Mike's Industry View - Issue #119
AI / Creativity
A year in, Marks & Spencer’s virtual assistant has helped drive £2m in sales — digiday.com
Over a quarter of a million customers have used the assistant to date, said Parmar and almost 70 percent of issues were satisfied without needing human intervention.
This is the Lexus ad that no human created — www.campaignlive.co.uk When Lexus decided to employ artificial intelligence to produce an ad script for its ES model, no-one expected things to turn out quite as they did.
Business/Marketing/Adv
The enduring strategy behind John Lewis' Christmas ads — www.contagious.com
John Lewis has done it again and got everyone talking about its Christmas ad. Even the retailer’s brutal first half of the year, in which profits fell 99% year-on-year, and a prevailing mood of fear and frustration in Brexit Britain, could not dampen its Christmas spirit.
Nike's new NYC flagship store for people who hate shopping — www.fastcompany.com The sneaker giant has an ambitious new goal: Woo people who hate shopping IRL.
Interestingness
Beijing to Judge Every Resident Based on Behaviour by End of 2020 — www.bloomberg.com China’s plan to judge each of its 1.3 billion people based on their social behavior is moving a step closer to reality, with Beijing set to adopt a lifelong points program by 2021 that assigns personalized ratings for each resident.
Goodbye ShortList Magazine — oldmediaman.com
Lifestyle publishers face a perfect storm. The lifestyle media market is heavily oversupplied, many of the brands are weaker than they look from the outside but VC money continues to be poured into launches. So the storm will rage for some years while winners and losers are sorted and a new equilibrium emerges between the content brands, the advertising focused FAANGS and socially driven influencers.
Platform News
M&S is putting Instagram higher on its media plan amid a marketing reset — www.thedrum.com Under pressure to attract a new, younger, generation of shoppers, Marks and Spencer (M&S) has funneled more media budget into Instagram, where it’s been experimenting with Shopping and IGTV.
Quartz's new commenting app and membership program — qz.com The Quartz app: a new way to talk about the news. Quartz membership: for turning change into competitive advantage.