Tron Draper Says, “Embrace AI”

Listen

Why Your Company Needs to Be Creating Videos

If a picture is worth a thousand words and there are 24 frames in a video per second, that’s, like, a lot of words in a 1-second video.

The point we’re making is that video is *it* right now, and today’s Listen is here to tell you how to seize it.  

Among other things, the hosts cover:

• Why every company needs to be producing video
• YouTube and Facebook as the best video platforms since they’re already video-centric — don’t reinvent the reel (terrible pun, sorrynotsorry)
• Red Bull & GoPro do video amazingly well because their content is 100% paired with what their audience is doing and what they care about (this one’s a really important lesson for anyone considering video)

The biggest hits come toward the end of this podcast. To really get the most out of video you need to:

• (21:10) Upload videos to Facebook natively versus sharing a video link.
• (22:08) Start with a bang. You need to capture your audience’s attention in 3 seconds or less.
• (22:45) Think about the thumbnails. The thumbnail is really what gets someone to watch your content.
• (23:37) Use closed captions and/or subtitles. As many as 85% of people on Facebook watch content without sound. 

HEY! If you dig what you’re reading, sign up for our marketing newsletter, The Daily Carnage. Get it here and become the smartest marketer in the room.

Listen Now

Read

8 Ways Intelligent Marketers Use Artificial Intelligence

Some may fear the rise of AI, but marketers should be embracing these new automated overlords. AI-powered marketing tools might be just what you need to beat your content marketing competition. Or, in the very least, be in the running.

Today’s Read shows us eight amazing ways to leverage artificial intelligence to get ahead in the marketing world.

Here’s a brief rundown of the ways you can use AI to your advantage:

1. AI-enhanced PPC advertising. AI-powered systems can uncover new advertising channels, help test out ad platforms, and optimize targeting, copywriting, and bids.
2. Highly personalized website experience and better CRO. AI can automate a huge part of personalization based on location, demographics, and browsing history, giving your visitors the most relevant content, notifications, and offers.
3. AI-powered content creation. AI tools can automatically generate email content, personalized reports or messages, and curate content for social media.
4. Content-creation chatbots. Take your customer chat to the next level with personalized content marketing. (Sephora kills it.) Chatbots can also aggregate location-specific requests to find patterns and repetitive problems, and predict what’s causing the issues.
5. Intelligent email content curation. AI can analyze a customer’s reading patterns and topics of interest to recommend specific and relevant content, making your emails more engaging and more effective.
6. Churn prediction and smart customer engagement. Identify customer segments that are about to churn or leave for a competitor. When combined with personalized content creation, AI  churn predictors (like Vidaro) help keep more of your customers engaged!
7. AI-powered customer insights. Where it takes humans a huge amount of time to crunch numbers and match them to customer’s behavioral patterns, AI can do it on the fly.
8. Automated image recognition. Image recognition could mean a better sync between online content and store visits, so you can deliver more targeted one-on-one messaging. Many stores use facial recognition software to trace customers’ in-store visits and link these videos to their customers’ profiles.

In short,  AI enables marketers to fulfill a dream once believed to be impossible — to engage with every single customer in a personalized and meaningful way. And that means, a happy and loyal customer.

Read Now

Watch

KFC Suppertime Stories

Dang, KFC has been frying up some amazing ads lately. We never expected to feature the king of fried chicken in the Daily Carnage twice in one month. But here we are.

Their newest campaign takes the traditional chicken bucket and uses it to create an immersive dinner-time experience, called Suppertime Stories. The idea is to bring families together over dinner (and fried chicken).

These buckets are artfully designed and each one includes a code to unlock a story from the mobile app. Customers are supposed to lay their phone on the table (screen side down), place the bird bucket over the phone, turn off the lights, and listen. As the selected story plays, families enjoy a fully immersive sound-and-light experience.

Big ups to Ogilvy & Mather for this one.

Watch Now