With Facebook and other rivals offering better video communication tools, Skype was in serious need of a reboot. The Microsoft-owned service relaunched on Thursday with several new features, including one that closely resembles Snapchat Stories. Dubbed Highlights, the Stories clone encourages users to create a “highlight reel” of their day with photos and videos -- with the intention of sharing them with friends and family. After people post a highlight, their connections can react to it with emoticons or text. Revolving around a new “Find” panel -- for easier searching -- the entire Skye interface can now be customized to reflect users’ favorite colors. Going big on bots, Skype will also be more closely linked to services like Stubhub, BigOven and Expedia. Users will be able pull ticket pricing and seating options directly into theirs chat; find a good cookie recipe; and check flight times and pricing for an upcoming trip. At launch, the new Skype is only available to users of the Android mobile operating system. Support for Apple’s iOS is expected in a matter of weeks, while desktop support is slated for later this year. Of course, Microsoft is not new to the bot game. By late last year, more than 45,000 developers were already using its Bot Framework, according< /a> to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. This is not the first instance of Microsoft stealing from Snap’s playbook. The software giant recently unveiled Sprinkles -- a camera app, which uses artificial intelligence software to suggest smart captions. Much like Snap’s flagship Snapchat app, Sprinkles can also frame users’ faces, then custom fit the images with fun graphics. The app also features hundreds of emojis and stickers. Also of note, Microsoft is no stranger to social. The company officially completed its $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn last year.
On Wednesday (5/31), the NBA uploaded an Instagram post featuring Kevin Durant, Lebron James and Stephen Curry. Noting in the post copy that the three players had won a combined 7 out of the last 8 Most Valuable Player Awards between 2009 and 2016, the image generated 391K post responses, helping the NBA maintain its #2 spot on the leaderboard.
With Facebook and other rivals offering better video communication tools, Skype was in serious need of a reboot. The Microsoft-owned service relaunched on Thursday with several new features, including one that closely resembles Snapchat Stories. Dubbed Highlights, the Stories clone encourages users to create a “highlight reel” of their day with photos and videos -- with the intention of sharing them with friends and family. After people post a highlight, their connections can react to it with emoticons or text. Revolving around a new “Find” panel -- for easier searching -- the entire Skye interface can now be customized to reflect users’ favorite colors. Going big on bots, Skype will also be more closely linked to services like Stubhub, BigOven and Expedia. Users will be able pull ticket pricing and seating options directly into theirs chat; find a good cookie recipe; and check flight times and pricing for an upcoming trip. At launch, the new Skype is only available to users of the Android mobile operating system. Support for Apple’s iOS is expected in a matter of weeks, while desktop support is slated for later this year. Of course, Microsoft is not new to the bot game. By late last year, more than 45,000 developers were already using its Bot Framework, according< /a> to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. This is not the first instance of Microsoft stealing from Snap’s playbook. The software giant recently unveiled Sprinkles -- a camera app, which uses artificial intelligence software to suggest smart captions. Much like Snap’s flagship Snapchat app, Sprinkles can also frame users’ faces, then custom fit the images with fun graphics. The app also features hundreds of emojis and stickers. Also of note, Microsoft is no stranger to social. The company officially completed its $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn last year.
No one doubts the strength of the slogan: “Make America Great Again.” Whether you agree with the policies President Trump’s slogan has come to embody, the appeal of greatness is intoxicating. By changing one word and adding a pronoun, President of France Emmanuel Macron has retooled the slogan beyond the confines of nationalism. “Make our planet great again,” Macron said at the end of his live response to President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord. After Macron’s response in English aired on Periscope TV and the video was posted on Facebook and Twitter, the engagement poured in. About six or so hours later, the stream had been viewed about 934,000 times. On Facebook, the post of the video had more than 1.7 million views. Macron smartly played his move in the social-media-fueled brinkmanship that defined our election. After all, in a social-media age, effective political discourse is done through these channels. Particularly when the subject is the planet and the audience is global. The message also underscores the stark differences in the messengers. President Macron and President Trump are almost polar opposites in their political personas. Macron, a measured, studied bureaucratic wunderkid of 39 vs. Trump, a boisterous, freewheeling covfefe of 70. When it comes to policy, particularly climate policy, the differences are no less obvious. Despite this, France and the United States are staunch allies, with centuries of shared diplomatic, military and cultural partnership. The strength of the relationship is unlikely to be seriously damaged by the reactionary nationalism of the Trump campaign — with a caveat. The push-pull of political ideology may play a louder role in the months and years to come. When they met in Brussels, Macron countered Trump with his white-knuckle grip. He also posted a video earlier this year inviting American scientists and researchers to come to France to work on combating climate change. Smooth diplomat that he is, Macron delivers his message in a cordial, straightforward tone. It's a striking contrast to Trump's bluster. And Macron's calculated move makes a larger point: Isolationism can't defy scientific reality. Climate policy must be left to those who want to protect both their country and the world.
Being a fast-follower may not work when it comes to artificial intelligence. That’s a potentially huge problem for the vast majority of companies — the mainstream of American and global businesses that have watched and waited as wave after wave of new technologies emerged over the course of the last 20 years. From the PC to “local” networks to the Internet to cloud, mobile and social. For each of those tech waves you could turn out fine if you waited, learned from the pioneers in your industry, and then followed quickly with the benefit of their lessons. Common principles emerged from early adopters of cloud computing, the mobilization of work, and the socialization of business that enabled fast-followers to start out, on day one, at a much higher level of implementation sophistication than their predecessors. But with learning technologies like AI, you’re not the only one who needs to learn lessons — the technologies need time to learn, too. And every company’s situation is different, especially when it comes to marketing. While there will certainly be lessons learned that “raise the floor” in terms of foundational AI/machine learning technology infrastructure, it simply does not stand to reason that application-level progress of company A (or companies A through Y) will be of any benefit to company B (or Z). A very closely related challenge that many companies are running into as they consider AI initiatives is the “toddler problem,” according to Mike Nicholas, a founder of Born, the new AI-focused agency subsidiary of MDC Media Partners launched in November 2016. The toddler problem is this: AI programs start out as dumb models that must learn on the job in order to achieve greatness. The machine learning algorithms that today can determine, in fractions of a second, the best route for you to take across town, or across the continent, began their artificial lives as empty-headed toddlers. They tried and failed, tried and failed, etc., and each time learned a bit and became a little bit better. The more times they tried, the more they learned. After billions or even trillions of tries — interactions — they’re faster and smarter than any program anyone could have written. Remember how “challenged” newborn Siri was to understand what we were saying? Well now there’s a $249 pair of headphones that will simultaneously translate real-time spoken language among English, French, Spanish, and Italian.* The toddler problem is a big concern for brands because it leads to a chicken-and-egg problem (sorry to mix metaphors). AI requires a lot of data — i.e., interactions. You need thousands or millions of interactions before your AI agent (or chatbot) gets super-smart. The only way to get all those interactions is by exposing your toddler-level AI to customers and letting them hack away at it. That, Nicholas says, stops most brands dead in their tracks. No way will I let a 3-year-old represent my brand! But then it won’t get smart. Marketers who are used to fine-tuning their work to perfection before letting it into the light just can’t wrap their heads around this problem. Fans of human brain physiology and evolution will note that this is the same phenomenon which, in humans, requires our species to have a far, far longer childhood than any other species on earth. One approach some businesses are trying is to stand up an internal AI to support customer service reps. That way, the rep becomes a human filter between the AI’s recommendation and the customer, ostensibly preventing the stupidest mistakes from damaging the brand. The AI learns through interactions with the customer-facing humans. The challenge here, though, is getting enough interactions, quickly. The brands with the guts to release toddler AIs to the world will get a first-mover advantage that probably overcomes all but the worst reputation-damaging screw-ups from the toddler. As my AI Insider column partner, Sarah Fay, pointed out in her keynote talk at MediaPost’s Marketing AI conference, when you think about it — and when you do the math — first-mover advantage in the AI era will be virtually impossible to overcome. Which brings me back to my opening sentence: Being a fast-follower may not work when it comes to artificial intelligence *Sci-fi subplot note: I try hard to convince people to read science fiction to learn about new technologies, since so many of the geeks inventing the stuff grew up reading it and are now trying to build what they read. With regard to the “universal translator,” “Star Trek" got there first (though by calling for the invention in 2151, it missed the mark by more than 125 years). But “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” got there funniest: "The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix."
Brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly being closed every day. Store traffic and sales are down, impacting many brands and retailers. Ninety percent of all retail is still done in physical stores and, let’s face it much of the purchase intent starts online. Can online behaviors drive more foot traffic … specifically, can influencer content pointed at a specific retailer on behalf of a brand/product increase foot traffic? Brands are flocking to influencer marketing and there is a demand for proof points to the value of influencer marketing. We sought out a mobile geo-fencing and measurement partner with an eye for examining the behavior of people exposed to influencer content versus an identical unexposed control. Together with this mobile location data and our first-party audience pixel data, we pursued the idea that the right social content could inspire more in-store visits. Measuring foot traffic through pixel data, combined with geo-fencing technology, allowed us to tap into the shopper DNA and consumer intelligence that has been lacking in the past. We looked to expose content and weigh the results against an unexposed household. Test households were pixeled upon visiting influencer content pages and then were further cookied to check for overlap with the mobile location panel. The exposed panel’s mobile devices are routinely polled for location (latitude and longitude) i.e., frequency, proximity, and time spent at the target venue, be it a retail store or other event-based locale. By serving specialized influencer content to the exposed audience, the chance of a consumer taking an action is already notably higher. Tracking the physical path-to-purchase through geo-fencing at a specific retailer provides the solution for justifying influencer content creation that clients have been searching for. The content not only drives consumers in-store, but also does so in a timely and measurable way. Traditional and digital media struggle to record the actual relationship between content served and foot traffic related to advertising content. This new measurement offering will enhance a brand’s presence among consumers while providing valuable store conversion data. Our results showed that 48% of the exposed group visited the retailer within four days versus only 29% in the identical, but unexposed, control group. The positive store conversion rate of 18.2% for the test vs. control affirmed that influencer campaigns can impact in-store traffic when implemented alongside audience pixel data and this data allows clients to target an audience they know is already interested in their product or brand. This adds another feather in the cap of influencers and their content, making them a valuable part of the marketing mix. It’s time influencer marketing be given a seat at the table and integrated across the marketing mix on both national and local levels.
On Wednesday (5/31), the NBA uploaded an Instagram post featuring Kevin Durant, Lebron James and Stephen Curry. Noting in the post copy that the three players had won a combined 7 out of the last 8 Most Valuable Player Awards between 2009 and 2016, the image generated 391K post responses, helping the NBA maintain its #2 spot on the leaderboard.