Category: Event

SXSW 2016: Buzzfeed Launches New Ad Product To Help Brands Reach Social Audience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Buzzfeed, master of viral videos and sponsored content, announced at SXSW on Saturday that it is launching a new premium ad product designed to help brand advertisers better reach audiences on mobile, desktop, and various social channels where Buzzfeed has built strong followings. The new ad product, Swarm, will allow brands to run campaigns simultaneously across all of Buzzfeed’s web and mobile properties, as well as six of its social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Vine, and Snapchat Discover.

What Brands Need To Do
As media consumption continues to fragment, it is becoming increasingly important for brands to reach out to consumers on as many media platforms as possible. This new ad product from Buzzfeed can mitigate some of the stress of running a multi-channel ad campaign, and also give brands a comprehensive look at where they are most likely to find their target audience. Last month, NBCUniversal also launched a new ad division specifically for handling multi-channel ad campaigns. As new holistic ad products become available, brands would be wise to experiment with such products to get in front of more people.

 

Source: AdWeek

Event Recap: LAUNCH Festival 2016

Posted on by Angel Mendozza

Last week, the Lab’s partnership team flew out to the West Coast to attend the 2016 LAUNCH Festival. An annual convergence of talented investors, founders, and startups, the festival has a storied track-record of catapulting new companies into the stratosphere, such as Dropbox, Fitbit, and Yammer. Over the course of three days, this year’s conference hosted over 15,000 attendees, over 240 startups, and a series of inspiring panel discussions and startup competitions.

After spending over 24 hours on the festival floor, viewing over 50 startup pitches and meeting with countless founders, the Lab has put together a shortlist of companies that can provide actionable solutions for Mediabrands agencies and clients.

Accountable VR
Virtual reality is a great way to create an immersive brand story, and more brands are beginning to test the waters by creating branded VR content. More brands have been warming up to VR content knowing that there have been over five million Google Cardboards shipped and new consumer-facing headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Playstation VR are all set to hit the market this year. While brands won’t see immediate ROI from a VR content investment, eventually brands will want to know how their VR content is performing. EaseVR and CognitiveVR are working to solve this question. Both startups are working to bring deep analytics to VR so brands can understand how viewers behave within their virtual experience.

A New Mover In OOH
Two major challenges the out-of-home industry faces are measurement and an increasingly fragmented audience whose attention is continuously switching among screens. Wrapify‘s on-vehicle advertising platform is working to overcome these challenges by connecting brands and drivers to create and launch OOH campaigns locally or nationally with real-time reach and impressions count.

A Solution To Increase Direct Hotel Booking
Today, a ridiculously high number of hotel bookings come from sites such as Expedia and Priceline as consumers book mostly on price. Stay Wanderful is alleviating this $33 billion problem by partnering with merchants, such as Regal Cinemas, Hard Rock Cafe, and Whole Foods, to create an incentive engine for hotel websites to increase direct hotel bookings and reduce the reliance on other channels.

But wait, there’s more! Here are 4 additional early-stage startups we discovered from the festival that you should keep an eye on in 2016:

Pilot AI Labs enables real-time computer vision using deep learning on embedded devices. Their algorithm can be trained to track specific objects and can be used in drones, retail security cameras or digital signage, and smart home devices.

CafeX unveiled a fully automated robotic cafe at Launch Festival. Prior to arrival at the cafe, customers can use the CafeX smartphone app to order premium coffee drinks.

We2o is the world’s first philanthropy platform to enable donation of unused vacation time to charities.

Mindset allows users to connect their app to a wearable heart rate monitor to learn and track stress levels throughout the day. The app notifies users of fluctuations in stress and provides exercises created by clinical specialists to lower stress.  

 

Header image courtesy of launchfestival.com

NY Tech Meetup - March 2016

Event Recap: March 2016 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Ben Hone

The IPG Media Lab went in to March like a lion by attending the NY Tech Meetup on the first of the month. To kick things off, Code/Interactive introduced teams of local high school students that had participated in their 24-hour hackathon. The prompt for the project was to design a tech product to help your community. First to present was the team behind Lend a Hand, an online platform that allows students to earn compensation towards a college education in exchange for community service. Companies can choose to contribute to students’ 529 College Savings Plans based on the hours they worked. This encourages young people to participate in socially beneficial activities and build their college resume while also providing a valuable PR opportunity to brands.

Due to the high rate of police brutality in the US, the next team, Protect and Swerve, was inspired to build a map that marked all reports of relevant incidents. Their aim is to create awareness around these events in attempt to curb them in the future. The students made it clear that they are not advocating distrust in police, that they respect cops, and only a small minority are responsible for the offenses that we see in the news. The team also built a game that prompts the user to get to school by avoiding pixelated police. The character is able to pick flowers and deliver them to the officers in the game as a peace offering.

Finally, many teenagers struggle to choose a particular field of study and need a spark to inspire them to pick a career path that suits them. The last student team attempted to provide this inspiration with their product, Teen’s Hope, an app that connects students to mentors for career guidance. The two sides are able to communicate through a Facebook API and can schedule shadowing sessions. This particular correspondent wishes he had had this tool at his disposal when deciding on a major (Political Science? Sure, why not?).

Among the other products demoed were a programmable race car toy whose goal was to teach children STEM from a young age, an aesthetically-pleasing accessory that emits a debilitating siren to ward off would-be assailants, and a database that is making the NY State government more transparent. In addition, the crowd was introduced to Ingredient1, a food discovery app that indexes nutritional facts and provides recommendations based on custom flavor or diet profiles. Another useful app on display was Parking Oracle, which deciphers cryptic parking signs to give you a simple “yes” or “no” answer as to whether you can park in a particular spot at that moment. Finally, Atri.me presented their experimental plug-in that captures a user’s dwell time on content as they browse the web and pays the content author based on time spent. It is safe to say that the future of the New York tech community is very bright.

 

Event Recap: NY MusicTech Meetup February 2016

Posted on by Ben Hone

On Thursday, February 25th, the Media Lab attended the NY MusicTech Meetup. The groovy event was hosted at the Harman store on Madison Avenue where a number of interesting music startups demonstrated their products for the crowd.

The first was CymbalFM, a social music discovery app for iOS. Users post their favorite song of the moment so others can listen and discover new tunes. Users have the ability to like and comment on posts, or explore a friend’s entire history of posts as one playlist. The platform is built on top of Spotify and Soundcloud’s APIs so people can listen directly on the platform. Soon they will be launching a discovery-specific page that surfaces trending hashtags and recommends users that have similar tastes as you.

Next was Cadenza, an app that provides an entire classical orchestra to accompany you while you play your instrument. Through AI and machine learning, the app adapts the tempo to your playing style in real time to create an ensemble performance consisting of one musician. The app is currently being used by young students who are taking music lessons and has a user base of around 40,000. They also have a social component where people can record their sessions and share to Facebook. Cadenza is a very powerful tool for beginning and intermediate musicians and it will be exciting to see how they grow as their tempo matching technology becomes even more robust.

Finally, Feature.fm discussed how they are helping aspiring musicians get discovered on streaming services. Their ad platform allows users to easily create and distribute sponsored songs that play natively during a user’s listening session. The artist can customize their message, a call to action, and their album artwork as well as select which region, genre, and tags they would like to target. The average cost-per-play is around 2 cents. However, there is no cost if the user skips the song before 30 seconds has elapsed. The ad unit is currently integrated into 8Tracks with plans to expand to 3-4 more services during 2016 (although they were not able to share which ones at the time).  There is an opportunity for advertisers to brand the info box that appears with the sponsored tracks or even sponsor the artists’ advertising budgets themselves in order to provide real value to consumers by surfacing new music.

Lots of exciting things are happening in New York’s music tech scene. As audiences become increasingly averse to being served with bland messaging, there are lots of opportunities in this space for brands to provide audience with real value to earn their attention.

Mobile World Congress 2016: Get Ready For More Mobile Videos As Companies Push For 5G

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Today marks the third day of the 2016 Mobile World Congress, where plans for 5G network have been dominating the conversation. Companies like Intel, Nokia, and wireless equipment supplier Ericsson all revealed their plans to push for the new wireless technology. Ericsson said it would start 5G radio test-bed trials this year, but pegged the full commercial roll-out of the networks at 2020. As more and more connected devices and data-rich personalized services become available, the demand for faster and more powerful networks will only grow.

Besides the developments in IoT, another driving force behind the push for 5G networks is the increasing consumption of mobile video. A 2015 study from the IAB confirms that 35% of viewers are watching more video on their smartphones, and they prefer to watch videos in apps rather than on the mobile web. Therefore, it is no surprise that Buzzfeed, the leading site in creating viral videos and branded content, announced at Mobile World Congress yesterday that it is launching a mobile app for binge-watching Buzzfeed videos. Available for both iOS and Android, the app currently carries no ads, but Buzzfeed says it plans to roll out native advertising down the road.

What Brands Need To Do
As digital video continues to draw consumer attention away from linear TV content and print media, brands must follow the eyeballs and start developing fun or useful branded video content to engage the audience, and take full advantage of the mobile video boom to reach customers. One way to do so is working with experienced publishers like Buzzfeed to create branded videos and distribute them through their content portals. But thanks to the field-leveling power of streaming platforms, where branded video content can live alongside traditional media content, brands can consider developing their own video apps as well.

To read more on how brands can reach viewers on mobile and OTT platforms with branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

Header image courtesy of mluxurystyle.com

Mobile World Congress 2016: Buying Location-Based Mobile Ads By Keyword

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
The 2016 Mobile World Congress continues today in Barcelona, Spain, where several mobile ad tech vendors are promoting their tools capable of making the shift from online to real-world advertising. Among them, xAd‘s new ad-buying tool called MarketPlace seems particularly interesting, for it claims to make buying location-based mobile ads on a global scale as easy as buying a keyword-based search campaign.

The xAd MarketPlace is built off data from 100 million locations around the world the company has collected in recent years, each tagged with keywords – such as “fast food lovers,” “car dealerships,” or, more precisely, “KFC stores” and “BMW lots” – that reflect specific groups of places that marketers would want to target with mobile ads. Advertisers buying certain keywords will have their mobile ads served to consumers in all locations with those tags, targeting potential consumers by their behavior (where they are visiting) instead of demographics.

This innovative ad-buying tool currently powers ads in 70,000 apps reaching 300 million global users, according to xAd, and KFC, Starcom Mediavest Group, and iHeartMedia are among a handful of brands that have tested it.

What Brands Need To Do
For brands looking to reach a global audience based on interests and behavioral data, this new tool from xAd offers a streamlined platform to conduct a location-based campaign. The locations are tagged based on consumer interests, and showing up at those tagged locations definitely make those consumers desirable targets for brands to reach. As mobile ads continue to evolve, we anticipate more new ad buying tools like these to pop up and bridge the gap between mobile and real-world advertising.

 

Source: AdWeek

 

Header image courtesy of mluxurystyle.com

 

Mobile World Congress 2016: Virtual Reality Becomes A Step Closer To Reality

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
On the first day of the 2016 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, several brands eagerly shared news about their latest development in virtual reality.

The HTC Vive, which made its big debut at MWC last year, returns with an official $799 price tag,a preorder date of February 29th, and an early April ship date. HTC also announced that its Vive headset will integrate some phone functions on both iOS and Android to allow users to answer calls, check text messages, and view calendar reminders without removing the headset. Similarly, LG is also making its entry into the burgeoning VR market with a pair of new products: the lightweight and compact LG 360 VR headset and the LG 360 CAM for capturing spherical photos and video. LG partnered with Google for easy sharing of videos to YouTube 360 and photos can even be uploaded right to Google Street View.

Samsung also returned to Barcelona with an aggressive push for its Gear VR headsets. The company made the consumer version of Gear VR available for $99.99 in November last year, and now it is giving out the VR headset for free with the purchase of its new Galaxy 7 phone for a limited time period. Samsung also brought in Mark Zuckerberg for its press event to talk up Facebook’s partnership with Samsung to support 360-degree videos on Facebook and working to make the VR experience more social. Moreover, Samsung also unveiled the Gear 360 camera that is just smaller than a baseball and aims to make shooting and sharing 360-degree photos and videos easier.

What Brands Need To Do
In line with what we saw at CES earlier this year, the news from MWC shows that virtual reality is quickly gaining momentum as a nascent medium, as more and more companies start developing affordable, consumer-facing VR headsets, as well as the tools for capturing, creating, and sharing 360-degree content. While virtual reality technologies may still be a few years away from mass adoption, as we predicted in the 2020 section in our Outlook 2016, companies like Samsung and Facebook are laying the groundwork for that to happen. For brands, this means that it is time to start exploring what VR technologies have to offer and consider developing branded VR content to excite and engage consumers with immersive experiences.

 

Header image courtesy of mluxurystyle.com

Event Recap: February 2016 NY Tech Meetup

Posted on by Ben Hone

On Tuesday, February 9th, the IPG Media Lab attended the NY Tech Meetup at the Skirball Center for Performing Arts. A handpicked selection of New York City’s most promising startups took turns demoing their products to a capacity crowd, representing a wide array of industries from event planning to manufacturing. Below are some snapshots of the exhibitors:

TradeIt is a Fintech company that allows investors to place trades on the sites where they get their news. Let’s say you are reading about Apple’s amazing quarter on The Street. TradeIt powers the button on the article page that allows you to purchase shares of Apple immediately. With a secure API that plugs into financial news sites, TradeIt prompts the user to select their broker to execute the trade. This feature is currently live with 23 partners and available on both desktop and mobile apps.

Perhaps you would like a quick, affordable way to manufacture small goods. VooDoo Manufacturing can help you achieve your goal with their 3D printing warehouse located in Brooklyn. Consumers can upload a 3D model, enter a quantity, and purchase all through their eCommerce site. If they need help with the 3D model, VooDoo’s team of designers can assist with the creation process. Low volume orders of 20 units or less ship next day, while high volume orders of over 10,000 units take up to two weeks.

If you need help planning your next party, it is time to download Funnster, the event planning app. Hosts post events with time, date, location and invite their friends. They also choose favors that they will need for the party so their guests know exactly what to bring. They also have the option to simply share the cost of the party with the host. In order to acquire new users, Funnster is offering $40 towards booze for hosting a party through their app. Keep them in mind for your next soiree!

Rather than staying in and hosting, sometimes it’s more fun to hit the town. With all of the great locations available in New York City, DIDiT NY can help you narrow down the options. Their experience discovery app curates lists based on expert columnists’ advice. For example, you want to visit Beyoncé and Jay Z’s favorite dinner spots. DIDiT crawls through web content and curates mentions of the power couple’s dining habits and surfaces options to you. You can then save the locations and mark once you’ve “DIDiT.”

Now one thing that Beyonce and Jay Z certainly have is a massive social following. Shareablee monitors social conversations to provide insights on content engagement. They pull all interactions (likes, tweets, comments, etc.) across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn to build user profiles. Marketers can use this platform to measure their social footprint and discover the makeup of their target audience.

Rounding out this month’s Tech Meetup were a career building tool, a site for monitoring the public council in NYC, an educational interactive toy, a 3D sketching platform, and an app that punishes the user for being late. Overall, the meetup showcased a very impressive lineup of innovative and useful tech.

Outlook 2016 Event: Conversational Interfaces

Posted on by Lab Team

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This is the first in a series of videos recapping our Outlook events, each highlighting one theme from our Outlook 2016.

This event focused on the role Conversational Interfaces play in shaping the future of brand communications, featuring three industry insiders on the panel discussion:

  • SoundHound | Michael DiNuzzo, Sr. Director of Sales, East & Midwest 
  • MSG.ai | Puneet Mehta, Founder and CEO 
  • x.ai | Alex Poon, Founder and COO 

For more information on our Outlook 2016, please visit our Outlook Website. If you’d like to attend one of our future events, please reach out to our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]).

Event Recaps: NRF & Flash Pitch 2016

Posted on by Angel Mendozza

It has been a busy week for the IPG Media Lab. After the madness of CES 2016 we managed to squeeze in two events before the week ended ­– Retail’s Big Show by NRF (retail industry’s version of CES) and Flash Pitch 2016. The beauty of attending these two events was that they couldn’t be anymore opposite.

NRF held its 105th annual retail event from Jan. 15-18th, which was attended by more than 33,500 people. As expected, the event came and went with plenty of big announcements and interesting retail technology:

RetailNext (featured in our Media Lab) BT, Intel, NexGen Packaging and SATO Global Solutions announced a global alliance called Acuitas Digital Alliance. The purpose of the alliance is to combine their technology and capabilities to make it easier for retailers to integrate their front-end and back-end analytics.

T+Ink in collaboration with WestRock and Intel showcased its smart e-ink display tag technology. These tags can be mounted on store shelves and pegs to track inventory in real-time, measure sales velocity, and allow for dynamic pricing.

Mobeam showcased its light-based beaming technology that enables POS laser scanners to read barcodes from smartphone screens. This allows retailers to integrate mobile payment, loyalty cards, membership cards, gift cards, tickets, vouchers, and digital coupons into their app, which can be read through their existing scanners at checkout. For brands, specifically CPG brands, this allows them to follow their digital coupons throughout the entire shopping journey and understand which coupons are performing and which are not.

On the other hand, The Flash Pitch event presented by NYU Polytechnic Incubator was a combination of speed pitch meets Shark Tank. Eight early-stage startups were given the opportunity to pitch for two minutes followed by a four-minute Q&A. In classic fashion, the judges from Bain Capital Ventures, BMW iVentures, Corigin Ventures and Pilot Mountain Ventures were relentless, firing questions to learn more about traction, growth strategy, defensibility, current challenges, etc.

When the dust settled, LiquidTalent, which offers companies a marketplace to find high-quality developer and designer talent on-demand, and Denarri – an electronics-focused shopping app that remembers user preferences as they use it to make future shopping faster – were the two startups that caught our eye.