Tag: AI-powered

Australia – DDB Sydney and Mango Communications have launched a campaign that offers fans the opportunity to own one of 2,000 pairs of Macca’s renowned limited edition Nuggies boots, paying respect to the boot shape’s ultimate dippability. 

Those who want to enter must buy some Chicken McNuggets and locate one in the shape of a boot. They then scan the QR code on their pack after grabbing a McNugget. To access the entry form and scan the correct morsel, users can use the phone’s camera to use the scanner app. This promotion is the first of its type to employ Google Gemini’s generative AI chicken nugget identification as a mechanism for users to submit their own material.

After weeks of testing (and tasting) using Google Gemini, the AI scanner software has been trained to identify not only the ideal boot-shaped Chicken McNugget but also to differentiate it from other shapes of the same product and items. 

#BootPursuit started this week and will last three weeks, with 2,000 pairs of Nuggies boots up for grabs.

The new campaign is being implemented throughout Macca’s locations countrywide, with backing from social media, public relations, influencer relationships, and sponsorship initiatives. 

Speaking about the campaign, Matt Chandler, executive creative director, DDB Sydney, said, “The boot-shaped Chicken McNugget is a fan favourite. It always tops the poll for number one nugget. It was time to reward Australia’s boot enthusiasts. The leaps we’re seeing in AI are remarkable, writing Shakespeare, generating news, and now analysing Chicken McNuggets. What a time to be alive.”

Meanwhile, Chloe Brannagan, McDonald’s Australia brand manager, said, “We’re thrilled to be bringing Nuggies back, and to give fans the opportunity to get their feet in them. Limited edition Macca’s merch has always been hot property, so to give them away with fun use of tech is the icing on the cake. Or the breading on the nugget, so to speak.”

Singapore – Adjust, a measurement and analytics business, has announced InSight, a machine learning and AI-powered measurement tool that gives marketers a data-driven perspective on campaign efficacy. 

Marketers may now use incrementality analysis to gauge the effect of particular marketing initiatives, including budget increases, on return on investment (ROI) because of the launch of Adjust’s InSight in the INSEA area and other markets worldwide. This facilitates ROI-positive decision-making by allowing marketers to evaluate these marketing initiatives against desired KPIs and ascertain if they yield incremental lift, cannibalise organic traffic, or have no effect at all. 

When incrementality analysis reveals the actual worth of new advertising channels, campaigns, budget adjustments, and seasonality—values not found in previous marketing initiatives—it can augment a marketer’s existing arsenal for measuring. 

Speaking about the launch, Katie Madding, chief product officer at Adjust, said, “As our industry moves towards a more privacy-centric, aggregated approach to measurement, marketers are faced with even more complexity in understanding the true impact of their efforts. This new era demands new innovative approaches that unlock real visibility. Without it, optimising campaigns and allocating budget becomes a guessing game and marketers could be highly misled by relying solely on short-term measurement.” 

She added, “Adjust is deeply committed to delivering next-gen solutions that answer the most critical question on marketers’ minds: ‘Is a campaign having a positive impact on my business? With InSight, marketers are no longer in the dark. Our models can accurately predict ‘what could have happened if this marketing action hadn’t taken place’, delivering results with a 95% confidence interval, which is the highest on the market.”

Meanwhile, Jay Christian, performance marketing manager at Pret A Manger, stated, “Adjust’s incrementality measurement brought us insights into iOS campaign optimisation once thought was no longer possible. With their machine learning models doing the heavy lifting and analysing our historical aggregated data, insightful outcomes and advanced incrementality metrics are available at the push of a button.”

Singapore – Yahoo has announced the acquisition of Artifact, an AI-driven news aggregation and discovery platform. 

Yahoo completed the acquisition of Artifact on March 29, 2024 with co-founders CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger, working as advisors for Yahoo during the transition.

In line with this, Artifact will no longer operate as a stand-alone application. In the following months, its in-house AI-powered customization algorithms and other features will be integrated into Yahoo’s network, which includes the Yahoo News app. 

Yahoo’s commitment to providing reliable news and information to its hundreds of millions of users globally is demonstrated by this initiative. It also advances their goal of offering a more tailored way for users to find news and information on a variety of devices. 

The AI-powered discovery engine at Artifact works by presenting information that fits users’ interests and gradually improving its comprehension of them. A tailored news feed that is pointing users toward stories they are interested in is the product of this process. 

In addition to curating material, Artifact provides a number of features that improve user experience, such as access to the most recent news, sharing options, clickbait detection tools, and more. By incorporating these features into the Yahoo portfolio, the opportunity to offer customers even more personalised and content experiences is enhanced.

Speaking about the acquisition, Kat Downs Mulder, SVP and general manager of Yahoo News, said, “Yahoo was one of the first to combine human and algorithmic curation of news. Since then, the landscape of machine learning and personalisation has changed dramatically and Artifact has innovated with best-in-class technology to meet the moment. Artifact has become a beloved product and we’re thrilled to be able to continue to grow that technology and further our mission of becoming the trusted guide to digital information and the best curator connecting people to the content that matters most to them.” 

Meanwhile, Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Artifact, stated, “We built an intuitive product experience that users love and has the opportunity to benefit millions of people. Yahoo brings the scale to help the product achieve what we envisioned while upholding the belief that connecting people to the trusted sources of news and information is as critical as ever. AI has allowed us to give users a better experience discovering great content they care about. Yahoo recognises that opportunity, and we could not be more excited to see what we’ve built live on through Yahoo News.” 

Singapore – Customer service software company Zendesk has announced that it has completed its acquisition of AI-powered quality management platform Klaus, following its initial announcement back in January.

The acquisition of Klaus is the latest addition to the company’s existing workforce engagement management solutions which includes ‘Tymeshift’, a modern workforce management tool built exclusively for Zendesk.

With digital agents resolving more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyses both human and digital agent performance is crucial to maintaining quality control and providing enhanced customer service.

Taking this role, Klaus pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations and follow-ups across all conversations – even those done by outsourced teams.

It also spots knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities that can be used to improve agent performance and productivity, all of which results in higher customer satisfaction.

Talking about the acquisition, Adrian McDermott, chief technology officer at Zendesk, said, “With Klaus as part of our WEM portfolio, we can empower businesses with the best AI-powered automated quality assurance in the market. By automatically assessing support using AI to pinpoint and fix gaps, AutoQA gives businesses 100 percent coverage of their customer conversations and a clear view of opportunities to improve, while removing the burden of manual review.”

Meanwhile, Kair Käsper, co-founder of Klaus, commented, “While most QA software can only score up to 5 percent of CX interactions, Klaus automates QA across 100 percent of customer support interactions. It uses AI to identify patterns, predict issues and suggest solutions making it a vital tool that improves service quality, enriches the customer experience, and ultimately enhances the reputation and success of the organisation.”

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – AI-powered multilingual digital marketing platform NexMind announced today that it has secured seed funding from Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm 500 Global to expand Its AI-powered multilingual digital marketing platform worldwide. 

With 500 Global’s funding, NexMind will be expanding their product offerings and accelerate customer acquisition along with the launch of Text2Social, a new feature that allows users to generate social media posts across multiple channels.

This tool mainly allows users to create social media posts in any of the 17 languages, ensuring their message is localised and relevant to garner higher engagement. Among the languages supported currently are Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. 

The tool also conducts in-depth audience research to identify multiple data points useful for generating effective social media content, enabling marketers to spend less time on data analysis, and more time implementing data-driven decisions that support their marketing and communication goals.

Francis Lui, CEO and founder of NexMind, said, “Our focus is to help business teams generate more leads, increase brand awareness, and enhance their productivity through advanced yet intuitive AI tools. We are proud to have the support of 500 Global in our mission to be a world-class AI solutions provider.”

Meanwhile, Khailee Ng, managing partner at 500 Global, commented, “We believe NexMind’s multilingual AI solutions will propel the growth of today’s online businesses, accelerate the exchange of goods and services for the next wave of internet users, and have a positive impact on the future of our global economy.”

Singapore – Advertising company Taboola has recently announced significant AI-powered advancements in its performance advertising-focused bidding technology called ‘Maximize Conversions’.

The new technology allows advertisers using Taboola to evolve beyond manual and time-consuming cost per click bidding strategies by simply specifying a budget and having Taboola’s algorithm automate the bid to drive conversions efficiently. 

Through Maximize Conversions, advertisers are seeing up to 50% boost in conversions while maintaining their cost per acquisition (CPA), as well as some advertisers seeing reduced CPA by nearly 20%.

In addition to making ad campaigns more effective, Maximize Conversions also aims to provide immense benefits in making campaigns more efficient, reducing the time in which advertisers get to their optimal results by half.

Furthermore, it is designed to give advertisers flexibility for their campaigns. The technology can be used without a target CPA, which delivers against an advertiser’s daily budget, driving the most conversions at the lowest cost. When used with a target CPA, it delivers performance at a CPA they control.

Adam Singolda, CEO and founder of Taboola, said, “We’re taking the guesswork out of CPC bidding, making it so that advertisers can simply share their goals, and our AI takes care of the rest. Our AI is trained on first party contextual signals from more than 9,000 publishers and nearly 600 million daily active users, giving advertisers using Maximize Conversions a competitive advantage in reaching customers.”

“We’re seeing incredible results from this technology – delivering large amounts of customers, saving costs, time and more. I expect nearly half of our advertisers will adopt this offering in 2024,” he added. 

Singapore – Coca-Cola has recently announced the launch of Coca-Cola ‘Y3000 Zero Sugar’, a new limited-edition flavor accompanied by an AI-powered experience from Coca-Cola Creations. This flavor marks the first futuristic flavor co-created with human and artificial intelligence from Coca-Cola, aiming to celebrate an optimistic future.

The unique item offers consumers and fans a refreshing taste and a glimpse of what the future could look like by scanning the can and going through the Coca-Cola Creations Hub, where they can use the customized Y3000 AI lens to imagine what the world could look like in the future. 

Coca-Cola created the Y3000 experience by tapping into human and artificial intelligence to understand how fans envision the future through emotions, aspirations, colors, flavors, and more. Fan’s perspectives from around the world, combined with insights gathered from artificial intelligence, helped inspire Coca-Cola to create the taste of Y3000.

The product features a futuristic packaging design including light and optimistic tones, a Coca-Cola Creations logo composed of effervescent bubbles, and the Coca-Cola Spencerian Script with fluid dot clusters that merge to represent the human connections of our future planet. Co-created with artificial intelligence, the design showcases liquid in a morphing, evolving state, communicated through form and color changes that emphasize a positive future.

Coca-Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar is available in select markets around the world, dropping soon  in ASEAN & South Pacific with Australia rolling the new Creations first. The Coca-Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar drink follows the recently released Coca-Cola Ultimate Zero Sugar created for League of Legends players, which was made available in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia early this year; and is currently available nationwide in the Philippines.

Oana Vlad, senior director, global strategy at The Coca-Cola Company, said, “Inspired by the timelessness of Coca-Cola, we want to celebrate everyone’s idea of what the future might look like. With the help of AI-powered technology, Coca-Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar imagines how a Coca-Cola from the future could taste and introduces innovative experiences to explore the future.”

Meanwhile, Tee Jae Sonza, trademark category head, Coca-Cola ASEAN and South Pacific Operating Unit, commented, “We’re excited to bring to life this latest innovation from our Coca-Cola Creations platform here in ASEAN & South Pacific as we continuously explore new ways to resonate with our consumers. The launch of Coca-Cola Y3000 Zero Sugar opens up the possibility of a world where humanity and technology can collaborate in harmony to create Real Magic.”

Spain – Global digital services and consulting agency Infosys has announced a three-year digital innovation partnership with world renowned tennis star Rafael Nadal. 

Marking Nadal’s first ever collaboration with a digital company, Infosys and his coaching team are developing an AI-powered match analysis tool with real time availability to simultaneously track insights from his live matches, when he is back on tour, along with historical data from his earlier matches. 

As the digital innovation partner for the ATP Tour, Roland-Garros, Australian Open, and The International Tennis Hall of Fame, Infosys has helped reimagine the tennis ecosystem for a billion fans globally leveraging AI, cloud, data analytics and digital experiences. Most recently, Infosys launched the Carbon Tracker, allowing ATP players to track and offset emissions from their travel on tour, being a first of its kind sustainable tech in any sport.

In addition, Infosys’ partnerships with tennis have also extended to serve communities around the world, a good example being STEM education, made engaging through the lens of tennis, to enable young children to develop a deeper appreciation for STEM studies together with Tennis Australia.

Talking about the partnership, Rafael Nadal said, “I’m very happy to work closely with Infosys, as they work to not only evolve the experience of tennis to the times, but also empower people in our communities to be part of a brighter future. I love the way Infosys has brought its digital expertise across industries to the global tennis ecosystem. 

“It has transformed the tennis experience for a billion global fans and truly empowered all players on the tour with analytics that they could have only dreamt of a few years ago. Also, the impact that Infosys is making beyond the court – creating the next opportunity for people, businesses, and communities – deeply inspires me. I believe it’s our shared aspiration to create societal good that makes our handshake truly meaningful,” he added.

Meanwhile, Salil Parekh, chief executive officer & managing director at Infosys, said, “It is an honor to welcome Rafa – one of the world’s most respected champion athletes and humanitarians – as an ambassador for Infosys. 

He is someone who personifies the spirit of always evolving, never giving up, utmost dedication and determination to give the very best in every situation. We are inspired by his approach, and it reflects our own aspirations to continuously evolve and always remain relevant for our clients,” added Parekh.