Friday, February 2, 2018

2018: the year RCS overtakes SMS for marketing

As carriers shift to the new Rich Communications Services (RCS) standard, new functionalities and ways to engage consumers will emerge, opening up a whole world of marketing opportunities.

Even last year, RCS began to emerge as a significant advance for mobile marketing. At that point, there were about 137 million RCS users, according to David O'Byrne, RCS lead at the GSMA. He was quoted in an MSN reportreferring to that baseline, saying he anticipates users to reach 350 million this year, topping a billion next year.

On the basis of those predictions, combined with the number of people already using SMS, RCS is poised to become a key component of communication in the very near future. That's the view of Andy Shirey, Senior Product Marketing Manager at OpenMarket.

RCS Set to Take Over SMS as Primary Marketing Tool in 2018

Marketing on wheels

Mobility Marketing: Toyota's e-Palette

Advertising on cars is nothing new, but what we may be seeing in future is not limited to static car wraps but specially purposed vehicles that can change their function and their messages as needed.

At this year's CES, Toyota unveiled the e-Palette concept. The company anticipates first introducing it for use at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. But it is already working with partners like Amazon, DiDi, Mazda, Pizza Hut and Uber to develop the concept and its commercial applications.

In a press release, Toyota describe e-Palette as exemplifying “Toyota's visions for Automated Mobility as a Service (Autono-MaaS) applications.” The vehicle itself is a “fully-automated, next generation battery electric vehicle (BEV) designed to be scalable and customizable for a range of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) businesses.”

Friday, January 5, 2018

Amazon May be Giving a Voice to Marketing

We've seen a rapid evolution in shopping interfaces, ranging from letting our fingers do the walking on our keyboards, to letting them swipe their way to what we seek on touchscreens. The next big thng, it seems, is a touchless interface made by possible by voice-activation.

As people are coming to expect the convenience of talking to their devices, companies like Google and Amazon are accommodating that form of navigation, and exploring new ways to monetize it.

Thursday, January 4, 2018

Facial Recognition Features on Facebook Find Your Face

Facebook doesn't need tags to know that the person in the picture is you. Is that a good thing? It depends on your point of view.

Given the proliferation of faces that gets uploaded in the form of photos and videos on Facebook, a person may not even know that his/her face appears in a particular context.

photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Face_detection.jpg

To address that problem and to increase access for recognition among the visually impaired, at the end of 2017 Facebook rolled out three new facial recognition features:

For the visually impaired, the feature provides a verbal description of people the AI recognizes in the photos.
You can be notified whenever the AI recognizes your face in an uploaded image, even when it is not tagged with your name.
Working off this link of your name and face, the system can alert you if others put your face in for their profile.

As the company explained in its announcement about it, Facebook's new features are based on the same technology the social media platform uses to bring people's attention to faces in images before they are tagged with a name.

While no one would likely object to applying AI to assisting the visually impaired, there are some questions about the effect of the alert feature, which delivers a "Photo Review" message to the user whose face it identifies. The company puts a very positive spin on it, saying, "You're in control of your image on Facebook and can make choices such as whether to tag yourself, leave yourself untagged, or reach out to the person who posted the photo if you have concerns about it."

Facebook AI Finds Your Face, Enabling New Features

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

AI and shopping: the perfect match

As visual AI advances, it's becoming a useful tool for marketing fashion both online and on premises. Alibaba recently demonstrated the difference it could make with record sales for this year's Single's Day in China. This marriage of fashion and AI signals possibilities for shoppers.

The volume of sales for this year's Single's Day through Alibaba's sites amounted to $9.3 billion this year, compared to $5.9 billion last year. Technology use played a major role in that surge of sales, as nearly half the orders this year came through smartphones; over double the 2016 number.

However, another form of technology was also involved: AI. Using deep learning, Alibaba researchers developed FashionAI to offer in-store shoppers a familiar kind of screen interface that can make recommendations to customers based on its huge volumes of data.

Friday, December 29, 2017

From Smart Cities to the Jetsons

photo from https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5324/6917138408_144eeec7b8_b.jpg

A connected utopia in the ideal vision of a smart city and it is achievable, but given the challenges to overcome it will take some time and effort to get there, according to AT&T's Michael Zeto.

In part one of this Q&A with Telco Transformation, Michael Zeto, general manager and executive director of AT&T Smart Cities, IoT, explained what forces, aside from the technology itself, have to work together to make smart cities viable and how his company was taking a leadership position. (See AT&T's Zeto on Achieving the Smart City Vision.)

In part two, he talks about AT&T's smart cities pilot, the type of problems smart cities deployments solve and how smart cities will evolve. He also explained why, despite the significant advances of the past couple of years, the achievement of full smart city status is still farther down the road.

AT&T's Zeto: How Smart Cities Meet The Jetsons

Monday, December 18, 2017

The shifting role of healthcare marketers

Technology is changing the game for all businesses, and marketers are also finding new ways in which to do their jobs more effectively. Now healthcare marketers are discovering the ways in which they can use technology to identify and engage their target market.

In order to identify the priorities for healthcare marketers in the upcoming year, Affect, a public relations and social media agency specializing in technology, healthcare and professional services, spoke with a panel of senior healthcare executives from organizations like, Illumina, MDxHealth, Pfizer and Phoenix Children's Hospital. Based on those discussions, it published a guide to navigating major trends in healthcare marketing in 2018 with a look at five key areas:

Advanced social media use to increase awareness and loyalty
Highly customized content plus promotion
Creative media relations
Emerging tech campaigns
Business-oriented metrics

I spoke with Melissa Baratta, SVP and healthcare practice lead at Affect, about the state of healthcare marketing in today's environment. She said that because of the increasingly important role technology is playing marketing, “the role of marketers for healthcare is shifting.”

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