DOUG SCHUMACHER

experience designer + writer

google

New podcast “Homie & Lexy” launched

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Most anyone who’s talked to me in the past couple of years knows my interest in AI. The more I looked into AI and it’s potential impact on marketing, the more fascinated I became with the voiceweb. Accessing content currently on the web, via a voice interface.

While voice offers challenges that text and graphic information doesn’t, it’s also the most natural interface developed so far. If you’ve played around with either of the two major devices — Amazon’s Echo or Google’s Home — you’ve no doubt seen the potential. And the likely challenges.

Given how reliant these systems are on AI, how much AI stands to progress in the very near future, and how early we are in the voicebot game, I think it’s pretty clear that we’ve only scratched the surface of the voiceweb.

So for me, the personal challenge was, How to immerse myself in this new channel of established growth and greater longer-term potential?

After considering a number of content types to develop, I came to the idea of a simple, short-form comedy podcast about two voicebots.

Homie & Lexy.

Homie & Lexy -HomePage-Podcast-FacebookVideo-header

As the website says:

Homie & Lexy is a podcast about two voicebots residing in the same house. When their owners step out, the voicebots discuss the perplexing human world around them.

The show integrates themes arising from the growing presence of artificial intelligence in our lives. Each episode is about 2 minutes.

Meet the stars of the show.

Homie

HAL - icon - homie

Lexy

HAL-Icon-Lexy

 

The podcast’s short format is, by design, well-suited for the voiceweb, as I’m currently in development on voice apps for both Amazon and Google’s platforms. Once finished, the podcasts can be easily played on either platform. (Yes, podcasts can be played on Echo’s and Home’s currently, but having an app streamlines the process and makes it more reliable that episodes will be played upon invocation.)

The short comedy format is also a kind of return to one of my favorite advertising mediums, radio. Something I did a lot of in my early days of advertising. My radio-writing background, combined with my years of digital marketing experience and lifelong early adoption of technology, makes Homie & Lexy feel like the completion of a circle. The weekly episode process involves comedy writing, digital audio production, and then distribution and promotion.

The voices are generated using Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech technology, using Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to push, pull and wrangle the right prosody out of the voices.

If you listen to podcasts, or if this sounds interesting, please listen and subscribe at any of the providers below. Thanks.

iTunes

Google Play

Stitcher

Soundcloud

YouTube

AI: The new creative director or the new creative?

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I’m not sure I’ve ever followed a story with the combination of awe and trepidation as AI for the past several years. The potential job displacement alone is staggering.

In the past, as a marketing person who trades in creative thinking, I’ve clung to the idea that however far technology might progress, jobs based in aesthetic judgement were in the clear zone for the foreseeable future.

Machine learning has been great on tasks with well-defined goals, like determining which ads in a campaign to give the most impressions to based on audience response. When the decision is highly subjective, though, it’s been a different situation. But that’s a barrier being broken through. Making the question not if creative jobs will be impacted, but how.

The recent AI experiment by Google is an example.

They turned an experimental deep learning system loose on their database of Street View images with the goal of artistic curation.

Per their blog post.

It mimics the workflow of a professional photographer, roaming landscape panoramas from Google Street View and searching for the best composition, then carrying out various postprocessing operations to create an aesthetically pleasing image.

Here are two of hundreds of beautiful images the AI selected, cropped and processed.

01-red-hut

They had a team of professional photographers judge the results of the AI along side a range of other non-AI photos, with impressive results.

A threat, a tool, or both?

There should be a lot of ways to use AI for creative development. What I find interesting in the Google example is the training of the AI system. Talk to any AI expert and they’ll emphasize the importance of having good training data. Garbage in, garbage out.

Whatever you put into the system, that becomes the measuring stick. The Google team pulled the training database from several photography communities, using the human-generated rating system to define the aesthetic taste. (If you want the gory details, you can read the full research paper.)

So the tastes of the photographic communities drove the training data which defined the results. But presumably you could use whatever data you want to train the system, and that’s the direction it will go in. Your new creative brief is the training data. Deployed on the full data set, off it goes generating concepts or creatives or whatever. In remarkable volume. And it never complains or causes HR nightmares.

Sounds like a creative director’s dream. Or a chief marketing officer’s.

Using AI to help creatives generate more ideas seems pretty obvious. You start a project with 100s of loosely-relevant-but-possibly-tangentially-interesting ideas already on the board.

And AI may never be more than a powerful tool creatives have at their disposal. But like Photoshop and digital media in general, this is another way technology compresses deadlines and reduces budgets. It also gives agencies and creatives another learning curve to climb. With opportunities and pitfalls parallel to previous waves of technology.

And of course you shouldn’t ignore the possibility of AI becoming more of a threat than a tool.

The name of the Deep Learning system Google used to generate these images? Creatism. It’s stated purpose? Artistic content creation. You can almost hear a deep voice on a sizzle reel enthusing “Creatism, an artistic content creation agency.”

Creativing :: Where good ideas come from, YouTube’s new mobile site, and WiFi on ‘roids

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Where Good Ideas Come From [VIDEO]

Excellent animated video on where good ideas come from. A lot of this will ring true to the importance of conversation monitoring, which is really just a way of plugging yourself into the community, or conversation, that the author talks about in this video.

Digital Marketing: Security Tech CAPTCHAs as Advertising – Advertising Age

Most of the time it’s annoying when advertising creeps into every nook and cranny of daily life, but this idea comes off as clever, and really making a pretty drab event — entering CAPTCHA info — a bit more interesting. And for brands, getting viewers to actually type out their tagline or product features based on a paid impression is pretty remarkable. One of the more clever new ad units I’ve seen in a while. The only limit will be that there really aren’t that many times a user has to see CAPTCHA’s, assuming they have cookies turned on.

The State of YouTube Mobile: Viewing up 160%, Operator Partnerships Sought

A couple of interesting things in this piece. For one, Google’s not happy with the way Apple’s YouTube app works, and are promoting the WAP version of YouTube mobile, instead. It offers a considerably better user experience, which shows that WAP has a lot to offer versus native app development. Secondly, Apple controls the YouTube app on iPhone, and if they can’t keep a major brand like Google up with the latest and greatest mobile experience, then it really underscores how much this brand really needs the larger development community on it’s side, and developing apps like mad for their platform.

SCVNGR provides deeper integration with Facebook Places

I’m following SCVNGR closely, as they seem to be the most aggressive of the location-based apps at trying to figure out survival in a post-Facebook Places world. It’s also interesting, because they’re backed by $4m from Google Ventures. And Google would love to kill both the social and mobile birds with one stone. But I still feel like SCVNGR lacks the simplicity to really go mainstream. For one, it requires an app download, a big barrier, whereas Facebook’s mobile app already has 100m users. And then there’s that problem of less than 1% of all mobile phone users use a location-based app more than 1x per week. So driving consistent use is going to be a real challenge. But the logic behind SCVNGR’s actions are on target, as they get that it’s ultimately about making brands more dynamic on their Facebook properties.

Digital Marketing: The Top 10 Viral Ads of All Time – Advertising Age

Just ran across this list. What I find interesting is that most of them are from the past two years. I’d think having more time on to accrue views would help. My guess is that two factors contribute to the recency of the leaders. One is that companies are getting better at promoting their videos, versus just tossing them on YouTube and telling a couple of forums about it. And secondly, the metrics tracking these views are improving, as they’re extending the analysis beyond YouTube views alone.

“WiFi on steroids” gets final rules, drops spectrum sensing

Any involved in online marketing should be a fan of anything that dials up our broadband speeds here in the US. They’ve been rated as low as 25th in the world, or something abysmal like that. But this is great. Take some unused TV spectrum and allocate it to wireless broadband. And I like that they’re focusing on wireless. It may not have the topend speeds of cable now, but ultimately it will be the most cost effective solution to scale, and seems like the most probably path to blanket coverage.

Phones Begin to Replace Hotel Keycards – Popwuping

Simply a smart way to differentiate yourself amid a battered travel industry. While it might not be enough to attract new customers, this will certainly make a strong impression on anyone who uses it (assuming no bugs, of course!). It also shows how companies need to focus on consumer touchpoints, and not media inventory, when looking at ways to make a real impression.

Hand Craft Your Way to Great Prizes in Etsy API Contest

Etsy is an interesting company to watch, as they’re developing a reputation for interesting, community-centered marketing campaigns. Earlier, they had a UGC video contest (http://www.youtube.com/user/etsy), and now an open API contest, with cash prizes. A couple things are truly helping them in these efforts. One is having a product that naturally attracts a lot of creative, artistic people. The other is having VC Fred Wilson (www.avc.com) as one of your backers.

5 Important New Trends in Location

An overview of the post-Facebook Places location-based services landscape. As expected, this is quickly moving from fun and games to real functionality. And that’s the big opportunity for brands. Because you may need several million people to make a game fun, but good functionality can be delivered on a 1-1 basis.

Creativing :: The revamped Facebook ‘Like’ button, Apple relents on Flash dev for mobile, and the return of microsites

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Google Losing Ground As Users Spend More Time on Facebook and Yahoo

The article attempts to downplay this rather remarkable stat. However, i think for many brand marketers, it’s all about quality time and experiences. When people are spending so much time on Facebook, it’s easier for a brand to forge a relationship because the users are in a more comfortable environment. Sure, there will always be value in meeting consumers who are just ready to buy, i.e. Google Search. But for brands who need to establish themselves earlier in the funnel, Facebook offers a better environment, and one that will ultimately offer more inventory because of the amount of time spent on the site.

comScore: Facebook Now The Third Largest Video Site In The U.S.

A while back, Facebook surpassed Flickr as the number one site where photos are posted. Now they’ve moved upwards in terms of videos viewed. It demonstrates the power of a platform, and being the default place people go to share things. Remember that a big part of YouTube’s success was it’s capability for embedding videos into other sites, like MySpace. As more people opt to upload their videos directly to Facebook, where they’re already spending much of their online time, then YouTube could see the same attrition happen that photo sites did. When it comes to sharing, users will almost always opt for the simplest route.

5 Things You Need To Know About Today’s Facebook Like Upgrades

Facebook is taking some bold steps forward recently with their Like button. Primary is the added flexibility of what Like can be tied to. A Web page, an app, or even a virtual goods. Perhaps of more immediate and tangible interest to marketers is the ability to identify where Like’s came from, and being able to reach out to anyone who’s Liked you or your content in the past.

Apple Relaxes Restrictions on Mobile App Development

This is refreshing, given my previous criticism of Apple’s decision to control how apps are developed for the iPhone and iPad. The biggest news nugget of this has to be the allowance of apps developed using Adobe’s “Packager for iPhone”, which was at the center of the recent Apple/Adobe flame war. At least for now, things seem back to normal, although I wish Apple’s decision was based more on keeping the platform open than the potential legal threat of non-competitive practices.

Thoughts on Google Instant

Given all the buzz around Google Instant this week, it makes sense to let Google’s search guru Matt Cutts give the main introduction. If you haven’t experienced Instant, just go to Google and start typing any search query. Not only will the suggested search topics change, but the surrounding page content. It’s basically a nice way to search multiple terms without having to click and view multiple pages.

How Much You Need To Spend To Be Facebook’s Largest Advertiser

Facebook is showing serious gains in advertising revenues. Not exactly Google spend levels, but there’s a big ‘Yet’ at the end of that line. This will get even more interesting as Facebook continues to figure out it’s social search product, a direct aim at Google’s big revenue generator.

What Big Brands Are Spending on Google – Advertising Age

These spend levels, while not even necessarily the top spenders on Google, are remarkable. Think about a brand spending $8m/mo on search. And that Google has to do very little to make that sale happen, or to maintain that customer relationship. It’s also interesting to see brands using SEM as a periodic strategy to address product launches, crises, and shifts in seasonal trends. Again, demonstrating the power and influence of search.

Thought Microsites Were Dead? Think Again

The first thing to note is, This is not your father’s microsite. There are hardly any links between it and the Flash-heavy, sound effects-drenched behemoths of the mid-2000s. Much more tactical from an SEO standpoint, the emphasis here is on making the content the experience. The benefits they list for this approach is a must-read.

PepsiCo Names 10 Tech Start-Ups for Pilot Digital Marketing Programs « iMediaConnection Blog

When you consider that Pepsico and their agencies spent several months reviewing over 500 emerging tech and social media platforms and culled the list down to this 10, this is well worth a close look.

Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Commerce Strategy Now

This story is remarkable if only for the mobile spending figures PayPal shares. They’ve seen mobile transactions go from $25m in 2008 to $141m in 2009, to a projected $500m in 2010. That’s staggering growth. And for just one mobile payment system. The article goes on to give suggestions around creating a good mobile shopping experience.

Creativing :: Stunning infographics, the future of Web content, and NASA explores Flickr

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

50 most stunning examples of data visualization and infographics | Richworks

Fantastic selection of work. This is a must see for anyone in marketing. (Thx to John Durham for the link.)

The Rise of the Anti-Facebooks

I don’t see any of these as having a real chance of unseating Facebook, but it’s a good read comparing their strategic approachs. Diaspora is the most interesting, as it’s open source. So many other platforms are moving towards open source, and as Facebook’s big strategy is to be a platform and not a destination, they could be vulnerable to an open source movement. Especially given the increasing amount of data they have on people (e.g., Places).

“The Social Network” Movie Launches a Facebook-Themed Website

I really like the simplicity of this site. I don’t get how they’re comparing this site to a social network site, but it’s well-done none-the-less.

Flickr: NASA on The Commons’ Photostream

Like the Library of Congress putting a lot of the National Archives photos on Flickr before. While the pics have been available on the NASA site, it’s nice to see them moving to a common online photo site. As a Flickr user, I’m glad to be able to see these pics up in my rotation of photos by contacts.

Facebook Awarded A Social Search Patent

The patent is for “ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation”. Interesting that the patent was filed in 2004. They were focused on that very early on, and the vision is still holding strong.

Apple – iTunes – Ping: Social Network for Music

I’m pretty underwhelmed. Of course, social media and open anything aren’t really Apple’s things. But really, there just isn’t any depth of content or relationship to the conversation or the connections.

Chatroulette’s Relaunch Is A Bust | paidContent

Even if the ChatRoulette URL proves to be dead, the idea of randomly connecting with strangers via video will surely surface somewhere else, probably more closely aligned with a specific interest group.

The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps

Uncovered this article from earlier this year. If you’re not familiar with Jeremy Allaire, he’s had a great career charting technology trends and making products that address the changing needs. His take is that of a seasoned technologist who’s seen a lot of things come and go. Bottom line is, there’s still a lot of tumult in the industry (witness the h.264 pending usage royalties in 2014) and a clear vision of the future online content platform probably won’t emerge for at least a couple of years.

Checkmate iPhone App Uses Background Location for Automatic Checkins on Foursquare

Given this works wtihin 50 meters of a business, that means a lot of potential checkins when people are just walking past. I can’t imagine how that’s good for Foursquare.

8 Crucial AdWords Reports For Measuring Success

A good set of campaign metrics to follow that provide a well-rounded view of performance. This is a good read for people outside SEM who aren’t overly family with campaign analytics

Creativing :: Social Media’s World Cup, Ridley Scott directs YouTube, and social media meets the offline world.

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Tweet of the Week

Come on, city of Cleveland, you’ve been on top for years. Give another city a chance.

The World Cup of Social Media – Advertising Age

While there’s been a lot of talk the last couple of years about the need for global marketing, perhaps nothing drilled that message home like the World Cup. A good read as much for the prose as the content.

Ridley Scott and YouTube Want You To Film One Day in Your Life

I’m quite curious about this because it seems to intersect a lot of different things that already exist. I mean, isn’t YouTube really an ongoing day in the life? So then this is just an edited version of that, with even less contest to what each of the video clips is about? I’ll be very curious to see how they bring a bigger POV to this and make it more than just a mashup of video clips. Perhaps this is the Internet version of Powaqqatsi.

What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero! | Forrester Blogs

This line pretty much sums it up: It is what companies do with fans that creates value, not merely that a brand has fans.

Seth’s Blog: Payola

A lot of SEO people spend their lives trying to outsmart a campus of Google geniuses with PhDs. Kinda like going 1-on-1 with LeBron James. You might get a lucky basket now and then, but he’s just going to come back even stronger. If you want good SEO, don’t think like a Google engineer, think like a consumer. Bottom line is there are always games going on to goose online performance. But long-term value tends to align with consumer interests.

NYTimes Shows How Civic APIs Should Be Built

I like how often we see data going from rote facts to entertainment value. The idea of taking voting district information and attaching that to landmarks in NYC is exactly the type of way brands can take data and create interesting stories about what they or their customers are doing.

Google’s Display Advertising Plans Include Gmail, YouTube – Advertising Age

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone suggest the online display game is on. And if Google’s piling money into it, that’s a pretty strong indicator.

The Real Life Social Network: How Facebook Affects Offline Relationships | MobileBehavior

This highlights a major challenge of social media at the moment. Sharing the same posts with vastly different networks of people in our lives. This includes a nugget of insight about where Google’s going to be aiming to penetrate Facebook’s armor.

Why Google’s Launching ‘Me’ and Facebook’s Real Future – Advertising Age

If you’re not familiar with Facebook’s Open Graph or why Google is gunning for Facebook, this is a good quick read.

Creativing :: Tweet of the Week, Craigslist TV?, and Foursquare links to print ads

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What’s going on in new media marketing, pulled from social bookmarking site Creativing.com:

Tweet of the Week

RT @hodgman “Just out here retweeting.”

Craigslist TV: Just as Awkwardly Entertaining as You Would Imagine [VIDEO]

Craigslist never ceases to amaze me. For one, it’s ongoing popularity, despite a horrible user interface. But even moreso, the way it frequently extends directly into popular culture. The personals are read for entertainment, artists do visualizations of the “Missed Connections” sections, and now this. There’s a fairly personal nature to much of Craigslist content, from personal ads to what people are selling out of their garages, that helps people identify with the content.

Facebook to Simplify Privacy Controls – NYTimes.com

Facebook responds to the privacy blowup. Given the speed of change Facebook’s been going through, and the Apple-esque disregard for outside opinion (some that’s both asset and liability for both), this whole scenario isn’t surprising.

More than anything, this really points to the role user experience plays in app and site development. Ignore it at your own risk.

Earthjustice Uses Foursquare to Make Print Ads Actionable | MobileBehavior

With Foursquare all over the news, the big question is, What are the different ways brands will be using technologies like this in their campaigns? This example links print work to mobile, with mass transit posters prompting riders to ‘checkin’ on a give subject to support an environmental cause. One great feature is that they’ve taken a print piece and given it a highly-trackable action.

Mobile creation – the Japanese way – Popwuping

The Japanese have long been ahead of us in mobile usage, and this is a good topline of their user behavior and why it’s different from the computer-based Internet.

YouTube Launches Platform for Crowdsourcing Suggestions

I’m seeing a lot of activity around the crowdsourcing/answers site format lately. Here, YouTube demonstrates again their value to Google in the way that Google can so quickly integrate many of their broad span of features into the largest video site in the world. In this case, I’m not sure video adds that much to answers, although given the power of video, it’s certainly worth Google trying. Bottom line is, there’s a lot of potential in answer sites, and that’s what Google’s trying to tap.

5 Ways To Turn Your Traffic Into Valuable User Data

Clearly your site visitors are a valuable source of insights and information about what interests them and others like them. The question is, How do you gather that information? This is a list of 5 tools that can help you ask them questions, process the information, and even compare it to competitor sites for relative value.

Google Rolls Out More Tweet-Based Ads

Using a Twitter feed to create the content for a Google AdSense ad is a great idea not only because it’s new and innovative, which generally tends to do well for online marketing, but because it does two things at once. It provides the advertiser with an extremely simple content management system for piping fresh messaging into their ad, and it also prominently promotes their Twitter account, which is a strong conversion action for many marketers.

Flash Enthusiast Sends a Hidden Message To Steve Jobs

This is quite clever. A creative at McCann built his website in Flash, and for the image that loads incase you don’t have the Flash plugin, he’s inserted a photo of Steve Jobs giving you the finger. He’s offering the image to anyone who will install it, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find this image popping up across the Web.

Yahoo Announces Deep Integration Partnership With Social Gaming Start-Up Zynga | AllThingsD

Social gaming is red hot. And it seems such a natural for brands to get involved. An existing, highly-active audience. Relatively low production costs. And of course, it all ties in to their social media networks for sharing.

Here’s What Google TV Looks Like (PHOTOS)

I’ve posted several things recently on Google TV, which is probably the most interesting happening around TV technology. Here are some early screen snaps from the experience. This is classic Google. Throw something out there early, it looks kind of ugly, but the upside potential is clear and massive.