AI & Machine Learning

Archive for the ‘AI & Machine Learning’ Category

August 28, 2018

Smart Ads Only Threaten Agencies That Don’t Deliver On Strategy

Is automation and machine learning eliminating the need for agencies and resellers? It’s a fair question. In Greg Sterling’s recent post, he examines it in the context of Google’s Smart Ads, which enable automated ad campaign creation, management, and optimization for small businesses. The short answer is no, automation and machine learning are not existential…

Contributed by: Alex Porter

August 7, 2018

Amazon ‘Internal Figures’ Show 50M Echo Devices Sold to Date

In an article arguing that voice-commerce is not happening, The Information (subscription required) says “about 50 million” Alexa devices have sold to date. The publication’s sources reportedly have seen “internal figures” from Amazon. While the bulk of the article is devoted to debunking the hype around voice shopping — reportedly, only 2% have bought anything with a smart…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

August 2, 2018

Smart Speakers: 47M in the US Today Heading toward 150M Tomorrow

Smart speakers and virtual assistants are not an over-hyped “shiny new object” technology platform. They are gaining rapid adoption and also influencing behaviors on other media channels: motivating more voice search on smartphones for example. Various analyst projections and estimates put the number of smart speakers (and virtual assistants) in US homes at around 43 – 50 million…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

July 30, 2018

Automated Google Ads Won’t Solve the Challenge of Ad Creative

Earlier this month, Google introduced “responsive search ads” which automate the search campaign optimization process using machine learning. Google takes up to 15 ad headlines and 4 description lines testing various combinations to identify the strongest ad creative for a given search query. According to Google, this kind of automated optimization of search campaign creative…

Contributed by: Joe Morsello

June 5, 2018

AR Grows While VR Slows

Mixed reality is a term that encompasses both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). But the two technologies appear to be headed in the opposite direction. Yesterday at Apple’s WWDC developer conference the company introduced ARKit 2 with enhanced capabilities and “shared experiences” (e.g., multi-player games). Apple has a vision for what it calls…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

May 9, 2018

Google Duplex: AI Machines Make Calls for Consumers to SMBs

During the keynote at Google’s developer conference yesterday there was an array of announcements. Perhaps the most interesting — and certainly unexpected — among them was “Google Duplex.” It’s a Turing test defying use of AI to enable machines to talk to humans over the phone. Google CEO Sundar Pichai cited an unsourced statistic, which…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

April 26, 2018

Facebook: 6 Key Stats about the Size of Its (SMB) Business

Yesterday Facebook announced first quarter revenues of $11.97, the majority of which ($11.8 billion) was advertising-related. The company reported that it has 2.2 billion monthly active users and 1.4 billion daily active users. Both user numbers were an increase of 13% over the year ago quarter. The recent data scandals appear not to have impacted its business in any…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

March 2, 2018

New Yelp ‘Custom Ads’ Use Machine Learning for SMB Ad Optimization

For some time Google and Facebook have been using machine learning to A/B test and optimize campaign performance for advertisers. Now Yelp is doing something similar with new Custom Ads. The company announced these new units yesterday. The basic concept behind the ad unit is simple: local advertisers get to pick an image and a review…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

February 5, 2018

What’s Hot & What’s Not in Hyperlocal

Cracking the online to offline attribution code remains a primary focus for local marketers in 2018, while booking platforms, loyalty programs, chatbots and beacons will be at the back of the line for investment this year, according to a survey of local marketers conducted by StreetFight. These findings were presented in a “State of Hyperlocal”…

Contributed by: Charles Laughlin

January 3, 2018

Will Virtual Assistants Dramatically Change Local Discovery?

How will voice and virtual assistants (in particular) impact the local market in 2018 and beyond? This is a question that many people have been asking over the course of the last year and now are actively considering as we wait for the holiday sales figures to come out and to determine how many virtual assistant…

Contributed by: Greg Sterling

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