Five for Friday – LG Hires Bros to Build Brand, Your New Favorite Robot & Google Sees the Future of Eye Care

July 18th, 2014 by Search Influence Alumni

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1. LG Teams Up With Bro-tastic YouTube Network for Content Marketing Campaign
– Advertising Age

YouTube famous stars known as Dude Perfect are getting more than just views from their unbelievable, athletic trick shots. They have already acquired advertising leads with brands such as Pringles, Nerf, and as of this week, smartphone maker LG.

LG hopes that by standing behind these bros, they can extend their reach to younger audiences and hopefully create some competition for other dominating brands in their industry.

Incorporating this “jaw dropping” content may boost LG’s brand recognition, but stealing market share from Apple may be a bit of a reach.

RobotWavingHandSmallImage2. Say Hello to the Robotic Personal Assistant of Your Dreams
– Entrepreneur

Meet Jibo, a robotic personal assistant created by Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, a Boston-based professor and entrepreneur. Jibo is a “family robot,” designed to interact with your household, take photos and remind you of important events.

Having had a strange personal experience with Siri, I’m a bit skeptical of personalized interaction with a computer. Jibo seems to break the mold, but will this technology continue a pattern of diminishing personal interaction in today’s culture?

3. Novartis, Google to Develop Contact Lenses to Monitor Blood Sugar
– Mashable

Google is currently joining with Novartis, a Swiss pharmaceutical research and sales company, to develop smart contact lenses. These lenses, expected to make their debut as early as next year, will be equipped with blood glucose monitors and autofocus for troubled vision.

“The promise here is the holy grail of vision care, to be able to replicate the natural functioning of the eye,” Jimenez said in the Bloomberg report.

As if being “the holy grail” of the internet was not impressive enough, Google is taking it a few steps further and improving health care and the quality of life as well.

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4. Prototype Improves Mobile Typing by Ditching the Keyboard
– DNews

Are you fed up with ineffective, awkward mobile and tablet typing methods? Well, a startup based in Austin, Texas is in the early stages of creating a nonexistent keyboard to solve that #FirstWorldProblem.

Just as the name implies, the AirType project’s goal is to create a system allowing the user to type freely with no restriction but the mobile sensors around your hands and knuckles. Not only does this keyboard (or lack there of) allow you to type freely, it will also adapt to your activity and begin recognizing your habits, like voice recognition for your hands.

5. Retargeting Is Flawed; the Future Is Pretargeting
– Digital Next

What if ads were designed to service needs that we don’t even know we have? Retargeting will soon be a thing of the past, the future of advertising is our future behavior.

Most are familiar with retargeting efforts, taking products and services we already recognize and driving marketing for those brands. Marketers are beginning to refocus their goals to be more predictive and create wants and needs we may have in the future. The more information consumers divulge, the more predictive marketers become.

Image Sources:

Niek Beck, Moms contact