Thursday, October 19, 2017

Holograms Enable 3D Marketing


We spoke with Ashley Crowder, VNTANA's CEO and Co-Founder about how brands make themselves stand out – literally – with holograms. It's effective for “any public face where brands trying to engage with consumers in the moment,” she said VNTANA partnered with multiple brands this year at Comic-Con 2017 to bring fans one-of-a-kind hologram experiences.


The holograms are so effective at drawing people in because they are “wowed” by the 3D images of familiar figures, Crowder explained. The interactivity it invites make it “seems like a game” or a “futuristic photo booth.” Those who use it don't perceive it as an advertisement or a way of collecting their data via facial recognition that picks up on age, gender, and emotions.

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3D Marketing with Holograms

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Automation Will Define Industry 4.0

pic from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Factory_Automation_Robotics_Palettizing_Bread.jpg
As the Industrial Internet revolutionizes manufacturing, the essential difference between the automation of the past and Industry 4.0 automation is scale.

The linking of the physical and digital in the Internet of Things has enabled manufacturing’s next evolution: the Industrial Internet, or Industry 4.0. Shawn Fitzgerald, vice president of marketing at Thomas, recently shared some insights on the effects of increasing automation and sensor integration.
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The Future is Automated

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Promoting sustainability built on data


The Rainforest Alliance deployed software that enabled it to advance data movement throughout its various applications, supply chain systems and data warehouse.

This year, the Rainforest Alliance celebrates 30 years of upholding standards for conservation and labor achieved through partnerships with farmers, wood harvesters and the businesses that incorporate those harvests into their products. With a presence in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, the alliance has an impact on the sustainable practices of more than 1.3 million farms in 78 nations.
The green frog logo that appears on the Rainforest Alliance's certified seal on a wide array of products lets consumers know which businesses are committing to these standards for their supply chains.

What Facebook's new standards mean for marketers

Giving More Control to Advertisers on Facebook

With nearly two billion active users and over five million advertisers on its platform, Facebook is major marketing medium. Many marketers appreciated its extended access, but what they didn't not care for was the lack of control over ad placement. Now Facebook is doing something to address that concern.  John Donahue, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Sonobi spoke with me about the latest development.
On September 13, Facebook announced new monetization eligibility standards“ to assure its millions of advertisers  that they can “feel confident and in control over where their ads appear.” The new guidelines offer greater “detail on the types of content that advertisers may find sensitive” so that they can decide if they want to prevent their ads from appearing on the pages that feature sensitive content.

Friday, September 15, 2017

Implementing ABM with all 3 varieties

I attended the ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Forum in  New York on  September 12.  The first session, delivered by Demandbase's Vice President ABM Strategy & Field Marketing, Jessica Fewless, and ITSMA's Senior Vice President, Rob Leavitt was “Optimizing ABM Investment: The Case for a Blended Approach.”
Based on the July 2017 ITSMA and ABM Leadership Alliance Account-Based Marketing Benchmarking Survey,  87% of marketers already agree that ABM is effective. The majority – 72% – also agree that the ABM approach has had an impact on “the way we do all our marketing today,” and 58% report that it makes the “entire company more customer-centric.” That jibes with what Scott Sobers, VP ABM, at Teradata said during his presentation: “Everything we do, we do with a lens around ABM.”
Read more in Keys to Optimizing ABM

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Pulling together 11 colleges and 12 hospitals

Expansion is a sign of success, but it also brings new organizational challenges, particularly when that expansion is built on knitting together various organizations. That's the situation that Philadelphia-based Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health (TJU) were in as they sought to bring together what now amounts to 30,000 employees in 11 colleges, two universities and 12 hospitals.
Achieving a coherent vision for the newly expanded entity was built into the job description for Jeffrey Stevens. He said that he was hired as chief human resources officer to accomplish two key tasks. One was to establish HR locally. The second was to deploy an HR tech strategy that would "consolidate everyone onto a single core system."
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University Adopts a Unifying Vision and Platform

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Mood Marketing Drives Toyota's Latest Campaign

The calendar still says 2017, but for car brands, it's already 2018. To market  this year's Camry, Toyota is veering away from making its car look like the sensible, though boring choice. Its “Sensations” campaign is meant to tap into what its audience is feeling.
Among the commercials designed for the campaign are some that explicitly encourage making the purchase of the care for “the wrong reasons.”  Those present the Camry as an attractive choice that makes driving a sensuous experience – as if the car were a sexy sports car.


As you can see from the video above, “Striking” presents a young woman in the role of the Bond girl, who zooms by in a car that flutters her hair as if she were in a convertible with the top down. It meant to be exciting, and once y're excited you can find a corresponding video identified by emoji.

Got sarcasm?

🧐🚂🤖🤓🙃
I'm being sarcastic." We've all had at least one exchange in which we either had to explain or had someone else explain that what was said was not intended to be taken straight. Generally, you need to know something about both the context and the speaker to grasp when to take a statement at face value or interpret it as sarcastic.
That's why it's particularly challenging to get handle on intent when attempting sentiment analytics on social media. For artificial intelligence to truly understand what humans mean, it needs emotional intelligence, as well. Iyad Rahwan, an associate professor the MIT Media lab and one of his students, who developed the algorithm with one of, Bjarke Felbo worked on just that.
The results are what they call Deep Moji. Described as "artificial emotional intelligence," Deep Moji was trained on millions of emojis "to understand emotions and sarcasm." Rahwan explained to MIT's Technology Review that in the context of online communication emojis take on the function of body language or tone in offering nonverbal cues for meaning.

Read more in Emojis Train AI to Recognize Sarcasm

Sunday, September 10, 2017

Mixed Reality to Become Mainstream

For all of its impressive effects, marketers have been holding back to some extent from applying mixed reality to their campaigns. That made sense in light of the fact that most people were not equipped to view it properly. But that's set to change by the end of this year.
At the end of August, Microsoft announced a lineup of mixed reality equipment for the holiday season that is expected to put it in the hands of a lot more people, thanks to the triple appeal of an affordable price, easy setup, and portability...
Google just released  a preview of its new software development kit (SDK) called ARCore for Android devices. Here's a video showing some Wizard of Oz inspired effects:
Popular characters also be adapted to marketing in a mixed reality environment, for example letting people interact with personae linked to brands, like Tony the Tiger, or Mr. Clean. That would mean that anyone could have the experience shown in cleaner's Super Bowl ad last year (except for getting the actual cleaning done, of course).

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Enhancing engagement with RCS

Rich Communications Services (RCS) effectively “drives engagement,” Brian Heikes, Vice President Product, Solutions and Analytics at 3Cinteractive says, because it makes it possible for people to experience “the same richness” provided by OTT “with the ubiquity that SMS has.” That opens up possibility of custom branding and other rich media used with native messenger.
In effect, it can offer “the depths of capabilities that have been locked behind an application” within “the messaging experience.” That's a significant benefit in light of the fact that “more than 95%” of people who download apps quit using them after just 30 days. As a result, brands can't capitalize on the promise of app engagement with the “ubiquitous capability” enjoyed by SMS.
At the 2017 Mobile World Congress, 3C showcased some of the possible applications RCS, with an illustration from its client, Walgreens, and Early Access Program partner, Google. This video, shows how Walgreens gives consumers personalized beauty recommendations seamlessly by uploading a selfie.



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Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Increasing IoT Investment for Supply Chain



At the beginning of 2017, IDC published its forecast for worldwide spending on the Internet of Things (IoT). It came up with the figure of $737 billion for spending on IoT in 2016 to cover organizational investments “in the hardware, software, services, and connectivity” it requires. That amount would continue to grow based at “a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6% over the 2015-2020 forecast period, reaching $1.29 trillion in 2020,” the firm projected.
A huge chunk of that is to come from industry. In fact, IDC’s estimates allocate the lion’s share of IoT investments in 2016 to that sector and found that it involved several large investment amounts. For the 2016, investment in IoT for manufacturing operations would have amounted to $102.5 billion. It also involved a chunk of investment in logistics, specifically freight monitoring  to the tune of $55.9 billion.
The motivation for such hefty investment at this time, according to IoT World’s report Manufacturing IoT & Supply Chain Transformation in 2017 (registration required) “is simple: a compelling ROI through increased efficiency, productivity, reliability and safety.”
Indeed, that fits “the formula for the Industrial Internet” that GE set forth in its 2015 Industrial Internet Report. It described the IoT for industry “as a source of both operational efficiency and innovation that is the outcome of a compelling recipe of technology developments,” which are composed of the following parts.
  • Data: both from the standard forms of Big Data and the additional streams coming through the sensors that track “equipment, products, factories, supply chains.”
  • Analytics that can assess the status of the connected things.
  • The definitive core of the business that defines the desired outcomes

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Investment in Supply Chain IoT Grows

AI for Customized Consumer Communication

As AI advances, it's reshaping marketing with new ways of pulling in data and insights to reshape and customize consumer communication. Its impact on marketing was explored in a recent NYC Media Lab white paper, "How AI Is Changing Media Economics."

 Now it's possible to apply real time analytics to a campaign that is tested, tweaked, and tailored to an audience. 
Read more in 

AI: The Ultimate Game-Changer for Media

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Google Glass Comeback

Success is not just a matter of timing but if also finding the right context. That’s the story behind Google Glass reception. Its first foray ended in failure, but it has found a new context in which it could thrive.

I remember when Google Glass was launched in 2013 as the ultimate wearable with a sticker price of $1,500. I recall reading one review that conceded that it had some problems but still thought that it was to be embraced as “the future” of tech. Just about every other reviewer rejected them, among them one who went on to list the reasons why people hate it

As it turns out, both sides were right. People did have major issues with Google Glass as a personal device. However, the hands-free convenience combined with smartphone capability proved very valuable in an industrial setting.
That’s why Alphabet X stopped trying to sell Google Glass directly as a consumer item and it up into the Enterprise Edition of the wearable.  Its current tagline is: “Glass is a hands-free device, for hands-on workers.” The product is no longer sold by Google directly but through partners who have customized the device for industrial purposes.

Read more in 

Raise Your (Google) Glass to the Enterprise Edition

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Healthcare Tech Marketing

Telling Effective Stories About Healthcare Tech
Telling Effective Stories About Healthcare Tech
New technologies are transforming operations in all industries, including healthcare. But we tend not to hear very much about it from healthcare brands. Melissa Baratta, Senior VP and healthcare practice lead at marketing, social media, and PR firm Affect spoke with DMN tech about innovations in that space and why they should be featured in marketing efforts.
The question is: What accounts for the hesitation to discuss emerging tech applications in healthcare? Barratta believes organizations may be concerned about how to make it fit with their brand image, and with fears that automation will displace human doctors. She referred to a journal article that suggested that radiologists and pathologist will be out of a job in the next five years when AI takes over. “A lot of media picked up on that,” and that may have made some wary of appearing “to promote tech that would eliminate jobs or raise concerns about trust.”
However, Baratta believes that these concerns should not hold brands back from investing in tech and using it for better patient outcomes. The way to go about it is to  “create educational stories, with perspective, that acknowledge challenges” while exploring how the tech “will help patients and help doctors” That includes applying AI to getting a handle on “data overload” and “more effectively mine data,” so that doctors are making better informed decisions for their patients.
The advantage for the brands that discuss their uses of emerging technologies now, she said, is that they “position themselves as thought leaders and innovaters.” It's an advantage “to talk about it when people are trying to understand what it means” and trying to grasp how it is can be used. That's why “now is the time to have a voice for thought leadership.”

Friday, August 4, 2017

Hitching a brand to an eclipse

An eclipse is not the word people usually think of in connection with marketing on August 21 this year, it makes sense to seek out some brand association with a nearly universally trending topic.
goals, as it seems to be the antithesis of gaining the spotlight. But when an eclipse is a highly anticipated event, as the one taking place
Eclipse of the Century is the somewhat pretentious name given to the event, and to the site dedicated to its coverage that is brought to you by CNN and Volvo. At the end of July the car maker announced the partnership for “a unique editorial and branded content campaign.”
The content will be delivered through CNN channels, including its app for IOS and the designated site. The content currently posted on the site includes a countdown clock to the eclipse, and a map of its anticipated journey east and south across the country, from Oregon to South Carolina. One can also find eclipse information, links to an article with directions of where and how to view the eclipse, and an introduction to “eclipse chasers.”
Those of us who are not in that category still don't have to miss out on this particular event "of the century." We can also marvel at the eclipse in real time, thanks to advanced capture technology, including 4K VR and 360° cameras strategically placed around the country to capture the eclipse's journey that CNNVR will broadcast live.  Showcasing what the technology allows us to do is the idea behind the partnership.

Sell me this raincoat

Umbrella in trash generated by Google Gemini The title of this blog is a variant on the "Sell me this pen" challenge.  Confession:...