Category: General Content

Google And Ivyrevel Developing App That Design Dresses Based On Personal Data

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google is teaming up with Ivyrevel, an online-only women’s fashion brand backed by H&M, to develop an Android app that can design a dress for you based on your contextual and activity data, such as location, weather, and physical activity.

Dubbed “Data Dress,” the app will analyze the personal data input, including their activity data once the users opt in. Specifically, the app will use the Google’s Snapshot API to monitor the person’s daily activities, including things like where they went, where they eat dinner or hang out, how often they work out, and so on, for a week and come up with a dress design that best fits their lifestyle. Users will be able to buy the personalized dress directly from the app if they like what they see.

What Brands Need To Do
This app presents an interesting case of how brands can leverage machine learning to offer personalized products and services. For brands, especially those in fashion and retail, it is important to recognize the possibility that AI-powered solutions unleash, which very much relies on the kind of customer data that brands can supply. Therefore, brands should start thinking about what kind of customer data they can feed into machine learning services to gain consumer insights and supplement their targeting and personalization effort, as well as coming up with a clear value exchange they can offer consumers for that data.

 

Source: TechCrunch

 

Header image courtesy of Ivyrevel

H&R Block Enlists IBM’s Watson To Help With Preparing Tax Returns

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
IBM’s supercomputer Watson can now add “tax accountant” to its expanding resume, as the company formed a partnership with tax preparation service H&R Block to apply Watson’s cognitive computing power to helping people maximize their tax returns. The two companies created a merged Block-Watson system that uses Watson to analyze the notes that tax preparers put in based on their conversations with clients and suggest possible tax solutions in real time. H&R Blcok says the AI-powered system will serve as many as 11 million clients who visit its offices during this tax season, which the tax preparation company also created a Super Bowl ad to promote.

What Brands Need To Do
This is a new example of brands plugging AI and machine learning solutions into their services to enhance customer experience. Last month at CES 2017, we saw many brands, such as Carnival Cruise and Under Armour, that incorporate AI in one way or another. From the fast development in autonomous cars to smaller home gadgets, artificial intelligence of varying degrees is being integrated to a wide range of products to enable smart automation and personalization solutions. For brands offering services and experiences, the implementation of AI-powered solutions is set to unleash a new kind of customer experiences that they will need to adapt.

 

Source: MarTech Today

Intel’s Drone Fleet Shines Bright During Super Bowl Halftime Show

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
During the opening moments of last night’s Super Bowl halftime show, a fleet of over 300 drones amazingly swarmed and swirled in a smooth, coordinating manner to form various background images such as the U.S. flag to support Lady Gaga’s performance. The drones, dubbed “Shooting Star” and launched by Intel last year, are a foot across and weigh just eight ounces. The performance is coordinated by a central computer that can do unlimited UAV animations in three dimensions.

IBM wasn’t the only companies that brought drones to the Super Bowl broadcast. Amazon also teased its “delivery by drones” Prime Air service in its Super Bowl ad last night, telling customers to “look for it soon.” Previously, Intel has worked with Disney to deploy this drone fleet for performances at the Disney World at Orlando.

What Brands Need To Do
This marks a high-profile debut of drones for entertainment use on national television and heralds the great potential that drones are set to unleash across major industries including entertainment, logistics, travel, and agriculture. For brands in those industries, now is the time to start exploring the new use cases that coordinated UAVs can unlock and figure out how drones may be integrated into your services and content production. As drone fleet management continues to mature, we expect to see more interesting and exciting use cases of drones to emerge for brands to take advantage of.

 

Source: Wired

Header image courtesy of Intel’s YouTube

Baskin-Robbins Gears Up For Super Bowl With In-App Promo

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Gearing up for the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, Baskin-Robbins is aiming to drive more customers to try out its mobile app with a digital coupon for its Polar Pizza. The brand is hoping that by offering a discount for a popular party item it can cater to the football fans hosting Super Bowl parties and establish a mobile touch point. The app features a store finder that can help customers locate the nearest BR shop.

Moreover, Baskin-Robbins is also leveraging third-party weather data to deliver relevant messaging to customers in different locations. For example, the company would surface messaging in its digital channels to drive people to local BR locations when an unseasonably warm day occurs.

What Brands Need To Do
As brands continue to leverage mobile to reach local customers, it is important that they take big media events like the Super Bowl and local contextual data into account. Last October, IBM began to integrate weather data it acquired from The Weather Company into its marketing solutions so as to improve the relevance of targeted ads for its clients. With more and more contextual data at disposal, brand marketers will need to adopt a mobile-focused, data-driven strategy to reach customers in the right context at the right time.

 

Source: GeoMarketing

Beer Giant AB-InBev Partners With Pitchfork To Create Content Site

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
In its latest content marketing move, beer giant AB-InBev is teaming up popular indie music site Pitchfork to launch October, a new online publication that will focus on draft beers. The company will work with the Conde Nast-owned publisher to create beer-related content such as reviews small-batch brews, essays on topics like beer trading, a directory of beers and, eventually, a regular lineup of events and podcasts. Aiming to broaden awareness and interest in beer-brewing culture, the site won’t carry any AB-InBev branding and the Pitchfork team will have full editorial control.

What Brands Need To Do
This is an interesting development in branded content marketing. Previously, for example, when Diageo partnered with Thrillist Media Group’s CoLab to launch cocktail recipe site Supercall, the site has to devote a set percentage of its content to Diageo brands such as Tanqueray gin. As brands continue to leverage branded niche content to effectively reach their target audiences, they will need to expand their work with content creators to ensure the authenticity and credibility of the content they produce.

 

Source: Digiday

ESPN To Air FIFA eSports Championship Ahead Of Super Bowl

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, ESPN announced that it will broadcast the Paris Regional Finals for FIFA’s Ultimate Team Championship Series this Saturday, marking the first time the network has aired an eSports event on its flagship channel in the U.S. Previous eSports telecasts, such as the 2016 Street Fighter World Championship, were aired on ESPN2. In addition, the Championship Series will be available via live streams on Facebook, Twitch and YouTube Gaming.

What Brands Need To Do
In recent years, eSports has grown from a niche media platform into a massive global phenomenon that brands are starting to tap into to reach the tens of millions of fans around the world. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that a sports channel like ESPN is starting to incorporate eSports into its programming, despite the wide availability of live streams. Nevertheless, as media companies rush into the eSports space, brands gain new channels to reach the young, male-skewing eSports audience, brands, especially those seeking global recognition, need to start leveraging the massive reach of eSports events and platforms via sponsorships and ads.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Domino’s Adds Full Menu And Customizable Orders To Messenger Bot

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Gearing up for the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, the busiest day of the year for pizza deliveries, Domino’s Pizza has updated its Facebook Messenger chatbot to add more ordering options. The Dom pizza bot was launched in August last year and only supported reordering the default order saved on a Domino’s customer account. Now with this update, Messenger users can chat with the bot to put together a customized order from a full menu without a Domino’s account. One caveat remains, however, that all orders made from the bot will have to be paid with cash, as Domino’s opted not to integrate the bot with Messenger’s existing payment system.

What Brands Need To Do
Domino’s latest move in improving its chatbot reaffirms its commitment to developing chat-based ordering tools to better serve mobile customers. The pizza chain also launched an Alexa skill last year to allow customer to place order via voice. It also shows how brands may consider a tiered release strategy when it comes to creating branded chatbots. After all, no bots are totally perfect at launch, and it is crucial that brands continue to put resources and efforts into maintaining and improving the bot based on customer feedback long after the initial launch.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers on messaging apps. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a chatbot experience supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.

If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on messaging apps and other conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related clients and learning opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

 

Gillette Enters eSports With League of Legends IEM Championship Sponsorship

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Gillette becomes the latest CPG brand to tap into the increasingly popular eSports by announcing a global partnership with ESL, the world’s largest eSports company. As part of the partnership, the leading men’s grooming brand will serve as an official sponsor of the League of Legends IEM World Championship in Katowice, Poland later this month.

To offer eSports fans attending the championship, Gillette will set up an on-site design studio where they will have the opportunity to customize Gillette razor handles using 3D printing technology. Moreover, the brand will offer grooming services to all competitors throughout the opening weekend. The company will also host autograph session featuring xPeke, an eSports star player and Gillette’s newest Global Ambassador, who will also be featured in Gillette’s “Pursuit of Precision” content series.

What Brands Need To Do
By adding an eSports player to its roster of brand ambassadors typically filled by celebrity  athletes, Gillette joins a growing number of brands, including Audi, Snickers, and Coca-Cola, in recognizing the popularity and cultural legitimacy of eSports. As companies race to capture the young, male-skewing eSports audience, brands, especially those seeking global recognition, need to start leveraging the massive reach of eSports events and platforms via sponsorships and ads.

 

Source: Yahoo Finance

Facebook Plans An OTT Streaming App As It Aims For More Video Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
According to The Wall Street Journal. Facebook is planning to launch an ad-supported streaming app for set-top devices, such as Roku and Apple TV, to showcase its growing video content. The social network giant is reportedly in talks with media companies to license long-form “premium” video content, but it is unclear whether user-generated video content will also be pulled in from News Feed.

What Brands Need To Do
This app follows Facebook’s relentless efforts over the past few years in cultivating video content as it makes a strong push for more video ads. Earlier this week, the social network announced an expansion of partnerships with third-party ad tech companies, promising to provide advertisers more data and a clear comparison between social ads and TV ads. Once launched, the app would offer brand advertisers a valuable new video channel to leverage Facebook’s audience data to reach targeted customers. As Facebook continues its push into the digital video space and challenges YouTube for a piece of the growing video ad budget, brands should carefully consider their video strategies and take into account Facebook’s growing video ad products.

 

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Snapchat Updates Ad Platform, Rolls Out “Snapcodes” That Open Websites

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Snapchat launched a revamped ad platform on Tuesday with some nods to the ad tech platform of Facebook. Snapchat first opened up its ad API in October to enable brands advertisers to purchase ads at scale, conduct A/B testing, and receive real-time analytics. The new ad platform adds six new API partners as part of this announcement, bringing the total to 15. Snapchat has also inked partnerships with five third-party ad tech providers, including mParticle, Kochava and LiveRamp, to facilitate audience-matching campaigns.

In related Snapchat news, the messaging app also updated its “Snapcode” feature to allow all users to generate the proprietary QR-codes that now can not only ink to Snapchat profiles, but also opens designated web urls via an in-app browser. Whenever users take a “snap” of a Snapcode, a pop-up window prompts them to either open the ink. Snapchat will also provide in-app analytics for Snapcodes that are scanned for more than 100 times, including the total number of scans over the past three months, as well as the percentage of people who opened the link after scanning it.

What Brands Need To Do
Snapchat introduced the Snapcodes for user profiles in January 2015 to let users add each other without having to type out usernames. Soon, many brands and publishers started using Snapcodes in their social media profiles to draw attention to their respective Snapchat account. Throughout 2016, brands like Sprite, FOX network, and Universal Pictures featured customized Snapcodes in their billboard ads and packaging to drive mobile users to check out more branded content on Snapchat. Therefore, this expansion of Snapcode functions should come as a welcome addition to brands as it opens up more possibilities for brands to incorporate it in their campaigns to bridge the print ads and the digital assets.

According to Snapchat Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan, the average Snapchat user opens the app 18 times per day and spends 25-30 minutes a day in the app. Now with the added support for ad buying, Snapchat took another big step in improving its ad products to match its rapid growth. Brands need to consider getting on Snapchat to reach its young-skewing users via not only standard video ads, but also more unconventional ad units such as custom Geofilters and branded selfie lenses.

 

Source: TechCrunch & Marketing Land