Category: Uncategorized

Your Eyeballs Are Money

Posted on by Lab Team

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter were assembled on a panel to discuss advertising. The participants expressed some common views on the industry but also some sharp philosophical differences emerged.

Neal Mohan of Google stressed that for advertising they are trying to embrace context, for example mobile vs. desktop and lean forward vs. lean back settings. He also highlighted that measurement represents one of the biggest unsolved problems in the landscape today. It’s critical to be able to measure the efficacy of digital ads in terms of driving sales. Google is currently investing a lot in solving this problem.

Gokul Rajaram from Facebook agreed that context was important, and pointed out that Facebook has been focusing heavily on creating an optimized mobile experience. In fact, a full 23% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile at this stage. The guiding philosophy behind the recently-launched Facebook Home was to put your friends at the center of your mobile experience rather than your apps. It was key, he indicated, that advertising not be interruptive, but that it fit into the flow of the natural way people are using an application.

Kevin Weil of Twitter discussed how the site is “a bridge, not an island”, insomuch as it drives action from sponsored content out into the world. He described the platform as the social soundtrack to TV, pointing out that 95% of social commentary about TV is on Twitter. He feels the two platforms thus make each other stronger for advertisers. Mr. Weil also pointed out that no one typically screenshots a banner ad and shares it, the way people actively retweet promoted tweets within their Twitter feeds.

A difference of opinion emerged into how to credit different digital marketing tools for effectiveness measuring purposes. Facebook’s point of view is that the last click before purchase doesn’t necessarily deserve all of the credit; they feel that brand-building interactions (e.g. Likes, Suggested Posts) play a more important role in driving purchase than conventional wisdom would currently say. Meanwhile Twitter feels as though engagement with Tweets and links therein that drive to purchase are critical, and the “last click” before purchase deservedly gets the lion’s share of attention.

Buzzfeed: Everyone is Literally* Crazy

Posted on by Lab Team

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed delivered an entertaining keynote touching on content, social networking and cats. The key theme was that many Internet users’ online behaviors actually roughly correlate to DSM-IV-recognized mental disorders, including:

OCD
Histrionic Disorder
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
ADHD
Oppositional Defiant Disorder
Caffeine Intoxication

As he dove into each of these mapping them to online behavior, he made a number of interesting insights that align with Buzzfeed’s approach to curating compelling content and driving eyeballs. In the end so much of how people embrace some content and not others reflects traits that are inherently human. A slide from Blade Runner was shown and the Voight-Kampff test was referenced.

One example was the role of cute/funny content in our lives. When you and a friend laugh together about a good joke, the next day you may not remember the joke as much as you remember being with your friend and sharing a good time. Similarly, cat pictures are not about cats – they are about connecting with other people.

A content-related tip was to “publish into the zeitgeist”. You try to capture a fleeting moment when everyone is interested in the same thing. An example of this was Buzzfeed’s picture of tipped-over yogurt as “earthquake damage”. A more recent example could be the now-famous Oreo tweet during the Super Bowl blackout.

Jonah’s presentation also contained a nugget of direct advice to marketers. When creating ad creative that you hope to go viral, consider the extent to which the content is the sort of thing someone would be proud sharing. He noted that the things people search for on Google the most (e.g. “sex”) rarely correlate with things they share on social networks. So from a creative standpoint, this drives a divide between a brand’s SEO and display ad strategy and their content/social strategy. As Jonah pointed out, women in bikinis may drive browser clicks, but that same content is unlikely to be proudly shared on social networks even if it is otherwise compelling.

On another note, Jonah shared that 50% of Buzzfeed’s video traffic happens during Primetime TV hours. This could indicate Buzzfeed has become something of a competitor to many of the emerging second-screen applications that tether to the TV programming being watched.

*figuratively

TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon

Posted on by Lab Team
“Team #10 needs a Leap Motion Controller. Does anyone have a Leap Motion Controller?” asks the man with the mic. Half a dozen hands go up. So goes the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon final presentations.
The programmers assembled here today in the Manhattan Center in midtown NYC have been up all night coding “hacks”, simple and rough tech product ideas. They will soon each present their ideas and be judged by a panel composed of VCs, entrepreneurs, and folks with backgrounds at Y Combinator, Techstars and the like.
Sometimes the ideas come out half-baked and don’t make much sense. But sometimes these projects turn into real companies, like GroupMe. The presentations are lightning-fast, with a hard limit of 1 minute each so they can get through the 160+ teams.
Here are some fun ideas that were presented:
Rendevous – Tracks people you crossed paths with throughout the day who are also using the app. Helpful for when you see the same person on the train each day, but you’re not completely sure.
Weather To Golf – App that monitors golf courses in your area. When weather is good and a tee time is available, sends you a text message and allows you to auto-dial the course to reserve a golf game.
Hangout Later – Built on Foursquare API. You check in to the app and it uses 4sq “Where To Next” feature to pick a cool spot (based on previous checkins) in between you and where a friend of yours has checked in. It auto-creates a text message to send to those friends who are nearby, suggesting the auto-picked spot.
Rambler – Tool to let you visualize your credit card spend on a map, using the plaid.io API for transaction data.
SocialPhish – A simple Visa-sponsored game that entertainingly educates users about phishing issues with an Asteroids-like game involving cute animated fish.
Squirrel – Crawls through your evernote notes and delivers a personalized newsletter of relevant content.
Machine Learning mapped news reader – Allows you to browse news articles on a big story pinned to a map based on where they were published. Lets you scroll through time to also see when each article was published. Learns what news to surface based on your behavior.
“Oh Shit I Need Olivia Pope” – Playing off of a character from the TV show Scandal, responds to user inputted questions or major issues of the day scraped from the New York Times with quotes from the character Olivia Pope. Basically, a content-branded online magic 8-ball.
GeoHue – Uses Google Image search for buildings overlaid on geography to determine a given geography’s recommended color palette.
Lightning Poll – Location-based mobile polling. You log on and see polls going on within your vicinity.
Bar Power – Gameifies a night out drinking. Earn points for doing good things lose for bad things. Overlays your score across various neighborhood on a map.
Menu AR – Point your phone camera at menu item, augmented reality mechanism shows images of the menu item via Google image search.
weatherLight – LED lightbulb that changes color and steadiness based on weather forecast and location. Configured and controlled via mobile app.
Yumbites – Scan UPCs of products in your fridge, matches against recipe database and tells you what you can make for dinner.
Bounce – Mobile app that uses the Foursquare API  to pick a nearby highly-rated restaurant when you’re hungry. The twist is that it only gives you one suggestion, and you can’t hit the search button more than once every two minutes. It is meant to make a decision for you when you are indecisive.
—
One of the featured APIs at the event was GM’s infotainment platform (alternately called MyLink or  IntelliLink depending on the brand). A handful of the projects that used this technology included:
Kar Nanny – Tracks a car’s location, fuel level, speed etc. For parents to watch over teens who are driving around.
Learn To Drive – This GM API project was by teens instead of just for teens; the coders who made it are still in high school. The app acts like a virtual driving instructor letting a person who is just learning know specific steps to take(e.g. use turn signal) as they navigate around.
News.io – App for GM cars that can read NY times articles to you as you drive.
Hail – App on GM platform & mobile. Allows people to offer money for rides. People make offers on mobile app. People using car app can see who is offering how much to go where. You can then pick them up. You basically act as a one-person Uber on an as-needed basis. Might be against several laws, local ordinances, and serial-killer-avoidance strategies.

The Future Of TV Starts With A Name Change

Posted on by Lab Team

There comes a time where naming conventions seem to hold back progress.

If we still called music “cassettes” it would be hard to imagine the effect this would have had on the way products like iTunes or services like Spotify would have been developed and marketed.

It strikes me that the future of TV , in terms of how content is searched for, found and viewed and how TV advertising manifests, is being hampered by the concept of TV and it’s antiquated name.

TV’s used to be large boxes in the home that you watched TV shows on, that were broadcast by TV companies on TV Channels.

Especially in the UK and Europe, you were quite likely to sit down at watch Channel Number X for the evening.

Increasingly these separate TV based units are becoming meaningless, the notion of a TV channel seems rather strange, even the idea of a “show” made for TV seems a little odd in an era of long and short form content on Vimeo, Youtube, News Websites etc.

A new name is required and with it a new way of thinking.
Much like we used to talk about records then cassettes, then CD’s and then MP3’s, each with their own cassette player, discman etc, we now just talk about music.
We now need to think not about DVD’s and TV Channels and Set top boxes, but about what it is Video.

Our TV’s are on the edge of being nothing to do with TV. They are merely large screen through which to play video.

We no longer sit down and “tune in” to see what is “on”, increasingly we sit down and think about specific content we watch. Smart TV’s like Samsung with their S- Recommendation engines now surface content based on our behavior and regardless of the format of content and the pipeline that brought it. Your thirst for soccer could be quenched by Live Soccer on Fox Soccer, a match on your DVR, an iTunes hosted video of the top goals ever, or highlights for free on Youtube.

Thinking of the TV as large screen for video allows the imagination to rethink other aspects. As an agency that seeks to serve the needs of brands, why are we now bound by the limitations and expense ofTV advertising.

TV Advertising can be done more accurately.
Digital TV’s can record data about your behavior and can work at an individual level, you now no longer need to buy a show, you can buy a individual house at a specific moment in time.

TV Advertising can be linked to an action.
You are now showing video to people on a large connected screen. Opportunities to buy products featured in shows will soon become common, as will click to find out more, or click to enter competitions

TV Advertising can be done more creatively.
With targeting down to a household ads can be served sequentially to build a narrative and ads can now be based on real time context or other data to make ads richer. They could pull in your feeds from you social graph, show what your friends think of the products etc.

TV Advertising can be done more measurably.
Any action based creative can be used to measure response in real time, thus providing ways for advertisers to test creative.

Even more than this advertising can now be served more quickly and much more cheaply/

So my only question remains, with this new world of the large screen and richer ad experiences, what does the TV’s new name become?Screen Shot 2013-04-11 at 9.30.58 PM

Mobile advertising – turning the dream into a reality.

Posted on by Lab Team

Since about 2005, every year has been the year when mobile advertising was going to explode.

In 2013 it’s expected Mobile Ad revenue will top $11.4bn after growing 20% in the last year, so it’s pretty safe to say we now live in a world where Mobile advertising has arrived and predictions now show over the next 5 years mobile ad revenue will rise faster than any other media.

While this sounds hugely impressive, by two key measurements Mobile advertising is failing to live up to expectations.

1) The revenues are not keeping pace with the time spent on the media, we now spend 4.5% percent of our time on mobile, but yet only 1.7% of ad spend is on the channel, and this gap is rising as smartphones become ever more popular and ever more used.

2) The value of mobile ads are still low, a typical CPM of $1.31, about 1/3rd of other digital ads and around 1/20th of TV.

What’s more the ability to monetize mobile traffic has never been greater, it’s the largest challenge facing some of the most important companies of our time, be it Facebook, Twitter or any content provider without a paywall.

But what most disappoints me is the very unambitious and extremely uncreative way that people have looked at mobile as advertising platform, it reminds me of how most digital ads have completely failed to make the most of the unique opportunities the channel has to connect with people in incredible ways.

Allow me to follow a brief journey through the history of digital advertising:

1995
Digital ads first appeared around 1994 with the world’s first pop up ad and some banner ads. While this may have been an entirely new media channel, the thinking was basically taking existing print ads like loose leaf ads and newspaper ads, and simply finding digital equivalents.

2005
Around ten years later with much faster internet access speeds allowed video to be streamed and as a result people took 30 second TV ads, chopped them down to 15 seconds and the world of pre-roll ads was born.

It strikes me that this timeline shows how incredibly poor innovation in the space has been, while we may see page dominant ads, or expandable banners, or MPU units, basically the entire world of digital advertising, a new paradigm of targeting, connectivity, measurement, real time, personalized content, and what we got was traditional ads repurposed.

Mobile seems no different.
Whether it was using SMS as a way to clumsily impart basic information or the decision that the mobile internet should be turned into screen real estate in exactly the same way that we approached physical newspapers, the quality , functionality and ambition has remained low.

What I don’t get has been the way that we’ve approached both digital and especially mobile as a screen. Just simply space to take up and put in front of eyeballs.
mobile ads
Our mobiles are far more than screens, they are our diary’s, our address books, our things to do lists, our maps, our photo albums, our location beacons, our coupon collectors and more, in many peoples cases they are their wallets.

The opportunities for mobile marketing are incredible, but it won’t come from thinking of the mobile as a small screen we take everywhere, but as a device that can remind us to do things, tell us where things are, keep our shopping lists, and so on.

And as our phones start to understand more about how we behave and where we are, the opportunities for mobiles to start predicting our behavior and make suggestions to us at the right time and the right place, will soon make advertising as a service the true moment where Mobile advertising really has arrived.

More on predictive computing and the true value of mobile advertising later.

Buzzworthy Fashion App Bokenhat Launches for iOS and Android With Blockbuster Partnerships

Posted on by Lab Team

One of the most buzzed-about fashion apps to come along in a while has officially launched today. Created by London startup Chapeau Labs, Bokenhat recommends the type of hat you should wear on a given day. It determines this from a variety of sources including the weather, your location, current fashion trends and current traffic conditions via a partnership with Waze.

As you might recall from earlier this year, Accuweather and The Weather Channel engaged in a fierce bidding war to provide the weather data for Bokenhat. “I usually never regret losing a bidding war,” the CEO of TWC was quoted as saying after Accuweather was chosen, “but this one stung. No one is really capturing the hat-wearing audience and this was a good a shot as any.”

Similarly, the selection of Waze to provide traffic data was quite a coup for the social driving startup. Heretofore Waze had been used for a wide variety of campaigns, including the famous Tylenol “Traffic Headache Simulator” and the Carnival Cruises “Imagine Your Car Was a Big Cruise Ship” efforts. By breaking into the hat space, Waze has opened up a whole new market for them to monetize.

“This app is going to be a big deal” said industry analyst Reginald Goodwin Esq. this morning. “This pulls the entire hat-choosing experience together in one place and makes a tough choice easy. Chapeau Labs can do no wrong.”

The Best Pecs In Tech: Silicon Valley’s 5 Buffest Bods

Posted on by Lab Team

Silicon Valley has always been known for brain over brawn, but lurking in the shadows of the startup world are a handful of technerds that also put in some serious hours hitting the gym. Here’s our roundup of the five best pecs in tech:

1. William Marist, Bitript

2. Tom Goodwin, Vingle

3. Elliot Frisk, CodeIron

4. Evan Chadakoff, Quadstech

5. Blake Goldberg, Meezu

Think you’ve got these guys beat? Tweet or Instagram a pic of your Pecs with #bestpecsintech

YouTube Launches “Un-Watch” Feature

Posted on by Lab Team

Inspired by the backlash against Garden Spot High School’s “Gangnam Style” homage and other similar videos , YouTube today launched a new “Un-Watch” feature. Garden Spot’s clip has been described by Huffington Post as the “worst Video on The Entire Internet.” Four agonizing minutes of kids screwing up the horsey dance, singing “Spartan High School style,” and “Hey.. Lunch lady!” with droll, half-hearted delivery. And while millions are ironically amused, others simply want a few wasted minutes of their life back.

Un-watch is a curious product launch but has been a long time in the making. “It’s a way to not only erase the experience” says YouTube’s Elliot Neary, “but to also remove the support you’ve given a video by upping it’s viewcount. Ultimately this is about identity— people want to know that their views are are being counted only for the videos they believe in.”

The new “Un-Watch” button lives directly next to the video play button but with a reversed icon facing leftward. Google is a bit more cagey about revealing details of the technology itself. “You know those scenes in Men In Black where they use that device to erase a few minutes of memory?” says Neary. “It’s basically like that, but online. It’ll be like you never watched the video at all.”

The response to the launch has been unanimously praised and has unsurprisingly found strongest support among teens and sci-fi fanatics. Geoff Countryman, a longtime Star Wars devotee and self described “tech nerd” says “it’s basically the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. There are some videos that just need to be unseen.”

Forget Apple, What About An Amazon TV?

Posted on by Lab Team

File of a box from Amazon.com is pictured on the porch of a house in Golden, Colorado

Until the iWatch was rumored the continued need for people to talk about Apple, was a conversation fueled by rumors of a Apple TV.

For me this felt like another chance for Apple to redesign something that people didn’t realize was terrible until Apple showed us the way. Generally the seem to put up with bad design and then coin Apple as a genius for what amounts to quite obvious simplification. In fact, I’m amazed at how much bad design people put up with, every single remote in my apartment is a ugly and functions terribly, my microwave has 32 buttons, of which I use 4.

All the conversations thus far have spun around how Apple would change the way we navigate content. They would likely bring in this world of easily searchable pipes where we’d not focus on the content provider ( Fox) or channel ( Fox Soccer ) or means of providing content ( Cable TV), but instead focus on a content theme like “Soccer” and then show us all manner of “Soccer” content from live games, to video on demand, to youtube to Bluray discs you could buy. It seems like a natural way to change the game, but one fraught with political battles that only someone like the mighty Apple could win.

A question I was asked to Answer on Quora got me thinking, it was asking why T-Commerce ( the idea of buying goods and services directly from TV Ads or TV shows) has not taken off.
I quickly replied how many brands don’t have ( or want to have) the fulfillment systems required to make that attractive, so while P&G are big enough to have a online shop, they aren’t too keen to sell you a bottle of Dawn for home delivery when they’d rather you went to store. I jokingly suggested the only people who’d ever be able to make the model work would be Amazon. It got me thinking.

An Amazon TV would be much like a Kindle HD. It would be sold at cost price, hardwired to buy “content” or in this case “Goods” from Amazon. Amazon would gain market share of these TV by undercutting the competition. As an Amazon customer, you would have your address and Credit card on file. I’d expect it to have a built in camera for monitoring user behavior, but also for Skype calls and gesture control. So as a consumer your experience would be this.

You could see any Amazon content on your TV with no set top box, so you could play TV, Music and Videos via your Amazon account ( and price based on how many people viewing). I’d expect Amazon to have amazing search and recommendation engines based on your demographic and behavioral data and what your friends and influencers watch. This content would be served by agreements with Cable and other TV companies, again, only Amazon has the might to be able to do this with the required weight.
It would be gesture controlled, and be linked up to Amazon Voice to allow you to make video calls over the internet. Amazon would then sell the ability to buy items seen in TV shows, Films, Games and Advertisement breaks to Brands, but with the deals fulfilled by Amazon – so you may be watching Skyfall and buy MacCallan Whisky or Heineken, or be watching A teen drama and decide to buy the outfit worn by the main character, or most likely be watching a TV ad and decide to add a product to your shopping basket.
Amazon then start to get even more customer data, it showcases the effectiveness of ads, records which creative works, when they work, you could even serve banner ads in real time based on promotions that may be going on, so long as the customer finds them valuable,

It seems to be the perfect combo, brands selling more to people, to target more precisely being able to monitor ad effectiveness and producing a solution that works well for typical heavy Amazon users.

VISUAL / UI DESIGNER (Junior/Mid-Level)

Posted on by Lab Team

User interface design and UX is what you live for, whether you made that button in Photoshop or with CSS it’s always perfect. you spend more time zoomed in at 400% than not because if every pixel isn’t just right you won’t be able to present it. Not because someone else will notice, but because that’s just not how you roll. You’re comfortable with design for all mediums and can just as easily make a comp for a presentation or work with our content team on concepting motion graphics. Most importantly, you have big ideas for the future and can make them come to life for your clients.

For more information, email [email protected].