Fast Forward Archives - Page 2 of 3

Fast Forward: What Marketers Need To Know About Facebook’s F8 Event

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Lab Team

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

• Facebook launched Messenger Platform to help brands to communicate with users
• Live Video with API strengthens video and video ads on Facebook
• New tools for app owners and VR content creators

What Facebook Announced
At its annual developer conference on Wednesday, Facebook discussed their ten-year roadmap and introduced a number of new features to improve its platform and make it easier for brands to connect with Facebook users. Following Microsoft’s launch of a bot framework two weeks ago, Facebook is introducing chat bots and developer tools to its messaging app with the debut of Messenger Platform. During his opening keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demoed chat bots from CNN and 1-800-Flowers to showcase how chat bots can help publishers and businesses communicate with users on Messenger. While there will not be a curated bot store, the Messenger team does promise to help with discovery, mostly via search.

Facebook also introduced a Live API so that developers can live stream video to Facebook from any app or device. The new API should vastly expand the reach of Facebook’s Live video broadcasts as it allows lots of new broadcasting methods, like the use of multiple cameras, drones, and new devices. This is in sharp contrast to Facebook’s biggest live-stream competitor, Twitter’s Periscope, which requires streaming from a single smartphone. Therefore, FB Live can scale from a front-facing smartphone camera through TV production quality equipment and has already shown it can draw audiences that rival cable TV with the right content.

Moreover, Facebook is diving deeper into virtual reality with an open-source Surround 360 camera rig to help professional content creators capture 360-degree video with minimal post-processing. It is also looking to ship the Touch controllers for Oculus VR later this year to add interactivity to virtual reality. Zuckerberg also teased some multiplayer features that Facebook is working on to make virtual reality a more social experience.

Facebook continues to build out its ecosystem with to two new tools: Account Kit and a new “Save to Facebook” button. With Account Kit, developers can streamline account signup and login, extending the popular “Login with Facebook” feature to users without Facebook accounts. Facebook is also expanding the four-year-old “Save for Later” feature with a new “Save to Facebook” button, which enables users to save content from third-party sites to read or watch later in the Saved tab Facebook.

Facebook also shared some interesting stats on its fast-loading Instant Articles program. Since launch, Facebook says posts in Instant Articles have logged 20% more opens and a 70% lower abandonment rate than other content. They also report an average of 30 seconds of engagement on Canvas Ads.

What Brands Need To Do

• Develop useful bots to reach customers on the messaging apps they’re already using
• Take advantage of the emerging popularity of live streaming to connect with consumers in real time
• Start producing branded VR and 360 video content to immersively engage consumers

As Messenger hits 900 million monthly users, there is no denying that it is important for brands to be present on Facebook’s messaging platform to connect with those users. With the launch of Messenger Platform, Facebook is making it possible for brands to build bots to communicate and serve customers directly on Messenger. For example, Facebook showcased a shopping assistant bot from Spring, which suggests appropriate items for shoppers to purchase directly on Messenger. Facebook’s demo shows that chat bots can be trained with basic responses on a web interface with no code while more in-depth responses require custom development, aided by Facebook’s new Bot Engine tools. Particularly interesting here is the Customer Matching feature, which allows brands to sync up customer profiles and conversations across Messenger and SMS.

With the Live API, Facebook is making it easier for brands and developers to integrate its relatively new live-streaming feature into their apps, platforms, and even devices. As we noted recently, live-streaming video is starting to blow up thanks to Facebook. Live video content lends an authentic touch to brands, which millennials seem to embrace. For brands looking to experiment with live-streaming, they should be prepared on the technical front to ensure a smooth broadcast, but also willing to roll with the punches and embrace the unexpected.

As Facebook makes a strong push for VR and 360-degree videos, brands would be smart to seize the opportunity and work closely with content creators to craft interactive VR experiences to intrigue and engage consumers. The new Facebook Surround 360 camera should be a great tool for brands to produce 360-degree content, and the coming interactive and social features should help make virtual reality a more powerful tool for brands to create immersive branded content to engage their audiences with.

How We Can Help
The Lab is actively producing 360 content, chat bots, and live social video products for our clients. Please contact Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss how your brand can better serve your customers with these emerging platforms.

For previous editions of Fast Forward, please visit www-stage.ipglab.com. Please reply with any constructive criticism or feedback. We want these to be as useful as possible for you and your clients, and your input will help us immensely.

All pictures featured courtesy of the F8 Livestream

Fast Forward: Microsoft Rolls Out Conversations As A Platform

Posted on April 4, 2016 by Lab Team

• Microsoft announced a major initiative that enables the development of cross-platform bots
• Brands can develop bots to reach customers on messaging apps that are popular among mobile users
• Branded bots are poised to become a crucial tool for brands to get on conversational interfaces

What Microsoft Announced
On Wednesday at its annual developer conference Build, Microsoft unveiled its grand vision for building out the next-gen tools for conversation-based platforms. And at the center of its plan is a bot framework that will allow developers to build cross-platform bots that will enable brands to communicate with customers, enhance services, and gather feedback across websites, social media, messaging apps, and Office 365 email. The BotBuilder SDK is now available on GitHub under an open source MIT license.

Moreover, Microsoft also announced that it’s adding Cortana, Microsoft’s AI personal assistant, and an API for bots to Skype with the launch of Skype Bots Platform. Skype users will soon be able to book trips, shop, or order take-out just by talking with Cortana, who will communicate with third-party party bots to carry out the tasks as needed and aiding in the discovery of new services. The company also previewed the Skype Video Bot, which aims to bring bots into real-time video.

What Brands Need To Do

• Develop useful bots to reach customers on the messaging apps they’re already using
• Take advantage of the emerging popularity of conversational interfaces with messaging-based customer services
• Integrate some humanizing touches into automated replies to make users feel more comfortable engaging with bots

For many brands, bots can be a great tool to reach customers on the messaging apps that they are already using. By developing cross-platform bots, brands will be able to tap into the marketing potential in conversational interfaces, which we discussed in detail in our Outlook 2016. Since mobile users spend the majority of their times in social and messaging apps, it is getting increasingly difficult to convince consumers to download an app for tasks that aren’t daily habits. Chat bots can help brands remove the friction in that process and serve customers directly in the places and methods that they are accustomed to.

Furthermore, well-designed bots can create an environment in which users are more willing to share free-form answers to open-ended questions than they would in a formulaic questionnaire, which could uncover valuable insights for brands from regular customer feedback. This kind of software is also much easier to iterate and improve as functionality that users want is requested explicitly and updates can be rolled out without the approval of App Store gatekeepers.

For travel and hospitality brands, bots can help users look up travel information and book flights and hotel rooms. Hyatt Hotels currently employs of a team of 60 across three global locations to help guests with their customer service needs via social and messaging channels. Earlier this week, KLM airlines announced a partnership with Facebook that will allow KLM customers to receive flight confirmations, check for flight status updates, and ask questions right in Facebook’s Messenger app. Building cross-platform bots with Microsoft’s framework can help automate and expand these use cases to more platforms and reach more customers.

For restaurants and QSR brands, bots can be of great help in handling online orders and gathering customer feedback. Microsoft showcased a Domino’s Pizza bot created with the BotBuilder framework, which works in multiple apps such as Skype and Slack and supports natural language interactions.

For retailers, bots can be a great tool for product recommendations while also allowing retailers to sell directly to users on messaging apps. For example, Sephora recently created a bot on messaging app Kik that will guide users through a short quiz and offer them a customized product recommendation based on the answers users give.

Market Impact
Microsoft is hardly the only company that wants to help developers and brands build bots. All major players in the development of conversational interfaces, from big companies such as Facebook and Google to messaging apps like Kik and Slack, have all announced their own programs and tools to help brands build bots to communicate with consumers. What Microsoft announced on Wednesday, however, will make it a lot easier for developers and brands to build bots that will work across various marketing channels and touchpoints. The coming proliferation of bots should also propel the mainstream adoption of conversational interfaces, which would change the rules of search and content discovery and further alter brand-customer interactions.

How We Can Help
Please contact Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or want to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss how your brand may benefit from integrating with messaging apps and voice platforms.

All images courtesy of Microsoft’s developer site

IPG Lab Releases SXSW 2016 Trend Recap

Posted on March 22, 2016 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]).

Fast Forward: Rich Media Comes To Facebook Ads

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Lab Team

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

Facebook Canvas extends the fast, clean, and frictionless Instant Article experience to mobile ads
Brand storytelling will be more engaging and outside the reach of ad blockers
Advertisers need to make sure the experience they provide matches consumers’ heightened expectations

What Is Canvas
Last Thursday, Facebook launched Canvas, an ad product that loads Facebook-hosted, full-screen rich media right from the News Feed, bringing the instant-loading, cleaner mobile experience introduced by Instant Articles to Facebook’s ad suite. The social network is also offering brands a user-friendly self-serve tool to help them build Canvas ads with no coding required, allowing brands to add interactive rich media like animations, carousels, product catalogs, tilt-to-view images, and videos to their ads with ease. Different versions of a Canvas ad can be targeted to different demographics, just like other Facebook ads.

The first advertising partners have seen much higher engagement than with other Facebook ads. ASUS, the computer and electronics manufacturer, saw 42% more clicks on their Canvas than other ads and 70% of their Canvas viewers clicked through to the ASUS website. Viewers of Lowe’s Canvas spent 28 seconds on average and the 16 million people Coke reached averaged 18 seconds.

What Brands Need To Do
With Facebook making Instant Articles available to all users last week, users will soon be served with a lot of Instant Articles-enabled pages, familiarizing them with the fast-loading experience. This means that Facebook users will expect a similar experience when it comes to ads as well. Therefore, brands should use Canvas to create rich-media ads that tell the full creative story that otherwise would require a microsite. Here are some good examples of brands that are already trying out this new ad product.

For restaurant and QSR brands, Wendy’s test campaign serves as a good example of the rich media experience that Canvas offers. Wendy’s created an ad that deconstructed a cheeseburger and let people scroll, swipe, and see GIFs of all the different ingredients in one of its burgers. The ad received 65 seconds of average view time, and 2.9% of viewers got all the way to the bottom and used the Wendy’s restaurant locator.

For fashion and retail brands, Canvas offers a great tool to build engaging mobile ads with a lot of beautiful images that fully showcase their products. Usually, pages with a lot of images would take a long time to load, losing impatient consumers in the process. Canvas’ fast-loading ads solve that problem without loss of fidelity or simplification in storytelling. Several brands including Mr Porter, Michael Kors, and Carrefour were brought on as launch partners to try out the new format and had successful results.

For entertainment brands, the new ad format also allows the creation of deeper narrative and engagement of viewers through video and interactive media. NBCUniversal, for example, is featured on Facebook Canvas’ launch site with an interactive ad for the Minions with videos, GIFs, and social content, ending with a buy button for the movie’s DVD.

Market Impact
Facebook started testing the immersive full-screen ad unit last September, and the company says early tests have shown users spend more time on Canvas ads with the top Canvas ads averaging over 70 seconds of view time per user. While it remains to be seen if the increases in engagement are due to the novelty of the format, the flexibility and responsiveness make us believers. As consumers avoid ads more frequently, Facebook is offering a way for advertisers to build compelling, targeted experiences with potentially broad reach and that can’t be blocked.

All pictures featured are promotional images courtesy of the Facebook Canvas site

Fast Forward: CES 2016 Highlights

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Lab Team

This is a special edition of our Fast Forward newsletter, bringing you a summary of the major trends we spotted last week at CES 2016. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

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CES 2016 may be over, but the technologies showcased in Las Vegas last week will no doubt continue to impact the market in the coming months. Here, we highlight the most important market trends we saw and what your brand can do in response.

What We Saw

Televisions used to be the focus of CES, and this year a ton of manufacturers rolled out High Dynamic Range sets, adding better color and contrast to their 4K displays. But the real innovation in television is happening in software and distribution, with Netflix expanding to a hundred and thirty new countries, and nearly every set-top interface supporting universal search across cable and streaming services.

This year cars took over CES. What used to be dominated by the aftermarket is now filled with OEMs. Last year, the story was all about driverless cars. And while that’s still present, this year manufacturers are eager to tell you how quickly they’re transitioning to electronic vehicles. Cars are becoming less like machines, and more like smartphones on wheels.

If a device has any electronics, you can assume that there’s a connected version, but not all of them are quite what we’d call “smart”. Some of the best connected devices were Whirlpool’s new washing machine, which can automatically reorder detergent from Amazon when you’re running low, and Samsung’s Family Hub fridge, which takes a photo of its contents every time you close it, so you never have to wonder if you ran out of milk.

Virtual reality was still in high demand at CES, with Oculus opening pre-orders for its Rift headset on the first day of the show and both Sony and HTC expected to launch their devices later this year. While there were still long lines to demo the major VR headsets, this year we saw even more hardware to create it. Cameras to shoot in 360-degrees were all over the show floor.

And of course, drones were everywhere at this year’s show. Drones that pilot themselves, drones that follow you, and drones that go faster, farther, or behave more like pets. Even a drone that will carry you. This year also saw the announcement that Nevada would house the world’s first droneport by 2018, designed to train and license the workforce of the future.

For more industries and actionable suggestions for your brand (like the two following examples), check out our CES 2016 Fast Forward playlist here.

For Automotive Brands:

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Auto brands should capitalize on increased availability of 360-degree videos, which can now be viewed on Facebook and YouTube as consumer-grade 360 cameras grow in popularity. They are perfect for viewing car interiors. 3D printers are also now cheap enough that consumers will adopt them or otherwise have access. Providing 3D models of popular and aspirational cars can let fans download and print them out. Encouraging a community of enthusiasts to modify those models with their own suggestions could build brand engagement and loyalty.

For Entertainment Brands:

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For content owners and distributors, Cisco showed off their cloud video delivery platform that allows instant interface updates across cable boxes, phones, and tablets. With the incredible proliferation of content, experiments around discovery are more important and now much easier.

Entertainment brands have a lot to think about as the industry quickly evolves. Integrating OTT services that promote co-viewing like Genii’s Cast can help engagement and reach. Offering downloadable content for fans to 3D print their favorites at home, as SyFy did with characters and habitats from The Expanse, can help spread the love. And as 360-degree videos get adopted both as a new form of consumption on Facebook and YouTube and on new cameras like the Ricoh Theta S, consumers will crave more from the pros.

What You Can Do

For more industries and actionable suggestions for your brand, please check out our CES 2016 Fast Forward playlist here.

And that was CES 2016! We hope you find something useful in our recap of this year’s biggest tech event. We’ll be back next year to help you sort through the rubble. In the meantime, look out for our Fast Forward updates and events, and reach out to our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) if you’d like to schedule some time with The Lab in person.

For previous editions of Fast Forward, please click here.

Fast Forward: CES 2016 First Look

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Lab Team

This is a special edition of our Fast Forward newsletter, highlighting the major trends we are seeing so far at CES 2016. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

The 2016 International Consumer Electronics Show is set to open tomorrow in Las Vegas. The Lab team has arrived in advance and scouted the venues to bring you a sneak peek at this year’s CES.

More Gadgets Start Talking

This year at CES, we are seeing more and more devices that can talk with users with a conversational interface. Instead of forcing people to learn how to use it, new devices are as easy to use as talking to or texting with a friend. For example, Sengled unveiled a smart LED bulb that responds to voice commands. It has a built-in speaker and microphone, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. Intel showcased a pair of Oakley sunglasses that can give you advice as you work out via a set of attached headphones. The new pair of fitness-focused sunglasses can report your stats, coach you through your workout, and be controlled entirely by your voice.

Similarly, Ford teamed up with Amazon to use virtual assistant Alexa to connect smart home devices to your smart car. With Ford’s Sync Connect and Amazon Echo, users can ask Alexa to start their car from their living room, and drivers can talk to Alexa and control their house while inside their car. Conversational interfaces are showing some serious momentum in both applications and adoption. In the near future, devices that don’t support voice commands might seem broken in the same way that non-touch screens have started to.

Video Cameras Expand Their View To Create 360-Degree Content

While most news surrounding the VR space in the past year has been about hardware for viewing content, a lot of news at CES this year centers on hardware for creating content, and capturing 360-degree views. These videos can be viewed in VR headsets or in new spherical video viewers on Facebook, YouTube, and elsewhere.

Whereas established camera-makers like Samsung and Nikon are joining in the trend and coming out with their own 360-degree video cameras, upstarts are still pushing the boundaries, adding 360-degree viewing experiences to new use cases like the Vuzix iWear VR headset and Vozz smart helmet. Ricoh’s Theta S 360-degree camera comes with an impressive 8 GB storage and is a consumer-grade 360-degree camera for $350. And if you don’t have hardware that will do it for you, Videostitch can help video creators assemble 360-degree videos in real time.

Cars Are Getting Cleaner And Smarter

Last year at CES, self-driving cars made their debut and took the spotlight. This year, driverless cars are getting closer to reality with major automakers such as Ford, Volkswagen, and Audi (working with Nvidia) all stating their commitment to developing autonomous cars.

But the real hype this year belongs to the electric cars. Faraday Future unveiled its first concept vehicle, the FFZERO1. It’s a sleek, single-seat, all-electric supercar that could produce as much as 1,000 horsepower. Ford announced plans to bring 13 electric vehicle models to market by 2020. Similarly, Volkswagen also introduced a couple of new electric car models in their press conference on Tuesday. GM CEO Mary Barra summed it up best when he said that the car industry is going to change more in the next 5 years than it has in the last 50. Cars are well on their way to becoming more computer than machine.

Smart Home Appliances Get Smarter

You can assume that there is a connected version of every product now. And as more and more devices and appliances get connected to the Internet, they are also getting a lot smarter. For example, Samsung introduced the Family Hub Refrigerator that comes with a 21.5-inch touchscreen built in. Working with MasterCard’s Groceries app, it will allow users to shop for groceries right on its door. Similarly, Whirlpool added Amazon Dash service into the smart appliances in its new Smart Kitchen Suite to enable simple re-ordering of household supplies.

Soon, those smart home devices may help develop smart cities. Panasonic has started working with the city of Denver to develop its first smart city project. Using Panasonic’s Internet-connected cameras and other technologies, Denver’s citizens will be able to access real-time information about utilities and mass transit.

The bad news is that not all connected devices work together. Some of the most heated competition is over which IoT smart home standard will rule them all, with entrants ranging from the major smartphone players to plucky startups. Until there is a clear winner or two, early adopters will face confusing choices and frustrating connections.

TVs Dazzle With Ultra HD Displays And New Interfaces

Every year at CES, the TV manufacturers pretty much have the same narrative – TVs are getting bigger, thinner, and better picture quality. This year is no different. One of the main stories this year is increased contrast and more colors based on technology called High Dynamic Range or HDR. Sony introduced three new TVs with crisp 4K HDR and ultra-thin bezels. Similarly, LG is set to debut a giant 98-inch 8K display and a new OLED 4K TV with HDR. LG is also showcasing a prototype of a flexible 18-inch display you can roll up like a newspaper. However, the very limited supply of 4K content to date is no doubt hurting the mainstream adoption of those ultra HD TV sets.

Perhaps more importantly, we are also seeing TVs get new interfaces to reflect changing viewing behaviors. Instead of focusing only on live TV’s rigid programming grid, we are seeing some new TVs integrate OTT content services with live TV, such as Samsung’s new SUHD Smart TV and TCL’s first-ever Roku 4K TV. Samsung’s new interface will make switching inputs as simple as switching channels and allow searching for content across live TV, Netflix, and soon YouTube.

Game of Drones

As with last year, drones are everywhere at CES. Some are getting bigger and steadier. Others are getting smaller. Most are gaining autonomous features. This year, the competition among dozens of drone-makers are pushing the UAVs into new heights. Among them, the fixed-wing Parrot Disco, which can fly at 50 MPH and whose shape resembles a paper airplane, and Fleye, which operates in a protected nest design for added safety, are the two early favorites.

What You Can Do

If you happen to be in Vegas now, make sure to check out some of the exhibitors we mentioned above. And stay tuned for more CES coverage.

Please contact Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab.

Fast Forward: How Yext’s Xone Can Reach Black Friday Shoppers On Cyber Monday

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Lab Team

• Yext launched Xone, a beacon network for offline-to-online engagement
• Retailers can message shoppers in real-time or retarget later on Facebook and Twitter
• Analytics dashboard gives transparency to repeat visits and increased footfall driven by ads

What Yext Announced
Yext, a leader in digital location management and one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the US, launched a location-based real-time audience engagement tool which is integrated with retargeting and online-to-offline attribution analytics. The new product is called Xone (pronounced “zone”). The Lab had a chance to sit with the Yext team on Friday, and we came away impressed.

Working with commodity beacon hardware, the SaaS tool allows retailers to accomplish three main goals. First, if a customer opens a Xone partner app while in range of a store’s beacon, the retailer has the option of displaying a “Xone Tip” that could promote a specific product or offer a discount. Note that this only happens inside a partner app as Xone does not do push notifications. Second, all customers with a partner app and bluetooth on that come within range of the beacon have their device IDs added to a database and can be retargeted on Facebook and Twitter now and soon on Instagram, Pinterest, DoubleClick, and more. That audience retargeting can be filtered by location, number of visits, and visit age. Third, there is an analytics dashboard pulling everything together, including attribution and analysis of visits to stores after online retargeting.

What Retailers Need To Do
The holiday shopping season is coming soon and it’s not too late to install and implement a complete system in your stores. For example, if you want to retarget customers that come in on Black Friday for Cyber Monday sales, Xone is the best way we know of to do it. While you’d have the option of in-store messaging that most people associate with beacons, you can also buy ads for both real-time or later placement in Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline. Black Friday or Christmas Eve deals are a great reason to target in real-time, even with different messages throughout the day, followed by retargeting on Cyber Monday or later in the holiday season. The retargeted ads on Facebook and Twitter can be cross platform, to appear on mobile, desktop, or both.

Xone’s attribution analytics can also help you calculate ad effectiveness in driving customers back to your store, even without new creative. For example, you could measure repeat customer visits for an audience that is seeing your ads versus a control group. Xone is the first beacon ecosystem product we’ve seen that completes the full circle from in-store data aggregation and messaging, retargeting, through attribution. If you’ve been waiting to try beacon technologies in your stores, the cost and time associated with setup have past the point of impediment.

We’ll soon have a demo of Xone in the Lab and can walk you through the setup, retargeting, and insights you’ll gain. Please contact us to schedule a demo.

Market Impact
Yext represents retailers’ digital location data for more than 500,000 locations, giving retailers an easy way to push updates to store hours, phone number, or other data to more than 100 app and map publishers, including Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Yahoo, and Yelp. With that foundation supporting it, we expect the platform to get buy in from more and more app owners. For now though, Xone partner app network is limited to 30 million monthly active users, not all of which have bluetooth turned on. However, with the growing adoption of wearable devices and bluetooth audio, more and more consumers are leaving their bluetooth on, so the reach of Xone’s network will expand accordingly.

All pictures featured are promotional images courtesy of Yext

Fast Forward: What You Need To Know From Oculus Connect 2 Event

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Lab Team

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

• New Samsung Gear VR, the VR product with broadest consumer potential, in time for Christmas this year
• Oculus Arcade, Video, Touch, Platform, and Minecraft all coming soon and with lots of partners
• Get ready for commerce, interactivity with haptics, social experiences, and many experiments

What Oculus Announced
On Thursday at its second annual developer conference, virtual reality leader Oculus announced new partnerships across hardware, software, and content as well as updating ship dates for all but its signature product, the Oculus Rift. At the keynote, Mark Zuckerberg talked about how he and Facebook see virtual reality as the next big medium in the evolution of communication, even though we are essentially just getting started on video.

Then, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe, Samsung’s Peter Koo, and others from the Oculus team explained their roadmap for the next 12 months:

Oculus Arcade, which will launch with dozens of games including Gunjack and Land’s End, from Monument Valley studio ustwo; and Oculus Video, with major studio and content partners including Netflix, Twitch, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Vimeo, and Hulu.
A consumer version of Samsung Gear VR, launching before Black Friday, for $99 and compatible with all 2015 Samsung phones. We think the key to consumer adoption is to power VR through the smartphone and the price point and timing announced at the keynote were big crowd pleasers.
Minecraft, the enormously popular 3D sandbox game now owned by Microsoft, is coming to Oculus in Spring 2016.
Hardware partners Asus, Dell, and Alienware will all ship Oculus Rift-ready desktop PCs next year for under $1,000, in time for the Oculus Rift launch in Q1.
No new information around price or timing for the consumer version of the Oculus Rift. Their signature product is still coming “Q1 2016.”
Oculus Touch, the handheld controllers that make interacting with a VR world possible, will launch in Q2 next year. We tried these in the Toybox demo and in Epic’s VR game Bullet Train, with great success. They make interactivity in VR real, both as a personal and as a shared experience with someone else, anywhere in the world.

What Brands Need to Do
We came away from the event with a much deeper understanding of the timeframes around the virtual reality industry and market. We expect that strong consumer adoption is still a few years away, though the types of experiences that are possible now are extremely impressive. There are two main paths to a successful VR experience now. The first is an immersive, powerful experience developed for an event where dozens or hundreds get to share the experience but the point is PR value. The second is a mobile-based experience driven through Cardboard or Samsung Gear VR in which greater scale is the goal. Either way, virtual reality is as Mark Zuckerberg said the next big communications and storytelling medium. Connecting with your customers and fans with the right VR experience can cement the relationship in a way never-before possible and in a way that’s impossible to understand without experiencing. The Media Lab can help strategize as well as connect you with the right partners to make a vision reality.

• Auto brands can create virtual test drives that jump from the mundane traffic near a dealership to s-curves in the Alps. For example, Lexus created a fully immersive driving simulator to promote the 2015 RC F Sports coupe, complete with racing seat, pedals, and steering wheel. They showed the setup off at multiple events. With a different take, Chrysler put together a virtual tour of the Chrysler 200 factory. The 30-second video, available on laptop and mobile devices, takes viewers through the five million square foot factory.

• Education brands can connect students with teachers or visualizations in seemingly impossible ways. For example, Google built a virtual field trip product called Google Expeditions, which uses Google Cardboard and any smartphone. Google says that “now, teachers can choose from a library of 100+ virtual trips to places like Mars, the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Wall of China.”

• Entertainment brands have unlimited possibilities, from exploring side-stories and changing perspective to interactive experiences that make the viewer part of the story. For example, HBO created an installation centered around the Oculus Rift for Game of Thrones fans. The experience gave users the feeling they were scaling the 300 vertical feet of ice known as The Wall in the show.

• Fashion brands can strut their stuff in a variety of new ways. For example, Elle magazine created an experience for a 7 For All Mankind’s fashion show in February. Greatly expanding the possibility of feeling like you’re in the front row for the show beyond a select few, the experience was distributed a few weeks after the show. Rebecca Minkoff also distributed a look at their Fall 2015 runway show, designed for Google Cardboard. They even sold a branded Cardboard unit through their website for $24.

• Healthcare brands can train practitioners, help patients in new way, and more. For example, USC’s Bravemind helps assess and treat PTSD through exposure therapy and they created another project that helps amputees rehabilitate.

• Retailers can finally create the shopping experience of Alicia Silverstone’s dreams. For example, The Line worked with SapientNitro to develop a virtual tour of their flagship store in Manhattan, designed for Samsung Gear VR. Viewers navigate the store by locking their gaze on “hotspots” designated by a diamond icon, then can complete a purchase with a tap on the headset.

• Travel brands can tease potential visitors with a sense of presence that can only be beat by booking a flight. For example, Marriott tapped Media Lab partner Framestore to “teleport” users to virtual vacations in Hawaii and London last year and expanded to Chile, China, and Rwanda this year. Marriott referred to the experience as “destination sampling.” They set up events around the US for visitors to try the experience.

In the meantime, Facebook also announced that 360 video is already available in News Feed, with Star Wars, Discovery Channel, and Vice early partners. Content developed for an immersive VR experience can now be viewed by everyone on Facebook, though on a flat screen. This is a great way to get additional scale and capitalize on press before your entire audience or customer base has access to a full VR experience.

How We Can Help
Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss strategies and tactics around developing VR experiences. The Lab also currently has VR headsets— Oculus Rift and Samsung Gear VR—ready for demo in the Lab. Virtual reality is something that has to be experienced to be understood. So come by the Lab and get a VR demo to see just how engaging it can be, and understand why consumers would be excited by this technology.

All images included in this post are promotional images courtesy of Facebook/Oculus

Fast Forward: How Brands Can Take Advantage of the New Apple TV

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Lab Team

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

• Apple unveils new Apple TV, complete with a new tvOS platform and App Store
• Brands can now develop TV apps to connect with consumers in their living rooms
• A new path to native sponsorship and call-to-action opportunities

What Apple Announced
During Wednesday’s press event, Apple finally debuted the long-anticipated update to the Apple TV that aims to revolutionize the way people interact with their TVs. Equipped with a brand-new iOS 9-based operating system called “tvOS,” the new Apple TV comes with an App Store, Siri-enabled universal search across content platforms, and a touchpad remote that doubles as a game controller. The new Apple TV will ship in late October, and the tvOS developer beta is available now.

What Brands Need to Do
While we’re likely to see an explosion of new modes of interaction as developers explore the platform, we already know that good content works well in the living room. For brands who have existing content plays, such as Red Bull’s video and event content, it’s time to secure the OTT streaming rights. If your brand doesn’t currently produce content, an event sponsorship is a great way to get started. In an on-demand, App Store world, you don’t need to worry about producing a full slate of content to justify an app install — Apple themselves have an Apple TV app dedicated to the iTunes Music Festival, which this year will only feature a week’s worth of content. Focus on quality over quantity.

A couple of features which weren’t discussed on stage could provide interesting go-to-market strategy for brands: support for interactive video, and deep-linking between Apple TV apps. We expect these will be combined to form a paid app install ecosystem much like we have on mobile, with early leaders likely to be ad-supported platforms with premium content, such as Hulu and YouTube. Ahead of any such announcements, however, there are still opportunities for brands to partner with existing content creators and game developers to drive app installs or to push value offers and reminders from the TV to a phone with a single click.

What Retail & Ecommerce Brands Need to Do

• Apple TV brings ecommerce into the living room and creates a shared online shopping experience
• Experiment with shoppable videos built upon Apple TV’s support for interactive videos with links to additional info

During Wednesday’s press event, Apple invited online clothing retail platform Gilt on stage showed off their new app designed specifically for Apple TV. Users can use the new touchpad remote to scroll and swipe through the categories of clothing, view product details, and even purchase items direct from their couch. Support for ecommerce apps brings online shopping into the living room and make it a social affair to be shared with family and friends. Apple’s tight integration between TV and mobile will also allow activities to be handed off to a user’s phone, allowing a brand to activate mobile coupons which could easily be triggered automatically when the customer enters a retail location.

Moreover, brands should take advantage of Apple TV’s support for interactive videos and start experimenting with shoppable videos, which embed clickable info providing viewers with product information and an easy way to purchase, turning video content into direct sales channels. Brands such as Sears, Kohl’s, and Gap have been experimenting with shoppable videos with some early successes, and with Apple TV, shoppable videos seem to be on the cusp of mainstream adoption, demanding attention from retail brands.

What Entertainment Brands and Content Owners Need to Do

• Apple TV can deliver a rich media experience
• Index your content to make sure it is discoverable via universal search
• Explore the interactive storytelling opportunities and new types of engagement

As MLB demonstrated during the event, apps provide a great way for content owners to deliver a rich media experience with additional information and interactivity. Apple TV supports universal search across integrated apps, providing an unprecedented opportunity for new content discovery, especially those on lesser-known services. Although only available for select partners at this time, it seems reasonable to presume Apple to open this feature up to all eligible platforms down the road, similar to the universal search in iOS 9. Brands need to index their content for it to appear in favorable spots when users search for certain keywords. The added interactivity also brings new storytelling opportunities for content and ad creators to explore and connect with viewers.

Market Impact
As expected, the new Apple TV introduces a new app platform, while not (yet) providing a truly new way for consumers to subscribe to television content. Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue called it the “foundation for the future of television,” which it may yet be, timed to take advantage of a holiday season which is primed for cord-cutters. It notably provides a way for Apple to extend their entire ecosystem – which may one day include platforms like iAd and Apple Pay – into the living room, along with their massive iOS install base and developer network, something that competitors such as Roku and Amazon cannot offer.

While it remains to be seen exactly how wide adoption of the new Apple TV will be, Apple’s new products quickly reach tens of millions of units sold and they are putting significant effort behind this one. Since a large share of marketing budgets are focused on the living room, a significant change in the way content is consumed there, away from linear and even streaming and towards the interactivity of apps, is worth adapting to. For both content creators and advertisers who support them, the new Apple TV offers expanded ways to reach users who earn more and spend more, whether that’s with traditional video content, expansions of existing iOS apps, or hybrids which blend video with interactive content of different types.

Apple’s entry into the living room gaming market is a bit more of a wildcard. While it opens up an obvious new market for existing iOS games, and we’ve seen some initial support of the device from big cross-platform games like Skylander and Guitar Hero, without a first-party game controller it remains to be seen whether the platform will be used for gaming or what price points it will support. Most at risk will be Nintendo, whose Wii U hardware and mainstream audience overlap with the new Apple TV’s capabilities and appeal. But if Apple follows its usual path of year-over-year hardware upgrades, Sony and Microsoft’s consoles may also be at risk, especially if Apple can woo top-tier game developers. As far fetched as it may seem, Apple was already EA’s biggest revenue generator all the way back in 2013. For the time being, our standard recommendations for brand integrations with gaming hold true for the Apple TV as well: integrate as natively as possible with branded content, sponsorship of in-app purchases, or participating in the wider gaming community.

For More Information
Please contact Engagement Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) at the IPG Media Lab if you would like more detail or to schedule a visit to the Lab to discuss strategies and tactics around tapping into the marketing potential of the new Apple TV.

Header image courtesy of www.apple.com/tv/

Fast Forward: Facebook Unveils Virtual Assistant “M”

Posted on September 3, 2015 by Richard Yao

Your guide to tech-driven changes in the media landscape by IPG Media Lab. A fast read for you and a forward for your clients and team.

• Facebook started testing its own improved, human-assisted version of Siri
• More than just making suggestions, it will also complete tasks on users’ behalf
• Brands need to explore the new functional layer that many messaging apps are adding to their platform for transactions, customer service, and reaching new customer

What Facebook Announced
Over a month after initial reports suggesting Facebook started preparing a human-staffed personal assistant service, the social network announced on Wednesday that it has started testing a new service for its Messenger mobile chat app called M that handles user queries and requests in a text-based interface that looks similar to other conversations on the platform. The service is currently available for a few hundred users in the Bay Area, and will eventually be rolled out to all Messenger users.

Unlike rival virtual assistants Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s Google Now, Facebook claims that M will take it one step further and actually complete tasks on users’ behalf, such as purchasing items, getting gifts delivered, booking restaurants, making travel arrangements and appointments, and more. In addition to AI-powered responses, Facebook also has a team of so-called “M trainers” to handle the requests that AI can’t, ensuring all requests are answered properly.

Facebook M In action — Facebook M in action. Image credit: David Marcus on Facebook

What Brands Need To Do

• Reach customers on apps they’re already using – in this case, Facebook Messenger
• Take advantage of emerging platforms with messaging-based customer service
• Prepare for a new version of SEO to conquer the prime space in AI-generated suggestions

At a time when the U.S. market is finally catching up with the Asian market in discovering messaging apps’ great potential as a commerce platforms, Facebook is looking to take initiative in a nascent ecosystem that brands of all types could benefit greatly from. It is time to start expanding your customer service from phone call-based to include text-based messaging, reaching consumers on the platforms they already use.

As of now, Facebook seems to be deliberately keeping M neutral and completely devoid of “opinions”, i.e. whether something is good or not. Instead, it merely presents all available options as generated by algorithms. While this approach may not seem too welcoming for brand integrations, we are optimistic that Facebook would open up M for sponsored content and branded recommendations in the near future, given Facebook’s trajectory in making Messenger’s platform more brand-friendly so far. And brands need to be ready for what could essentially be a updated version of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that plays around AI algorithms to make sure their content shows up in advantageous positions in M’s recommendations.

Market Impact
M will certainly face some tough competitions: Amazon unbundled its virtual assistant Alexa from its smart speaker Echo in June; Microsoft has launched Cortana on new platforms; and Apple is reportedly integrating Siri into its updated Apple TV for voice command. But unlike other virtual assistants, Facebook M holds the advantage of being a hybrid of AI and real-human touches. Boasting over 700 million monthly users and still growing, Facebook Messenger has been actively adding new brand-friendly features to integrate businesses into its platform, clearly aiming to become go-to place for mobile discovery and customer service. Moreover, it bucks the convention of being voice-activated, and instead is text-based. Given the flexibility of conversational UI, however, it seems reasonable to expect Facebook M to adopt speech command down the road as an option, just as its competitors could easily move to texts-based communications to best suit user’s’ needs.

In recent months, we have seen some messaging apps adding a “functional layer” on top of its chatting features to connect customers to businesses. For example, popular Chinese messaging app WeChat has been actively onboarding certified brand accounts to expand the functionality of its messaging platform, to some great success. Similarly, apps like Kik, Vurb, Path, and Tango all updated their platform to add features that seek to connect users to businesses and brands via chat or in-app shops. On the other end of the spectrum, there is Magic, a startup that promises to fulfill any legal request that users send via texts, and employs real humans to handle those requests. Other similar texting-based on-demand service includes Operator, helpa, and the travel-focused Pana. Everywhere we look, the major tech companies are expanding their platforms with business-friendly features that aims to connect consumers with brands in a natural, conversational context.

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