And more on what brand marketers need to know from the 2022 Google I/O event — The 2022 tech conference season continues as Google kicked off its annual I/O developer event on Wednesday with a hybrid keynote session. Through the 2-hour-long presentation, Google introduced new software products and features, showcased its latest advances in AI research & development, unveiled the new Android OS along with a…

What our proprietary Futurecaster survey tells us about the creator economy, and how brands can tap into it — As digital media companies present their latest and greatest brand solutions to advertisers during the NewFronts this week, the booming creator economy is a common theme that has popped up across many presentations headed by social media companies that rely on user-generated content. On Wednesday, TikTok unveiled a new ad…

What Brands Need to Know from the 2022 Snap Partner Summit Keynote — On Thursday, Snap Inc. kicked off the spring tech conference season with a live-streamed presentation. During the hour-long keynote, the company unveiled a new crop of creative tools on Snapchat, shared some impressive stats on its users, and launched the long-speculated consumer-facing camera drone. …

The gaming industry is growing rapidly with an outsized cultural influence, yet the shifts towards cloud gaming and the metaverse bring new challenges and opportunities — Video games, once a designated hobby of nerds and geeks, has grown into a mainstream medium with cross-generational mass popularity and outsized cultural impact. The gaming audience, now estimated at nearly 3 billion worldwide, are starting to diversify demographically, with women now making up roughly 45% of the gaming community…

Weaponized memes, cults of personality, and the unexpected lessons for brand marketers — Elon Musk is at it again. Ten days after buying a majority stake of Twitter’s stock at 9.2% and sending the stock price flying, the tech billionaire provocateur is now offering an unsolicited bid to buy the whole company for $43.4 billion. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO sent the offer…

Why Netflix wants a Best Picture win, and how Apple got there first — At the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday, Hollywood’s yearslong journey to crown a streaming movie as the Best Picture winner came to an end. CODA, a small indie movie that Apple purchased at the 2021 Sundance FIlm Festival for 25 million dollars, beat out the presumed frontrunner The Power of…

The metaverse discourse is being muddled by crypto startups and getting lost amid web3 hype, but innovation-forward brands should not lose sight on why it truly matters — After two years of virtual events, the SXSW festival returned to in-person gathering earlier this month. Judging by all accounts, attendees were bombarded with a sludge of crypto-related activations and web3 products that dominated downtown Austin during its run. From immersive activations designed to promote whimsical NFT collections, to outrageous…

People are ready to return to revelry, but the experience economy is still in flux. Here is how service brands can find a path forward — This week marked the two-year anniversary of the first nationwide lockdown in the U.S. due to the Covid-19 outbreak; it also happened to be the opening week for the SXSW festival, which returned to a fully in-person affair. …

Insurance brands should leverage IoT data to expand usage-based insurance, while also exploring the opportunities that web3 technologies may unlock — The insurance industry is looking at an uncertain future: a global pandemic, worsening climate change, aging populations, and general geopolitical instability are ushering in an age of anxiety. While that in theory may be good for business, in reality, the combination of these volatile factors means that it is increasingly…