Lab Weekly — 09/07/2018
Apple fall event preview; BMW debuts voice assistant; Amazon rebrands ad products; and more
Lab Originals
Everything We Expect to See at Apple’s 2018 Fall Event
Apple is set to kick off its annual hardware event next Wednesday. The trillion-dollar company is expected to showcase the follow-up to last year’s iPhone X, among other updates to Apple’s product line. Here is a round-up of everything we know so far about what Apple is planning to announce, and also what Apple may have in store in the near future based on recent news reports.
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News Analysis
Apple’s Acquisition Of Shazam Finally Approved By The EU [link]
Apple confirmed its $400 million acquisition of music identification service Shazam back in December, and the European Commission (part of the EU) has been reviewing the deal on antitrust ground since April. Now that the acquisition has finally been cleared, expect to see Apple incorporate Shazam’s tune-spotting feature into Apple Music, which gives it another competitive edge over Spotify, and Siri to aid audio content discovery. In fact, Apple has already been licensing usage of Shazam technology for Siri for a few years.
Less known is some of Shazam’s visual recognition features, which could make their way into Apple’s native camera app and help Apple catch up with rivals in terms of visual search as well. Given how close this EU approval came to Apple’s planned iPhone event next week, we probably won’t see any of the results of buying Shazam until a later event.
Related: Apple Pay adds 19 more banks across the United States [link]; Apple Music is testing Android Auto support [link]; Siri Shortcuts beta 4 adds iCloud syncing and other refinements [link]
Instagram Is Building A Standalone App Dedicated To Shopping [link]
Considering how popular and ubiquitous social commerce has become on Instagram, it makes perfect sense for Facebook to build a standalone app solely for shoppable content, and it should offer brands, especially direct-to-consumer brands and retailers, a valuable new mobile channel to reach customers. That being said, it is clear that Instagram is still focused on building native, organic shopping discovery features for direct-to-consumer brands that use Shopify as their backend for now.
As part of its ongoing efforts to monetize as Facebook’s domestic user growth stagnates, Instagram has been adding various shopping-friendly features and ad products to its platform since last year. Most recently, for example, the social network added new shopping tags to Instagram Stories, a quickly growing format, to make its disappearing content more shoppable. It is also worth noting that this won’t be the first spin-off app for Instagram — it launched IGTV, a YouTube competitor dedicated to long-from vertical videos, back in June.
Related: H&M’s new brand tapped into the power of Influencers and Instagram Polls to create two new products [link]; Instagram announces new features aimed at countering bad actors on its platform [link]; Twix debuts split-screen Instagram Story as part of left/right campaign [link]; The state of advertising on Instagram Stories in five charts [link]
Amazon Rebrands Its Ad Products Under Amazon Advertising [link]
Following Google’s decision to ditch its 22-year-old DoubleClick brand and rebrand its ad products, Amazon is also consolidating all of its growing advertising solutions under one branding for the sake of simplification. With this move, Amazon Advertising now encompasses all ad products including Amazon’s DSP, video ads, display ads, stores, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands as well as Amazon’s measurement solutions.
In the past year or so, Amazon has been quickly expanding its ad products as it aims to challenge the duopoly of Facebook and Google, which take up more than half of the $88 billion digital ad market. Amazon is reportedly testing an attribution tool to let advertisers compare campaign performances on Amazon compared to Google and Facebook. All these developments clearly indicate Amazon’s growing ambition in gaining its share of the online ad market and should drive more ad dollars to Amazon by making it easier for advertisers to buy and manage campaigns.
Related: Amazon unveils attribution tool while Kellogg’s tests new video ad placement [link]; Amazon rolls out “sponsored” video ads in the Prime Pantry section [link]; Amazon orders 20,000 Mercedes-Benz vans for new delivery service for small businesses [link]
BMW Debuts A Personal Voice Assistant For Its Cars [link]
BMW has said that it plans to combine the best of the available assistants by integrating all of them into its BMW Connected platform. But for the sake of maintaining a premium in-car experience that consumers have come to expect from BMW, it makes sense that the German automaker is building its own in-vehicle voice assistant in pursuit of a high-end, customizable conversational driving experience. As voice assistant usage continues to pick up, we will likely see some more branded virtual assistants like this to pop up across various products and brand platforms to offer a unique customer experience and take full control over their brand voices.
On the flip side, however, it is important to acknowledge that not every brand will have the resources and technical prowess to develop their own voice assistants. For those brands, it is important to focus on integrating with the voice assistants of dominating digital platforms where you can reach your customers, as well as developing useful branded voice experiences that deliver true value to them.
Related: Samsung to let third-party developers build apps for its Bixby assistant with API and SDK planned for November [link]; Google Assistant can now speak two languages at once [link]; Alexa voice control is coming to Toshiba televisions [link]; Audio notifications are coming to Sonos speakers as the company plans developer platform [link]
Roku Channel Is Launching Its First Branded Content Hub [link]
This branded content hub is sponsored by MillerCoors in partnership with Nat Geo and Great Big Story, who will supply the channel with video content that ranges from one to seven minutes long. As part of its “Thirst for More” campaign, this branded channel will run on Roku Channel for four months, with a native ad on Roku’s home screen and another one that will run across ad-supported Roku channels to drive viewers. This marks the first time an entire space within Roku Channel has been devoted to sponsored content, signaling the streaming set-top maker’s growing ambition to monetize its platform. As more and more viewers cut the cord and move on to OTT streaming services, brand opportunities like this will likely emerge to help brands reach customers on those typically ad-free platforms.
Related: Product placement in Netflix teen comedy helps Yakult yogurt drink fly off shelves [link]; Mercedes-Benz honors ‘The First Drive’ with long-form IGTV video [link]; SoulCycle launches media division to create branded content in-house [link]; Wendy’s promotes summer drinks in six stories that parody the romance genre on Wattpad [link]
Stats To Know:
- ViSenze recently announced the findings of its study analyzing Gen Z and Millennial consumers’ attitudes towards emerging technologies. The study found that 62% of respondents want visual search capabilities enabling them to quickly discover and identify the products on their mobile devices.
- Amazon’s market cap evaluation briefly passed $1 trillion on Tuesday, a month after Apple became the first company to reach that milestone on Aug. 2. Amazon’s stock price has doubled in the last 15 months; the company’s cloud business represented 55% of operating income and 20% of total revenue in the second quarter.
- According to the latest Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults, Facebook’s data scandals have prompted some users to reconsider their usage. 42% of respondents say they took a break from Facebook for several weeks or more, 26% deleted the app from their phone, 54% adjusted privacy settings in past 12 months.
- Crypto markets continued their free fall. More than $20 billion in market capitalization of crypto assets was erased during US hours, and the slide continued in early trading today. Over the past 24 hours, bitcoin dropped by over $1,000 at one point, to around $6,300, while ether wallowed near one-year lows.
