New Balance uses AI at NYFW

A fun use of Artificial Intelligence.

New Blance set cameras up to record people walking down a street in New York for several days.  Then, during New York Fashion Week, then used the learning from the weeks of observation to identify people who stood out from the crowd - and rewarded them a free pair of shoes.

The streets of NYC are nothing less than exceptional, and AI technology proved it. Find out how: https://t.co/1tlpSdtVsu #BeTheException #NYFW #FreshFoam pic.twitter.com/enoDYDt59w

— New Balance (@newbalance) September 12, 2018

I suspect that there may have been human intervention in this (many people in New York can stand out for all sorts of reasons), but it's a great idea.

White Castle's Chicken Rings on Facebook Live

This is an example of a brand using Facebook Live Video -


US burger chain White Castle created a fake shopping show on Facebook to promote its Chicken rings, joking that you could use them as earrings etc, with live interaction from fans watching.

More here

rePAWters

Probably not what Kevin Systrom had in mind when he founded Instagram.

Three London-based Instagram-famous dogs will be reporting regularly for the Evening Standard

BREAKING NEWS 📰 George is very excited to announce that he will be joining @lecorgi and @sukiandthecity as rePAWters for @esgoingout Go LDN team 🎉 The dogs will be covering all things going out in London. If you have any recommendations for places for them to visit, let us know. 🍹 #london #visitlondon #stoppress #evenigstandard #feedme #golondondogs #workingdog #repawter

A post shared by George Sofoluke-Brown (@georgethesausage) on Dec 4, 2017 at 1:37pm PST

'When you're house-sitting for millennials and you ask how the lights work'

When you're house sitting for millennials and ask how the lights work pic.twitter.com/Xli7ZdZeHW

— Cate (@c8ters) February 16, 2016

Anti-Drone Measures

I'll start collating these...

Dutch police train eagles to take down drones



Japanese police use drones with nets to catch other drones

Patti LaBelle's Sweet Potato Pie

Patti LaBelle is not marketing her own Sweet Potato Pie in Walmart, and apparently it's a smash hit, thanks in part to YouTube Vloggers like this guy.  Apparently they were selling at a rate of approx 1 a second over the last weekend.



(2m views in a week)

Full story here

Ryan Gosling Day at Asos

Today is Ryan Gosling's Birthday, and Asos have created this page in his honour.  It's basically raining Ryan Gosling.

I think this is fun, and pointlessly fun, but Ryan is clearly a big deal on the site when you see how many different looks have been created around him and his style.

They are the top result (for me anyway) for the term 'Ryan Gosling get the look'

& Asos' house band (!) also played a song in tribute to him

Relaunching Bebo

This video is hilarious.  Whether or not they can relaunch Bebo, this is so much more engaging (I think) than the one Myspace made for their relaunch.



It was made by Rubber Republic who make Bodyform's The Truth video, and you can kind of see the similarities in self deprecating humour.

A Google Image search for Atari Breakout

Another brilliant Easter Egg from Google.

How long has this existed..?

Media 101

What's wrong with this chart, taken from a recent presentation on Slideshare?

I love how the final number is actually equal to more than the sum of the three, how the Twitter and 'blogs' numbers are rounded/approximate and the Instagram one isn't (& of course how it assumes that there is no duplication between reach of the three).

Santam vs. Nandos: TV Ad Feud

Recently South African insurance company Santam ran a TV ad (in South Africa) with Ben Kingsley that played a trick on viewers.

Nando's (another South African company) thought that it was ripe for parody, and so make their own film.  Then things escalated.  Watch below.



For clarity, it's Santam, then Nando's, then Santam, then Nando's.

Props to both companies!

More here

"A hotel in a desert" - new phrases

A hotel in a desert was a good analogy used by someone I met this week.  The point is that if you build a hotel in a desert you've got to tell people about it, and make it as easy as possible for them to get there.  See also making a video and putting it on YouTube, making a new site, and so on...

Three other new phrases:

A two pizza team - a team of about 5-7 people.  "If you can't feed a development team with 2 large pizzas it's too big"

GAFA - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple - the new power elite.  I remember when we used to talk about GYM!

Showrooming - where people treat shops as showrooms, then buy online.  Apparently in the US 39% of people who bought a book on Amazon had looked at the same book in a physical store

Stripping for 'Likes'

Stussy have a new campaign on Facebook - the more you like their page, the more clothes their model will take off.

She's clearly in a cold place, because she's wearing lots of layers, or rather she was when she started.  Not sure how long Facebook will allow this, and is this the first time a brand's done this on Facebook?

More background here

April Fools 2012

A quick run-down of some of the best.

Google - They always go big on this; among those this year were 8-Bit Maps, the whole of YouTube on DVD, and a self-driving Nascar.  Oh - and Google News got fooled by a story on Forbes





Sony Vaio - The world's smallest Ultrabook



Cadbury - Dairy Milk Bubbly filled with helium

Webex webinar service - Angry Birds option now available

Criterion Collection - Kindergarten Cop 3 Disc Director's Cut released

The Lynx Mobile App



More here.

& some technology-specific ones here

Any (good ones) I've missed?

What you can tell from shopping data

It's rare (& a bit naive) for a retailer to be so open about what they can deduce from mining customer data.  This story is from Forbes, about how Target benefit from shopper analysis:

"As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.


One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August."

He then shared a non-hypothetical example of an angry father coming into a store:

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”


The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.


On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

National Sweater Day

A very entertaining campaign by WWF and Loblaw in Canada.  The aim is to make people wear their sweaters on 9th February, and turn their heating down, thereby helping the planet.

Go to the site here, and you can book one of the many grannies to call you or a friend on the day.  (Grannies are supposedly the ones who give the sweaters at Christmas time)

A good, actionable campaign!

'Like' Kahlua when you watch The Big Lebowski on Facebook

I found this little snippet in an FT story on how Lion's Gate is using Facebook for film rentals.  If you rent The Big Lebowski to watch on Facebook, you can 'Like' Kahlua while you watch the film:

"Other films have also taken product placement to a new level, offering viewers the opportunity to “like” consumer products that appear in the film. When the main character in The Big Lebowski makes a white Russian, viewers can “like” Kahlua, which then allows Kahlua to deliver free marketing messages to that person’s news feed."

(Article here)

I haven't done it, so I'll take the article's word for it.  It's pretty clever, and I think for many people it could even add to the enjoyment of watching the film.

Liz: 2 friends in common

You've got to love the ingenuity of the people making ads online - even if they are completely untrue.

Strangely this one appeared on a page of the online news site The Drum.  You can see that its from the Google ad network - the little box in the top right hand corner lets you set your targeting preferences.

Still - at least it's not quite as bad as this one:

Please tell me it's not just me that gets these!

JESSIE J IS TOTES AMAZEBALLS - or How Hits Happen on Twitter

Trending Topics (TTs) are one of the most mysterious aspects of Twitter.  How do they start, how do they grow, what takes off...  These are all questions that have puzzled marketers at some time.

Twitter promote TTs as one of the most useful aspects of the service - allowing people to see what people are talking about to get early warning of breaking stories.  Recently I've noticed TTs becoming more and more driven by pop culture, and not about news at all - the band One Direction seem to inspire at least one a day - and when one particularly strange one JESSIE J IS TOTES AMAZEBALLS trended in the UK last week I decided to investigate how it had started and become popular.

(I should say that I've seen Jessie J and I agree that she's pretty amazeballs, but totes?  That's probably over-doing it a bit.  Maybe after a couple more years)

To do this I used the analysis tool Radian6, which has access to the entire Twitter firehose - that is all tweets sent.

In all cases I've hidden the identities of the Twitter users, but I'll show the Tweets.

The phrase got a sudden flurry of Tweets on 27th October, to hit a peak of about 18,000 for the day:

According to my analysis, this was the first tweet, in minute 1 a user - with 1144 followers - tweeted:

It was then picked up by friends, first slowly, and then it started to gather steam, rising from 1 tweet a minute (TPM) to hit 14 tweets a minute by the 7th minute.  In this time the first Tweeter Tweeted other versions 6 times.

I show the number of TPS for the first 90 minutes here

It continued to be re-tweeted, but it did not rise above 21 TPM until the 40th minute, when it suddenly started to hit 45 TPM on the 43rd minute.

What happened was that on the 40th minute it was tweeted by someone with 13,978 followers

and then in the 42nd minute by someone with 94,090 follwers.

(This last user is pretty amazing - a 23 year old from Ireland who 'loves Rihanna more than my mother'...)

This last one was re-tweeted more than 100 times, and the TPS started rising to hit 45, and then a few minutes later 51.

It then declined again, until it hit an absolute peak of 68 TPS in the 67th minute.  I think thiw was caused by two tweets by users with nearly 12,000 followers each, in the 63rd minute.  I also think that by that time it had hit the TTs, so other Jessie J fans had seen it and spontaneously joined in the fun.

So what does this all mean?

1 - Twitter works organically, but can be swayed by very popular users if they are in the mood.  If you're a brand it helps to have some of these people; if you're a digital PR person it's essential to have either lots of followers yourself, or be on very good terms with people who do.  But also the messages must be relevant to your followers.

2 - This can de-value Twitter's reputation.  How so?  Because they trade on the TTs as a serious, useful service. It's mentioned a lot in their presentations to agencies, and other companies, for example Nielsen, put a lot of store in the top trending topics.  People are now actively starting to manipulate them - although there's not evidence that Jessie J's people were involved in this - and it's potentally going to be akin to SEO spam.

Twitter already block words in TTs - all the main swear words (I think) and other words like 'Assange' (once 'Sweden' was trending because it was ruled that Assange could be extradited there, but 'Assange', a word that featured in all the 'Sweden' Tweets, didn't appear).  If Twitter can block these, why not address some of the other abuses?  Block TTs in block capitals?

Or even do 'Trends among Friends' - i.e. just trends within who you follow.  That would be a better solution!

The Museum of Obsolete Objects

The Museum of Obsolete Objects is a treasury of information about - well - obsolete objects.  These range from quill pens to typewriters to cassette tapes to cameras.  Some are debatable - have hand-whisks really become obsolete? - but that aside it's a great resource.

The site is a YouTube channel.  You navigate through a time-line, and the objects themselves are profiled in short videos.

This is the video for cassette tapes: