Category: General Content

NFL Teams Up With Google For Original VR Series

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Continuing its experiments with VR content, the NFL announced it is expanding its partnership with Google to develop a nine-part VR series that will offer viewers a 360-degree perspective of life in and around the NFL. This marks the league’s first foray into producing content in virtual reality. The series will be available to watch via the NFL channel on YouTube, with the first episode scheduled to debut on Thanksgiving Day, as well as via the NFL VR app for Daydream, Google’s upcoming affordable mobile-powered VR headset.

What Brands Should Do
As more and more brand marketers rush into VR to capitalize on the booming popularity of the emerging medium, many fail to come up with a sustainable, long-term VR strategy that fits their brand. The NFL, however, avoid this rather short-sighted approach by developing this multi-episode VR series, which could attract more football fans to try out VR viewing. Brands should take a cue and start developing VR content that truly enhances brand messaging and contributes to the campaign objectives.

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

 

Source: TechCrunch

American Express Creates Slack Bot For Buying Concert Tickets

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
American Express is making it easier for its cardholders to find and purchase concert tickets within popular workplace communication platform Slack. Working with creative agency B-Reel, AmEx created a Slack bot that can guide users through the process with event data from Ticketmaster and, once an order is confirmed, use their on-file AmEx credit card information to complete the purchase. The bot also allows users to split the bill simply by tagging other Slack team members in their answers. The company debuted the prototype at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival on Tuesday, with plans to roll it out for public testing within the coming months.

What Brands Should Do
Slack currently has over 4 million daily active users, which represents a sizeable professional audience segment that brands can reach via chatbots. Previously, Kayak showcased a slack bot prototype to help customers book plane tickets via natural-language messages. This AmEx bot serves as a good example for brands looking to develop their own bots as it provides customers with real utility value and offers a seamless user experience thanks to the payment integration.

The Lab has extensive knowledge about building chatbots. 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: Co.Create

Twitch Launches Unblockable Video Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Popular live-streaming site Twitch is launching a new video ad product that aims to circumvent ad-blocking software. Taking a page out of Facebook’s playbook, Twitch is now making its video ads indistinguishable from the site’s regular content so as to bypass detection by ad-blockers. The Amazon-owned site acknowledges in a blog post that it is “well aware that many dedicated Twitch viewers” use ad blockers but insists its platform will stay “agnostic” toward ad-blocking.

What Brands Should Do
This new ad product highlights the ongoing push-and-pull between consumers’ increasing avoidance of ads and digital platforms’ need for monetization. While this initiative should boost the viewability of Twitch’s video ads, brands looking to reach the young Millennial audience on Twitch may also consider native advertising such as the live, in-stream branded content that Carl’s Jr. tried with Vice Media.

For more information on how brands should leverage interesting branded content to earn consumer eyeballs, check out the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: The Verge

Hasbro Creates Mobile App That Brings Play-Doh Creations To Life

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Hasbro launched an iOS app that can bring your Play-Doh creations to life on your smartphone. The company debuted the Play-Doh Touch app, which uses the phone’s camera to scan Play-Doh creations made with its Touch SHAPE TO LIFE STUDIO set and transforms them into animated game characters that kids can play with in the app.

What Brands Should Do
With this app and its accompanying Play-Doh set, Hasbro is taking an innovative approach to driving digital engagement and adding a new dimension to their physical products so as to cater to shifting consumer habits. More brands, especially those in the CPG and entertainment fields, can benefit from adopting a similar approach to leverage today’s mobile devices to enhance their products and marketing experiences.

 

Source: Engadget

Header image courtesy of Hasbro press release

L’Oréal Launches Virtual Reality Salon For Hair Stylist Training

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
L’Oréal has found an interesting way to use VR technologies to improve its Matrix Academy program, a branded training program for hairstylists. Working with VR software startup 8i, L’Oréal will be offering hairdressing classes via a room-scale volumetric VR experience, which allows trainees to walk around the room, view the hairdo from different angles, and even step into the instructor’s virtual body and learn how to style the model’s hair from a first-person view. The goal is to enable aspiring hairstylists to learn the latest hair techniques and hone their skills without having to travel for their training.

What Brands Should Do
This initiative showcases a rare enterprise use case for brands to leverage burgeoning VR technologies to modernize their training programs. Moreover, this VR initiative also points to a future that beauty-related branded content can evolve into. In recent years, makeup tutorials and product review videos have gained significant traction on sites such as YouTube and Instagram, giving rise to a slew of beauty vloggers and influencers. The possibility of extending such educational VR programs to let consumers learn makeup skills in an immersive virtual experience would be a truly exciting way to attract beauty customers.

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

 

Source: VentureBeat

Image Credit: 8i Medium post

Hulu Strikes Partnership With Strata For OTT Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Hulu is teaming up with Strata, an ad buying and selling marketplace, to build an ad platform geared toward streaming video. Strata, whose software is used by 99% of broadcast stations as well as over 1,000 ad agencies, says this new platform will offer advertisers an ad buying experience similar to that of local linear TV for Hulu’s streaming content across viewing devices. Hulu will convert ad impressions to TV rating-like metrics to make it easier for ad buyers to incorporate Hulu into their media mix.

What Brands Should Do
This partnership is particularly interesting considering that Hulu has just inked deals with Disney and Fox to carry their channels on its upcoming OTT live TV bundle, which could push more viewers to drop their cable subscriptions. With more and more viewers choosing on-demand viewing over linear TV, brands need to consider adjusting their media mix and increasing ad buys on ad-supported streaming services such as Hulu to follow the eyeballs.

To learn more about how brands can reach viewers on OTT platforms with ads or branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: AdWeek

Twitter To Speed Up Customer Service By Offering Brands Chatbots

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter continues to make its platform more brand-friendly as it launches a chatbot service in Direct Messages that brands can use to speed up their customer service. The new feature allows brands to partner with nearly a dozen third-party services to build automated message systems specific to each brand, such as Welcome Messages and Quick Replies, to generate timely responses to inquiries and prompts from customers. Brands such as Pizza Hut, Spotify, Tesco, and Airbnb are among the first to try out this new product.

What Brands Should Do
Twitter has been steadily adding customer service tools to its platform, and this introduction of chatbot services is a natural step for Twitter as it builds out its customer support tools to appeal to the growing needs of brands and their customers. A recent study by Twilio found that most consumers now prefer to use messaging to interact with businesses rather than calling. As Twitter continues to make its platform more brand-friendly with new messaging features, we expect to see more brands utilize the tools to provide better customer service.

To learn more about how brands can reach and engage with customers via conversational interfaces such as messaging apps, check out the first part of our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: AdWeek

Header image courtesy of Twitter Advertising

Instagram To Test Shoppable Photos With 20 U.S. Retailers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Instagram is diving deeper into social commerce as it announces that next week it will start testing a new feature that will let users buy products by tapping on non-ad posts. Working with 20 U.S.-based retailers including Macy’s, Kate Spade, JackThreads, and Warby Parker, Instagram will allow retailers to tag their photos with pricing information, product descriptions, and hyperlinks that direct users to brand websites for purchases via an in-app browser.

What Retailers Should Do
Previously, retailers have long been able to direct Instagram users to destination sites for purchases by using its Carousel ads. This new feature, however, will enable brands to turn their organic posts into ecommerce opportunities and transform their Instagram accounts into a digital storefront. While there’s certainly room for improvement such as payment integration, it is nevertheless an important step for Instagram as it continues to make its platform more business-friendly. Retailers and brands looking to harness consumer attention and sell directly on social platforms should keep a close eye on this development.

 

Source: Instagram for Business

Header image is a promotional image courtesy of Instagram for Business

Reddit Launches Interest-Based Ad Targeting Product

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Reddit has offered subreddit-based ad targeting for a while now, but it is now broadening its targeting capability to be more interest-based, allowing brands to target audiences based on “a handful of predefined interests (e.g., sports, gaming, music, and more) which will be informed by which communities they frequent,” according to CEO Steve Huffman. Interestingly, Reddit is also allowing users to opt out of this new ad product so as to appease a significant portion of its user base that is adamantly anti-ad.

What Brands Should Do
This new interest-based ad product allows brand advertisers to reach an audience that shares a particular interest across different subreddits in a more effective way. Reddit currently has over 240 million monthly unique visitors, and despite its notoriously ad-avoidant user base, some brands such as Toyota and Ford have found moderate success in their content marketing efforts on Reddit by playing to user interests and sensibilities. If your brand wishes to incorporate Reddit into your marketing channel mix, this new ad targeting product should be useful to locate an engaged audience.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Epicurious Revamps App With Better Native Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Popular recipe site Epicurious has revamped its mobile app to better integrate native ad units to offer a smoother user experience. The app, which was launched in 2009 and made Epicurious the first food publisher with a mobile app portal, previously supported banner ads and disruptive video ads. With this revamp, the Condé Nast-owned food publisher is getting rid of banner ads on mobile and adding sponsored content tiles that emulate the in-app designs for galleries and recipes. Epicurious is using custom content management system Copilot and a Google SDK to power the native ad experience.

What Brands Should Do
This revamp should help food-related brands reach their targeted audiences on the Epicurious app more effectively with branded or sponsored content. By improving its ad products, Epicurious is also doing its fans a favor by offering them a better app experience, which in turn should encourage app usage and user engagement.

As we pointed out in the Ad Avoidance section of our Outlook 2016, branded content serves as a good way to engage increasingly ad-avoidant consumers, and more brands should take note of the increasing number of native ad products available and explore their options in terms of finding the most suitable content creators and publishers to work with.

 

Source: AdExchange

Header image is a promotional image courtesy of www.epicurious.com