Google Lens has gone live or is about to on Pixel phones in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India and Singapore (in English). Currently, Lens can read text (e.g., business cards), identify buildings and landmarks (sometimes), provide information on artwork, books and movies (from a poster) and scan barcodes. It can also identify products (much of the time) and capture and keep (in Google Keep) handwritten notes, though it doesn’t turn them into text. [Source: Search Engine Land]
It seems that Facebook’s still looking for ways to address its ‘context collapse’, the decline in personal sharing on the platform which has been in effect over the last few years. [Source: Social Media Today]
Instagram is giving brands a new reason to invest in producing higher-quality Stories. Brands and all other Instagram users can now showcase collections of their old Instagram Stories on their profile pages. [Source: Marketing Land]
Twitter is broadening its support of AMP (accelerated mobile pages) to include article analytics. According to the announcement, when Twitter loads an AMP version of an article, it will now ping the original article URL to record the view, in addition to passing the query arguments from the original article redirect into the AMP run-time. This will allow publishers to receive the data using the amp-analytics component. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Google has confirmed that it has made a change to the way it displays snippets in search results. Over the past week or so, many have been noticing that the snippets were longer than what’s typically been shown. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Advertisement spending in India is expected to grow 8.4% in 2018, led by growth in television ads, Publicis Groupe-run media agency Zenith forecasted. The estimated growth rate for 2018 is about three percentage points lower than the 11.2% forecast for 2017, when ad spending was estimated to touch Rs54,344 crore. [Source: Mint]
Apple says it will bring more installs with less effort “at a predictable cost.” That’s how the company is pitching its new Search Ads Basic offering. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Pinterest is looking to piggyback on the popularity of Facebook Messenger in order to boost growth, adding two new tools which will enable greater Pinterest functionality within Messenger threads. [Source: Social Media Today]
Google has started testing and potentially rolling out a new feature in search that shows a carousel with a list of answers directly within the search results snippets. It shows the main search result snippet, and below it, it shows a carousel of answers picked from the content on the page the snippet is linking to. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Even as it has hit several brand safety bumps over the past year, YouTube is poised to raise prices on premium ad inventory in the coming year. [Source: Marketing Land]
Expert Opinion:
- Why investing in Artificial Intelligence for Your Marketing efforts is the way to go
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are revolutionizing the marketing world. Many brands are already taking advantage of this technology and utilizing it in innovative ways to boost the impact of their marketing activities. According to a survey by The Boston Consulting Group, 85% of executives believe that AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.
Some of the benefits offered by this unique technology are:
– Efficiently process and analyse the huge chunk of data available with marketers and gain useful insights for the same that can be used for future marketing plans
– Analyse customer profiles and provide insights that can be used to optimize customer value
– Figure out effective ways to interact and engage with the audience
– Time saving
– Improved productivity
AI is surely helping marketers profoundly by streamlining their processes and functions. Marketers can make the most out of this technology by accessing the right set of data, use the insights considering their business objectives and keep on improving the processes on an on-going basis. AI has the power to transform the overall success of a brand, if used correctly. Brands that adapt to the newer technologies like AI & machine learning, invest in them and use them intelligently are sure to succeed and sustain in the new-age marketing era.
– Pariekshit Maadishetti, Managing Director, Grid Logic Group
