Tag: Amex

AmEx Brings Voice Banking To Alexa With Branded Skill

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
American Express is the latest financial service to dive into voice banking with the release of its first Alexa skill. AmEx cardholders can search and sign in with their American Express online account to activate the skill, which allows customers to check their balances, access discounts and offers, pay bills, or hear about recent transactions, all delivered via voice through Alexa. For an added layer of security, users are also asked to create a four-digit PIN code that they will need to repeat every time they access their account via the skill.

What Brands Need To Do
As Amazon and their developer community continue to build out Alexa’s capabilities, the Echo is becoming an increasingly business-friendly platform for brands to connect with consumers via a conversational interface. As Amazon continues to expand the Echo lineup and push for Alexa integrations into third-party devices, brands need to take a proactive approach and create an Alexa skill in order to connect with customers at home.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer 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 conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Fortune

Amex and JBL Harman Sign On As Sponsors For Twitter’s Original Live Shows

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Twitter has found two brand sponsors for its upcoming original live shows. Brand messages from American Express and JBL Harman will appear in and around The Starters and The Warmup, which are both athletic-minded shows produced by Twitter partner Turner Sports in conjunction with the NBA. The shows were first announced in July and will be broadcasted weekly via their designated Twitter pages as well as the NBA’s Twitter page.

What Brands Should Do
This announcement underscores Twitter’s aim to monetize its live video content and attracting sports fans who are also cord-cutters. As more and more consumers choose time-shifted viewing over linear TV, brands should follow the viewers and work with content creators to explore new TV ad formats on connected TV devices and engage with the audience in their living rooms.

According to a new report from eMarketer (paywall), US connected TV users is projected to reach 202.1 million in 2020, up from 181.8 million this year. To read more on how brands can reach viewers on OTT platforms with ads and branded content, please check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: AdWeek

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

American Express Debuts Financial Service Chatbot On Facebook Messenger

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
American Express has snatched the honor of becoming the first financial institution to create a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. The credit card company demoed the chatbot at Cannes Lions with plans for a roll-out in the coming months. Designed to provide transaction alerts and other purchase-related content, the AmEx bot will message users receipts, reminders for flights they purchased, and restaurant recommendations. The company also says it is working on leveraging the purchase data to personalize the recommendations.

What Brands Need To Do
Ever since Facebook introduced chatbots to its messaging app at its annual F8 conference in April, some early adopting brands such as Mondelez and Staples have been experimenting with bots to reach the over 900 million active users on Messenger. With increased usage of messaging apps, brands need to follow the consumer attention and start developing useful bots to better serve their customers.

To learn more about Facebook’s F8 conference this year, click here to read our Fast Forward analysis of the event.

 

Source: AdWeek

Viacom Partners With AmEx To Forecast Purchase Intent

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Viacom has teamed up with American Express to launch a new ad product called Vantage Intent, designed to help marketers forecast purchase intent and reach the right audiences across platforms. It allows Viacom clients to tap into AmEx’s over $1 trillion of transaction data to create predictive audience segments that match AmEx’s data with Viacom’s viewership data, all based on anonymized forecasts and models to protect AmEx customers’ privacy.

Why Brands Should Care
Viacom has been making a conscientious effort in courting data partners in order to improve its ad products. Earlier this year, the media conglomerate reached a new multi-year deal with comScore for better cross-platform measurement, and later partnered with Roku to offer advertisers valuable data on the streaming audience. As Viacom continues to improve its ad offerings, brands should take advantage of the new tools available to devise and run more effective, data-driven campaigns.

 

Source:  Ad Exchanger

Apple Pay Goes Global With AmEx Partnership

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Apple is pushing Apple Pay worldwide with a new partnership with American Express, which will bring Apple’s mobile payment solution to consumers in Australia and Canada soon, before expanding to Spain, Hong Kong, and Singapore in 2016. Apple Pay is said to be growing by double digits, according to CEO Tim Cook during Apple’s Q4 earnings call yesterday. Previously, Apple Pay launched in U.K. in mid-July, marking its first entry into international markets.

Market Impact
Since its initial launch over a year ago, Apple Pay has come a long way, gaining growing acceptance at retailers around the U.S. Earlier this month, Starbucks, KFC, and Chili’s became the most recent companies that added support for Apple Pay in their stores nationwide. Now with AmEx’s help, Apple is set to push Apple Pay into more global markets, expanding its scope and capturing more users in the process. For brands that have presence in those aforementioned markets, this presents a good opportunity to target local consumers using Apple Pay’s integration of reward programs.  

 

Source: Re/Code

Jawbone to Launch Payments Wearable With Amex

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Re/code

Wearable maker Jawbone is making its first entry into the payment market by announcing a deal with American Express to create a payment-enabled fitness tracker, named the Up4. Enabled by NFC technology, Up4 is the first wearable device after Apple Watch to incorporate mobile payment into its functionality. Given the significant competitions in the space, Jawbone certainly needs this to stand out.

 

Head image taken from Jawbone.com