Category: General Content

Foursquare Teams Up With Nielsen To Map Offline Attribution Of Online Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Foursquare is teaming up with Nielsen to track the offline attributions of online ads, especially in terms of how they drive consumers into stores. As part of the partnership, Attribution by Foursquare will be integrated into Nielsen’s digital measurement products. This will generate real-time behavioral insights of anonymized consumers for customers of Nielsen’s measurement products, allowing them to measure the real-world impact of their digital campaigns.

What Brands Should Do
In the past, marketers would turn to Foursquare for measuring increases in foot traffic and go to Nielsen to measure in-store spending. Now with this integration, brand marketers can judge the effectiveness of their online campaigns in one place with a more streamlined process. As more and more brands come to realize the importance of location data in measuring the full impact of digital campaigns, more and more ad platforms such as the ones from Google, Facebook, and Snapchat have all made efforts to team up with location data providers and improve their capability in tracking offline attributions. More brands may benefit from this trend and should take note of new tools as they become available.

 

Source: MediaPost

Mall Of America And Nordstrom Launch Chatbots To Better Serve Holiday Shoppers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Retailers continue to explore new customer experiences powered by chatbots as two more prominent U.S. retailers launched their respective bot services. Mall of America, the nation’s largest shopping center located just south of Minneapolis, worked with IBM to leverage Watson’s cognitive computing power to develop a chatbot service that can help visitors navigate the sprawling shopping center and suggest routes and activities according to user input on how much time they have and what they are looking for. The chatbot is accessible via MoA’s Facebook Page as well as via a mobile web browser.

Similarly, Nordstrom launched its first chatbot on the Facebook Messenger and Kik on Monday to help holiday shoppers pick out gift items. The bot will start by asking a series of questions about who they are shopping for and then suggests appropriate gifts from Nordstrom’s online store accordingly. Nordstrom says the chatbot will available to consumers up until December 24.

What Brands Should Do
This is the latest example in retailers exploring chatbots’ potential in conversational ecommerce. Earlier this week, Sam’s Club also launched a “gift genie” chatbot that aims to help shoppers select holiday gifts. The rise of conversational commerce points to changing consumer behavior on mobile and a shift in brand-customer interaction.  According to a recent research from DigitasLBi and Harris Poll, more than a third of U.S shoppers surveyed said they’d be willing to make a purchase through a chatbot and spend as much as $55.80 on each order. As more brands start to realize the vast potential of chatbots, it is imperative that they find the right partner to work with to develop effective conversational customer experiences.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building branded chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. 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 client 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 & Business Insider

L’Oréal Canada Taps Shoppable Video To Enhance Influencer Marketing

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Aiming to accelerate its ecommerce growth and enhance its influencer marketing program, L’Oréal Canada is teaming up with Toronto-based mobile tech firm dubdub to leverage its  “dubcandy” app to convert viewers and boost online sales. The app supports shoppable video content that can link out to retailer websites, and L’Oréal is looking to use it to set up a new compensation model for influencer campaigns based on conversions.

What Brands Should Do
WIth the recent explosion of makeup tutorial videos and online influencers, many beauty brands are figuring out the best way to integrate influencer marketing into their existing content strategies. This move by L’Oréal suggests that one way to do so may be combining it with shoppable content. Not only does it allows L’Oréal to monetize video content across their influencer network, it also provides a quantitative way to measure the performance of their influencer content.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience working with beauty and CPG clients to create and implement retail experiences that utilize social and influencer content. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square, featuring a “Colorcast” digital sculpture that displays NYX’s social content in fascinating, color-coordinated combinations, is a proud showcase of our team’s work in this space and elevated NYX as one of the most innovative digital beauty brands of 2016 named by WWD. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop an updated retail strategy and implement digital-driven solutions to modernize your retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: PressWire

Bacardi Hacks Instagram Stories To Create An Interactive DJ Experience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Liquor brand Bacardi found a way to create a fun interactive DJ experience on Instagram to connect with its music-loving customers. Working with BBDO, Facebook’s Creative Shop, and Swizz Beatz, Bacardi hacked Instagram Stories, the Snapchat-inspired feature that Instagram debuted four months ago, to create a unique musical experience where users navigate back and forth through a series of sound clips by tapping on a simulated two-turntable DJ set. Like all Instagram Stories, this initiative will only be available for 24 hours, but Bacardi plans to publish this set of Stories to its feed and other social channels for later viewing (but no longer interactive) after it expires.

What Brands Should Do
This initiative from Bacardi offers an innovative take on Instagram Stories and, by extension, Snapchat Stories that more brands can learn from to develop this kind of interactive experiences on social channels. Too often, brand marketing on social media is focused on resurfacing marketing materials or driving conversions with special offers, whereas mobile-native experiences like this one or the Kik campaign we developed for Sony Music can truly help brands to achieve organic engagements. With consumers increasingly shunning traditional ads and spreading more and more media time on mobile, it is imperative that brands be creative with their mobile and social initiatives and explore new ways to engage with customers.

 

Source: AdWeek

Lead image courtesy of BacardiUSA’s YouTube 

Sam’s Club Launches “Gift Genie” Chatbot On Facebook Messenger

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Members-only retail chain Sam’s Club launched its first Facebook Messenger bot today to make it easier for customers to find the right gifts for family and  friends. Dubbed “gift genie,” the bot is created by Rockfish Interactive and Conversable and uses a combination of both natural language conversational exploration and random gift idea generation to help Sam’s Club shoppers quickly find suitable gifts by categories.

What Brands Should Do
This is the latest example in brands exploring chatbots’ potential in conversational ecommerce. Previously, eBay and TGI Fridays launched their respective Messenger bots to sell directly on the messaging app whereas fashion brands such as Burberry have used Messenger to launch new product lines. The rise of conversational commerce points to changing consumer behavior on mobile and a shift in brand-customer interaction. Therefore, other brands should take note and start developing a strategy for conversational commerce.

The Lab has extensive knowledge about reaching consumers on mobile messaging apps and building branded chatbots. The new NiroBot we build in collaboration with Ansible for Kia delivers comprehensive product information about the all-new Niro model via friendly chats. If you’re interested in reaching your audience on messaging apps and better serving them with a chatbot, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) for more information or to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: VentureBeat

Panasonic Debuts Smart Shopping Basket That Can Tally Your Bill

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Following Amazon’s awe-inspiring introduction of a checkout-free grocery shop, Panasonic today joined the race to automate the retail experience with a smart shopping basket. Capable of scanning the items shoppers put in the basket, tallying up the bill, and automatically bagging up the purchases at the end of the shopping trip, this smart shopping basket is designed to make shopping more convenient and frictionless without full-on surveillance. Panasonic is currently testing the prototype at a Lawson convenience store in Osaka, Japan where the company is headquartered.

What Retailers Should Do
As retail technology continues to evolve at an incredible speed, it is becoming increasingly important for retailers to leverage those technological advances to modernize their retail experiences both online and in-store. For example, an interactive digital station would make product sampling much more fun and effective, as our recent work with Hershey’s has demonstrated. Even smaller things such as integrating your loyalty program into mobile payment system would greatly improve your customer experience and boost brand loyalty.

The Lab has extensive experience working with retail, beauty, and CPG clients to create and implement digitally-enhanced experiences for their stores. The recently-opened NYX Cosmetics store at Union Square is a proud showcase of our team’s work in crafting a digitally enhanced, innovative retail experience. If you’d like to learn more about how your brand can develop an updated retail strategy and implement digital-driven solutions to transform your retail experience, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Facebook To Test Live 360-Degree Video With Nat Geo

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Live video on Facebook is about to get a lot more immersive as the social network readies the debut of its first live 360-degree video for National Geographic. The nature and travel publisher will publish the first 360 Live video tomorrow at noon on its Facebook Page, documenting in spherical view as scientists emerge from the isolation pods at Utah’s Mars Desert Research Station. Facebook says live 360 broadcasting will be added to Facebook Live’s API later this month as it plans to roll out the capability to all Pages and users next year. Facebook is not the first major platform to combine these two emerging media formats as YouTube introduced its first live 360-degree video in February.

What Brands Should Do
This new feature further improves Facebook’s Live video product and offers content creators and brands a new way to connect with viewers with immersive and real-time content. At a time when many brand advertisers are starting to see the potential of 360-degree video, this move by Facebook should help it attract more experimentations as brands race to incorporate the immersive format into their digital ads. While it will not doubt take more careful planning and robust technical support to pull off, melding live streaming with 360-degree videos should provide brands a chance to connect with customers on a more urgent and interactive way that they should not miss out on.

 

Source: TechCrunch

Google Invites Developers To Build “Actions” For Google Home

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google announced on Thursday that it is now allowing select developers to create pre-approved “conversational actions” for its smart speaker and Echo competitor Google Home. The “actions” are essentially Google Home’s version of Alexa Skills, which allows users to activate new capabilities made by third-party developers for Google Assistant. Google is recommending services like its own API.AI to help simplify the “action-building” process for developers. and says open access will roll out to all developers in early 2017.

It is worth noting that Google Home handles two type of “actions”: direct and conversational. It’s only the latter that are open to developers to work on. Direct actions — commands that don’t require a conversation, such as turning on your connected lights — still require a partnership with Google.

What Brands Should Do
This announcement marks the gate-opening for brands to get into Google’s digital assistant service and smart home ecosystem, a first step in making Google Home a brand-friendly platform as Amazon’s Alexa. As Google and Amazon continue to make strong pushes for their respective conversational products, more and more mainstream consumers will soon become reachable via those emerging voice-based devices. Therefore, brands will need to explore opportunities in building advanced applications for these emerging platforms with highly engaging user experiences and conversational interactions.

The Lab has extensive experience with building chatbots and Alexa skills and we are excited to explore the new possibilities that Google Home is set to unleash. To help brands navigate the challenges and opportunities that the rise of conversational interfaces brings, we developed a proprietary system for building, maintaining  and analyzing conversational experiences called Dialogue that can guide you through every step of building conversational customer experiences. If you’re interested in learning more about this or have a client opportunity, please reach out to our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Verge

Turner Extends Snapchat Partnership To Reach Millennials With Original Shows

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Turner is extending its partnership with Snap Inc. to reach Millennial mobile consumers with  original content specifically made for Snapchat and more collaborative ad efforts. The original shows will be based on programming from TBS, truTV, and other popular Turner-owned networks and will appear on Snapchat’s Discover channels. Previously, Turner also worked with Snapchat on Live Stories for sports organizations like the NCAA in March, which has been renewed as part of the expanded partnership.The extended partnership will also result in more collaborative ad sales for the two companies as they aim to create more sponsorship and ad opportunities on the Discover channels.

What Brands Should Do
This partnership extension indicates Turner’s plan of leveraging content to reach Snapchat’s growing audience and shows Snapchat’s deepening ties with media owners. For brand advertisers, initiatives like this are what makes Snapchat an increasingly promising ad-supported media channel to reach consumers, especially those who are shunning traditional media and spending time on mobile channels instead. As Snapchat’s ad business catches up to its rapid growth and starts to compete for more ad dollars with leading sellers of mobile ads such as Facebook and Google. now is the time for brands to consider getting on Snapchat to reach its young-skewing users.

 

Source: AdAge

Brands Can Now Use Facebook’s Dynamic Ads To Drive App Installs

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Facebook has updated its Dynamic Product Ads to allow brands to drive mobile app installs with more efficiency. Now brands with serving product ads on Facebook can instruct users that are browsing its product ads to install the branded mobile apps directly. This adds to the direct-response nature of the dynamic ad units, which delivers better results than ordinary mobile app install ads, according to Facebook, as they target users already interested in the product and brand.

What Brands Should Do
Just in time for the final push of this holiday shopping season, brands and retailers would be smart to leverage this new feature to spice up their dynamic ads and reach Facebook users more efficiently. Even if the installs don’t drive immediate returns, they can carry some long-term benefits, as having an app installed on a shopper’s smartphone keeps it top of mind.

For more information on how retailers can effectively reach connected consumers by taking a mobile-powered, omnichannel approach, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: VentureBeat