Google Unveils New Search AI; HookLogic Goes Beyond Brand-Retailer Negotiations

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Google’s World

At its I/O conference, Google made a big splash in voice-activated search, where it competes with Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. Its new Google Assistant UI chats with you “across devices and contexts.” And the intent data will be rich indeed. Per the company blog post: “It makes it easy to buy movie tickets while on the go, to find that perfect restaurant for your family to grab a quick bite before the movie starts, and then help you navigate to the theater.” Read it. Question: What are the mechanics of a voice query auction? App bonus points: Also at I/O, Google unveiled Instant Apps, mingling the app and mobile web experience. Android blog post. And it crowed about some app install milestones, per Re/code.

E-CPG

Ad Age reports on HookLogic’s efforts to empower retailers in the e-commerce milieu. Brands can bid across its network of retailer sites for better positions in end-cap display advertising or paid Google search results. Understanding that consumers shop online differently than they do in-store, HookLogic forgoes direct brand-to-retailer negotiations and measures sales across its entire network. “It’s more than the search results,” said CEO Jonathan Opdyke. “It’s the recommended products. It’s the home pages, all the different ways you can browse to a product in the store, essentially allowing brands to create online the kind of bias they do offline.” The strategy, which Opdyke calls “aggregating the digital aisle,” has helped his company grow by 2.5 times this year to over $200 million in annual sales. More.

The AI Agency

Havas Media Group and IBM launched Havas Cognitive, which leverages AI data from Watson, Adweek reports. IBM has been a Havas client for more than 20 years, but the two are rebooting their relationship with the joint offering. TD Ameritrade used the product to assign confidence scores to football fans based on social data. Red Bull and Adidas are also on the client roster. “Part of the relationship we have with IBM in this venture gives us unparalleled access to the Watson APIs. For our clients it’s almost a running start into cognitive marketing,” said Andrew Bennett, global CEO of Havas Worldwide and Havas Creative Group. More.

Got ’Rithm

Snapchat is working on an algorithm meant to curate content from publishers and brands for users (who currently see only a chronological feed from accounts they follow). “Platforms always seek to have a layer of control over the content they show because that gives them power. So Snapchat will figure out a way to do that,” says David Grant, president of PopSugar’s content studio. For now, Snapchat’s algorithm remains a rumor, as Digiday cites only anonymous pub sources. But Snapchat has been soaking up ad tech and measurement talent from the likes of Facebook, Google and Millward Brown for the past year, leaving very little doubt about its intention of becoming a marketing power broker. More.

All Roads Lead To Home

Location stamps on just eight Twitter posts can be enough to disclose a user’s home and work address to snoops, per an Oxford University and MIT research report. Twitter’s location reporting is off by default, but many users choose to turn it on. Tweets containing seemingly harmless information can then be easily traced back to an address through Google maps or location-based apps. “[The] paper puts two significant bricks in the wall of our privacy understanding,” said Latanya Sweeney, professor at Harvard University and former CTO at the FTC. “First, [the] survey shows how people can learn sensitive information from seemingly innocuous facts, and, second, people will easily share information they believe is innocuous.” More.

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