Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

In case you haven't already heard, bots are the new black.

Seriously. The new strategy of providing 1:1, instantaneous assistance to users and customers is proving successful for brands across industries. And although we've rounded up AI and bot use cases for you as they relate to productivity and marketing, we wanted to round up other cool ones, too -- that anyone can use, even for fun.

So read on to learn about a few neat bots we've enjoyed using so far this year...

ON FRIDAY EVENING, inside an old-movie-house-cum-art-gallery at the heart of San Francisco's Mission district, Google graphics guru Blaise Agüera y Arcas delivered a speech to an audience of about eight hundred geek hipsters.

He spoke alongside a series of images projected onto the wall that once held a movie screen, and at one point, he showed off a nearly 500-year-old double portrait by German Renaissance painter Hans Holbein. The portrait includes a strangely distorted image of a human skull, and as Agüera y Arcas explained, it's unlikely that Holbein painted this by hand. He almost certainly used mirrors or lenses to project the image of a skull onto a canvas before tracing its outline. "He was using state-of-the-art technologies," Agüera y Arcas told his audience.

Neural networks are not only driving the Google search engine but spitting out art for which some people will pay serious money.His point was that we've been using technology to create art for centuries—that the present isn't all that different from the past. It was his way of introducing the gallery's latest exhibit, in which every work is the product of artificial neural networks—networks of computer hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain. Last year, researchers at Google created a new kind of art using neural nets, and this weekend, the tech giant put this machine-generated imagery on display in a two-day exhibit that raised roughly $84,000 for the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco nonprofit devoted to the confluence of art and tech....

Many people believed that modern technology will first replace the low wage jobs from the industries that are dependent on manual labor rather than intellectual work. However, the latest innovations in robotics and A.I. tend to contradict our previous beliefs: we are now entering a new era, of A.I. based design that hopefully, will change everything for the best.

Until recently, computer generated design was regarded more as a sci-fi idea rather than a reality. The development of artificial intelligence was focused on other goals and nobody could have dreamed about it being capable of actually delivering something useful to mankind. Sure, we all have at least once admired beautiful fractals generated by computers but let’s face it, they were not actually visual designs. They were visual math and nothing more.

The idea pops into my mind almost immediately. For weeks, amid my dad’s barrage of doctor’s appointments, medical tests, and treatments, I keep the notion to myself.

I dream of creating a Dadbot—a chatbot that emulates not a children’s toy but the very real man who is my father. And I have already begun gathering the raw material: those 91,970 words that are destined for my bookshelf....

It was winter in New York City and Asaf Jacobi’s Harley-Davidson dealership was selling one or two motorcycles a week. It wasn’t enough.

Jacobi went for a long walk in Riverside Park and happened to bump into Or Shani, CEO of an AI firm, Adgorithms. After discussing Jacobi’s sales woes, Shani, suggested he try out Albert, Adgorithm’s AI-driven marketing platform. It works across digital channels, like Facebook and Google, to measure, and then autonomously optimize, the outcomes of marketing campaigns.

Jacobi decided he’d give Albert a one-weekend audition.That weekend Jacobi sold 15 motorcycles. It was almost twice his all-time summer weekend sales record of eight....

The other day at work, my colleague, HubSpot Marketing Director Ryan Bonnici, sent around a link on Slack -- to a website called “Will Robots Take My Job?”

We were thrilled to learn marketing managers had only a 1.4% chance of our jobs being automated or replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. And although I breathed a sigh of relief that writing has only a 3.8% chance of being automated, it made me think about job roles that weren’t so lucky.

If you think job disruption by AI is limited to the assembly lines, think again: AI is doing a better job than humans at some aspects of sales and marketing, too....

Representing 1,300 Google AdWords accounts and more than 176,000 active campaigns, the iProspect report provides an analysis and overview of the trends and opportunities relevant for brands that are taking a strategic, performance focused approach to paid search marketing.i

iProspect’s Q1 year-over-year Google AdWords data showed strong mobile growth in terms of both impressions and clicks. Volume on desktops and tablets, however, was down, indicating an overall decrease in demand for those devices. Other key findings include:

Cost per click increased across all devices, reaching the highest CPC recorded since this report’s inception in 2014

Mobile CPC saw a particularly significant increase, up 40% YoY, further closing the gap on desktop

Mobile click share also continued to grow, as advertisers adapted their strategy based on the device-specific search preferences of consumers, and now represents 59% of all paid search traffic

Google Shopping investment continued to grow, with advertiser investment up 44% YoY.

Voice search, for instance, is quickly becoming the search method of choice for many consumers, says the report. Today, 500M people use a voice search-powered digital assistant of some kind, and half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 (Tractica, 2016)....

Artificial intelligence is making huge strides in innovating the creative industries, and thanks to a collaboration between IBM and the Tribeca Film Festival – the trend seems set to grow even bigger.

Earlier this week, the two companies hosted the Storytellers with Watson contest where a small but prestigious group of artists and scientists were asked to come up with new ways in which creatives could rely on IBM’s supercomputer to make art. The event featured five finalists selected from a larger pool of entries.

Selected contestants were then asked to pitch their ideas in a ‘Shark Tank’ style format. Following a consideration from the panel of experts, the jury eventually gave the award to filmmaker and journalist Seth Grossman who proposed an algorithm that finds meaning in words and images to make video editing easier.

The so-called Rip-o-matic model that Grossman designed essentially takes the hassle out of editing by automatically splicing together numerous bits and pieces that represent the filmmaker’s overall creative vision....

Ads used to just be ads. They were signs on the side of the road, or in our browsers. They were something that could be ignored. Visually loud, sure, but they weren’t a fundamental part of our conversations, relationships, or entertainment.

But on the internet today, ads aren’t just part of the content or interface, they are the content and the interface. From what photos you see on Facebook, to the music you listen to on Spotify, to the videos you watch on Snapchat–it’s all served by algorithms that have quantified your response well enough to exploit your tastes, showing you things that you will almost certainly click on.

By using these apps and services, we’re feeding the companies that control them immense amounts of data that, in turn, tailors the medium to fit our tastes. The difference between an ad and a piece of content, these days, is becoming technical. It’s an insight that echoes throughout Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report, which she and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers published yesterday afternoon.

The report, which is heavily anticipated every year, contains hundreds of slides breaking down digital culture and business–everything from emerging markets in China to the rise of unboxing culture. But the trend that stuck out most to us this year? That the internet is now playing every user in one giant game we cannot escape. Here’s how....

Colors can affect our feelings and behavior in ways so profound that studies have been conducted on how we can better use them in life, and in society, to “hack” culture. This covers subjects from what colors to wear to a job interview … to the ideal shade for prisons.

Because of this odd relationship we have with color, the colors we choose, and what we name them, become meaningful shorthands for much bigger stories. Every year, Pantone selects a “Color of the Year” that thematically puts us on the right track for the next 12 months. We project as much onto Pantone’s choices as the brand seeks to project onto us. (This year’s color was “Greenery.”)

With all this in mind, research scientist and neural network geek Janelle Shane decided to see how well artificial intelligence fares at both selecting colors and naming them. A writer at Ars Technica calls her results “the greatest work of artificial intelligence I’ve seen to date.”

On Tumblr, Shane describes both the terms of the experiment and its output. “I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values (RGB = red, green, and blue color values),” she writes. “Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?”...

The Mirai is Toyota’s car of the future. It runs on hydrogen fuel cells, gets 312 miles on a full tank and only emits water vapor. So, to target tech and science enthusiasts, the brand is running thousands of ads with messaging crafted based on their interests.

The catch? The campaign was written by IBM’s supercomputer, Watson. After spending two to three months training the AI to piece together coherent sentences and phrases, Saatchi LA began rolling out a campaign last week on Facebook called “Thousands of Ways to Say Yes” that pitches the car through short video clips.

“When we started to look at the people who were going to be interested in this car, we realized it was people who were new technology adopters,—it was psychologists; it was engineers,” said Chris Pierantozzi, ecd at Saatchi LA. “So we wanted to make an ad for almost every single potential buyer of this car—one for every type of Mirai driver.

”First, Saatchi LA wrote 50 scripts based on location, behavioral insights and occupation data that explained the car’s features to set up a structure for the campaign. The scripts were then used to train Watson so it could whip up thousands of pieces of copy that sounded like they were written by humans....