empathetic and truly understand the emotional context behind ad messaging.

Similarly, Y&R’s David Sable stressed that it is important to “build experiences for life, not experiences for machines”. There is such a reliance on algorithms to form bonds with consumers that story telling gets lost or forgotten. It’s not a question of digital vs. not digital, but rather, a question of what people genuinely want.