Google was I/O last week with plenty of news and announcements. As expected, the voice activated assistant space is heating up with, with Google announcing “Aptly”. Aptly will power a new piece of hardware called “Home”, an Amazon Echo/Alexa competitor. No prices are yet announced, but you can pre-register your interest here. Also teased during I/O was “allo” and “duo” which are messaging and video messaging products, available this summer. What’s notable about these apps is they also include smart assistant capabilities.
VR also featured prominently in the IO announcements with a new platform called “Daydream“, coming in Fall, this is the first step to move beyond Google Cardboard. A whole host of device manufacturers (Samsung, HTC, LG and Huawei) and content providers (WSJ, CNN, HBO) have already signed up to participate. For a full download of what Google I/O means for brands, check out the IPG Lab update.
Reading all of the Google I/O news what really stood out to me is that Facebook is now a little isolated when it comes to hardware devices in the home. Google, Amazon and Apple are hard at work bring their assistant services into in-home devices whereas Facebook has not done so. Excluding Oculus, Facebook is notably absent in the overall home device space which is odd given their push around messaging. Feels like a watch-this-space moment.
Facebook did have some interesting news during the week. Striking a pilot program deal with Warner Music that enables you to add Warner music to your Facebook slideshows, videos, etc. This may unlock some new creative opportunities for UM brands e.g. if you’re licensing Warner music for a campaign, there may be some clever things you can do to get people to use that in some sort of video mash-ups.
What’s 140 characters long but not? twitter! According to Bloomberg, twitter is going to stop counting links and images in the character limit. Great news for the owner of longest domain in the world and the longest free email address in the world, but more seriously – I expect some brand to take advantage of this with a marketing hack that takes advantage of this twitter loophole. The change is apparently going live in the next 2 weeks, although I tested a 256 character weblink and it seems the extra character limit works on some accounts already.
Joshua