Hasta La Creative!

The Democratic party is on a mission to foster data and tech unification up and down the ballot, and now the keepers of Republican data have signaled a similar goal. Two of the most prominent voter-data companies on the right, the Data Trust and i360, now will align their databases, allowing clients using either system to tap into some of the same information about voters.

Both sides are making moves leading up to November’s midterm election — a staging ground for the 2016 presidential race — to spur sophistication among campaigns using tech tools and data analysis for field organizing, ad targeting and get out the vote efforts. But their approaches differ.

While i360 houses data on more than 190 million voters — information that is publically available — the Data Trust is the exclusive data supplier of the Republican National Committee’s voter file data. Both provide information to Republican campaigns and other like-minded organizations. To access the RNC’s voter data through Data Trust, political campaigns agree to funnel data they gather on voters while door-knocking and other interactions back into the RNC voter file.

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For decades, urban cyclists have been seeking the ultimate bike lock, only to find each one’s vulnerabilities eventually demonstrated on YouTube. But what if the answer were in the bike itself?

Designed by three Chilean engineering students, the Yerka Project is an “unstealable” bike that functions as its own lock.

If the video below is anything to go by, it looks like they took The Club and built a bicycle into it. I don’t mean that as glancing praise, either—it really is a really cool idea.

The guys behind Yerka (which is kind of a Nordic word for “strength”) have been experimenting with a few different designs, including combination lock frames, smartphone-enabled locks, and a step-through frame.

Yerka is still in the prototype phase, with a Kickstarter campaign in the works to raise money for large-scale production of their finished bike models. 

The Hershey Co. has taken the foil off a redesigned corporate logo that the candy giant says “underscores the company’s evolution from a predominately U.S. chocolate maker to a global confection and snack company.”

The new logo still includes an image of a Hershey’s Kiss, but the new mark shows the tiny candy in silhouette form, stripping off the shiny foil wrapper shown in the old logo. The new image also looks a bit less like the logo shown on a Hershey bar, making use of updated typography and removing the apostrophe ‘s,’ going with “Hershey” rather than “Hershey’s.”

In addition to the new logo, Hershey stated that it is “implementing a new, disciplined visual identity system that is inspired by the famous colors of its most iconic brands, including Hershey’s, Reese’s and Ice Breakers, to bring a more colorful and consistent look to all of the company’s visual materials.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Did you hear the one about the marketer wanting to be more human and friendly with its customers and using robots to do it? Well, it’s not a joke. Welcome to “chatvertising,” an attempt to update the chat bot idea from the old ELIZA (a natural language processing program) and Smarter Child days. Remember the hype? You could have a conversation with a computer program. Smarter Child was well named because talking to it, with its scripted responses to a short list of understood keywords, was both as fun (for the novelty) and frustrating (for the communication) as talking to an infant.

With all the advances in artificial intelligence that have led to, um, Siri, some marketers have decided to have conversations with consumers through popular messaging services like Kik. Users can now choose to “chat” with brands that have a Kik profile. But rather than the fun but pointless responses that Smarter Child might have shot back at them, a chatty brand will deliver relevant marketing content to their new buddy. And why wouldn’t people love it? Well, the core fallacy here is the assumption that people want to have a relationship with a brand and, more so, that a brand is capable of having one.

You’d be correct in assuming that all of this is starting to sound like dj vu. Brands have been trying to be our friends for years. As far back as 1936, 7-Up was trying to make friends with its consumers: “You Like It, It Likes You” — an early instance of a brand suggesting it is capable of a social relationship. But let’s take a step back and think through the goal of these messaging campaigns. Brands are trying to appear more human and friendly to their audience. That is worthy. No matter the medium, when people interact with your brand, the response should be friendly and helpful.

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Category: Career Oxygen
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Social video experts Be On review the latest viral from Old Spice

sApple declined to comment beyond the e-mailed invitation, which said: “Wish we could say more.”Now the Cupertino, Calif.-based company will attempt to repeat that feat in wearables, an emerging group of devices that track people’s activity and health. Apple will introduce a wearable gadget along with new iPhones on Sept. 9, a person with knowledge of the plans said. Notices for the event, which will also take place in Cupertino, were sent out today.

While companies such as Fitbit and Jawbone have made some headway introducing wearables to the public, global sales of the activity trackers hit just 13.6 million units last year, according to researcher Parks Associates. That’s about the number of iPhones Apple sells in a month, giving CEO Tim Cook room to boost the size of the market.

The new device also will give the clearest sign yet of where the company is headed without Steve Jobs at the helm. Cook, who took over almost three years ago to the day, has been under pressure to show that the company will continue to deliver breakthrough products.

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DoubleDown Interactive, the company behind the popular gambling app DoubleDown Casino, placed its early marketing and media bets on Facebook. It’s worked. But as its bettors shift to mobile gambling from desktops, in sync with consumers’ migration to mobile devices for all sorts of daily activities, DoubleDown is looking to broaden its media-buying strategy with a new agency and additional publishing partners.

“We want to show up in places that might be unexpected for players and potential players,” said John Clelland, VP-global marketing at DoubleDown, a Seattle subsidiary of Las Vegas gambling-machine manufacturer International Game Technology. “The digital landscape is changing rapidly. People are carrying increasingly sophisticated devices with bigger screens.”

Three years ago, every DoubleDown player was using a desktop computer, Mr. Clelland said. Now players are split down the middle, and mobile use is growing at double the pace of desktop. The company says it has over 1.7 million average daily users.

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