#Google Women Tech Makers Ambassador

[krisrampersad]

On the shoulders of Giants - the Unfinished Agenda Happy IWD Women Techmakers Dare 2 B The Change

Happy International Women's Day! How women tech makers and digital creators can bridge the digital divide and avoid replicating bias, stereotyping and discrimination towards gender equality

International Women’s Day 2023 with Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, WorldPulse Digital Ambassador & Island Innovators’ Ambassador Dr Kris Rampersad As women techmakers, we need to pay close attention to and ensure that we are not replicating the biases, stereotypes and by extension the discrimination Dr Kris Rampersad, AMBASSADOR for Women Techmakers, WorldPulse & Island INNOVATORs Happy…

[martechadvisor-blog]

Why Digital-Out-of-Home (DOOH) is the New Kid on the Block

Out-of-home (OOH) media/advertising has come of age in more ways than one. After all, can you name one tactic that hasn’t been digitalized? Get set to meet Digital 20.0

AdTech evolution in retrospect

Do you want to take a guess on the origins of OOH? Remember The Mummy…..? Yes, dating back to over thousand years, Egyptian civilization used obelisks of tall stone to communicate treaties and laws to people!

Let’s go through a timeline before ‘tech’ became an obvious suffix to advertising.

Some journey that, isn’t it? OOH, as we see it today, is around us through a plethora of touchpoints. Noticed Nicole Kidman for Etihad at airports? Or, Kristen Stewart for Chanel at malls? Or, the ‘Shot on iPhone 7’ campaign on busy commercial squares? There’re sub-touchpoints within these touchpoints too. That’s what makes OOH comprehensive in terms of targeting and reach.

Digital-OOH: DOOH Wow!

With tech, OOH is fully prepped to provide what other forms of advertising already promise –personalization. Whatever be the market, demography, and clientele, modern-day OOH or DOOH doesn’t operate on the ‘one-for-all’ mode anymore.

With advancements in the art and science of pixels, every year an array of new screens come alive. This is reflected in the ever-growing number of digital screens and interactive billboards for OOH in public spaces. Lifestyle upgrades along with higher spending powers have seen DOOH prevail effectively in state-of-art airports, malls, multiplexes, theme parks, parking lots, hotels, and so many others – DOOH is all around us.

Powered by expansive sources of data, especially with the smartphone wave, hypertargeting and personalization through DOOH is now a reality. Therefore, OOH campaigns now revolve around creative impact, innovation, and meaningful reach. Companies are maximizing the usage of factors like facial recognition, geo-targeting, and augmented reality (AR) to ensure continuous engagement levels wherever their target audience may be.

DOOH, especially interactive formats, can serve as invaluable data collection points for brands. For interactive forms of DOOH, facial recognition is the pivotal technology, and geo-targeting comes a close second. Geo-targeting can be defined as ‘delivering different content or ads to people based on their geographic location’. It is executed via geofencing technology which creates an intelligent layer enabling actions based on a set ‘area’. This area is built by establishing a ‘virtual fence’ clouted through different geofencing-enabled technologies like a platform for managing digital signage content. Geo-targeting compliments DOOH impeccably.

Michael Provenzano, CEO & Co-Founder, Vistar Media:

The biggest challenge of out-of-home historically has been that there was no real way to directly tie any impact results back to the actual campaign exposure. With location data, you can understand consumer movement enabling marketers to validate store visitation and household validation.

In-store visitation is a crucial KPI for retailers in a range of industries, from the big box retailers to telecom, QSR, and casual dining. If they can invest in media and then see an increase in the number of people visiting their stores, and therefore increasing sales, that demonstrates the ROI of that ad spend and is a huge win for their business. Vistar measures foot traffic by using location data to identify audiences that have been exposed to a digital out-of-home campaign and then visited a physical store location. This provides a powerful view into the impact of OOH media exposure.

Visitation is great for retail marketers, but for some marketers in areas like automotive and CPG, sales are the final KPI that matters. In a similar way that location data tells us where someone went, it also can tell us where someone lives. Some of the largest transactional data sets for sales are stored at the household level. By combining location data with transactional data, we are able to understand what households are exposed to what ads and understand how sales were changed at a selection of households.

DOOH: Forms and scale

**When you want a message delivered at a broader scale, interactive DOOH with hashtags or Instagram feed is a great option to gather data** or/and information. There are some fine examples of this.

National Geographic’s DOOH campaign across NYC’s Time Square on May 19, Endangered Species Day, encouraged people to take a selfie with a displayed endangered species and post it on Instagram or Twitter with #SaveTogether. 175 selfies were selected from the lot and projected on the digital billboards.

A local ad agency brought the condition of Panama City roads to the notice of its Department of Public Works. Devices were placed throughout the potholes in the city streets and every time a vehicle drove over it, a tweet was sent to the Public Works. Such was the campaign’s impact that the ministry had to address the issue soon.

A local ad agency brought the condition of Panama City roads to the notice of its Department of Public Works. Devices were placed throughout the potholes in the city streets and every time a vehicle drove over it, a tweet was sent to the Public Works. Such was the campaign’s impact that the ministry had to address the issue soon.

When using interactive DOOH to deliver a more one-on-one content, apart from the usual hashtags, email ids and mobile numbers (for OTPs) or QR code scanners provide essential data on a deeper, personal level. For that, DOOH gets beyond just those digital billboards. There’s a host of digitalized sub-touchpoints for one-on-ones. Digital standees at events, malls, airports, bus stops, fests, and more serve the purpose well. In-flight interactive digital screens have become common in most airplanes providing data to airlines that is decisive to improving CX. The collected data and resulting insights can feedback to power your marketing technology stack too.

More examples of the power of DOOH:

Pepsi (#LiveForNow) – Long live AR, and see how Pepsi used it to promote Pepsi Max.

British Airways (#lookup) – BA used GPRS to delight audiences with its #lookup campaign. Every time a BA flight passed over Trafalgar Square, a little child in a digital screen pointed to the sky!

Barncancer Fonden – A Swedish DOOH for a social cause! To spread awareness and empathy on how cancer affects young women. A camera identified an incoming train and the hair of a 14-year old blew vigorously with the wind and ultimately flew away. Strong! Social! Emotional!

Thus, with well-directed DOOH, you can surprise, entertain, and even bring a tear to the eye. DOOH allows you to feed your appetite for creativity and innovation. Increasingly, we will see companies executing customized-DOOH campaigns. In short, next time you’re facing a digital screen close to a salon, imagine Rachel Weisz spraying Bvlgari eau de toilette on you! A virtual moment totally worth it, right?

Tech companies embracing OOH

Executing OOH campaigns doesn’t always mean roping in celebs as brand ambassadors. Though it seems a great fit for high-end, luxury brands, OOH is more about making the right brand associations. While tech bigwigs have always showcased their products via OOH, ads for services using the outdoor medium was limited. However, the famous OOH campaign by Accenture (remember, ‘high performance delivered’) meant that technology companies and B2Bs started to embrace OOH ads for their services. Since then, instances of tech OOH/DOOH have surged.

Provenzano explains:

Data-driven targeting, specifically location-based audiences, opens up new ways for B2B marketers to take advantage of the impact of OOH while still reaching a defined professional audience.

For example, a security software provider trying to reach IT decision makers might target an audience of individuals attending a cybersecurity conference. The campaign could activate DOOH media in areas physically surrounding the conference, as well as analyzing the movement patterns of conference attendees and continuing to reach them at high impact moments throughout their daily routine, such as in office building elevators, transit screens and digital kiosks in areas they are likely to be.

Vistar recently ran a campaign that used location targeting to identify two distinct audiences of large corporation employees vs. small businesses and then reach them throughout their daily routines with DOOH media. According to a panel survey after the campaign, a majority of those exposed identified themselves as business executives, and the campaign drove boosts across both brand and product awareness.

A special advantage of OOH is location. Environment surrounding people can be utilized to make strong impacts. Google did just that when it promoted its rebranded app leveraging location-based OOH campaigns across NYC.

OOH has also been endorsed by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Snapchat. It’s a clear testimony to the fact that **DOOH allows direct offline and online communication between brands and audiences**. OOH also syncs well with social/digital as it can trigger online searches or invite a viewer to directly engage with the brands’ social pages.

OOH: The programmatic panorama

AdTech players began offering programmatic OOH in 2015. However, the sensation was when Google introduced DoubleClick to OOH which signaled a significant, giant leap. Why? It meant OOH ads can now be traded programmatically with the automation process of DoubleClick. Sensational, because of the sheer power of internet data that Google houses.

Provenzano adds:

One of the main drivers in the growth of OOH this year is the push to tie OOH to measurable ROI - and programmatic is a mechanism driving this shift. Digital buyers are increasingly looking to add OOH into their broader omnichannel media mix, and media owners are eager to tap into growing digital budgets. Transacting digital out-of-home programmatically requires systems that have been built to handle the complexities of OOH, such as measuring a 1-to-many medium, managing creative approvals (which have stricter regulations due to their public display), creative transcoding to fit the huge variety of screen displays, and much more. At the same time, programmatic systems that have been built from the ground up to handle these challenges are also offering new opportunities for buyers to reach their audiences in targeted, measurable ways across a very impactful medium.

Through programmatic OOH, creative messages are displayed by analyzing historical and real-time data encompassing a range of sources such as weather, sporting events, leisure, and more to ensure the right billboard at the right site shows the most relevant ads at the right time. When the audience around the site is not relevant, brands can opt to show no ads. Informative digital billboards can now display exactly what audiences are searching. Programmatic OOH also provides streamlined branding avenues as recall/recognition gets augmented. AdTech companies are establishing partnerships with media agencies to take programmatic OOH to newer heights. With such heights, personalization scales too! It’s like a choice between Kristen Stewart or Rachel Weisz spraying Chanel or Bvlgari based on who is near that screen – a Millennial or me!

As DOOH continues to get integrated with the best-in-class adtech to reach people on the streets of Brooklyn or The Venetian in Vegas, it will become more integral to digital marketing programs. **Time to take it outdoors! Take it OOH!**

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[interactiondesignwithclo]

Oculus Launch Pad: First Blog

Wow. 

First, I want to deeply thank Ebony Peony for creating this opportunity!! The investment and value that has been given to me will not go wasted. It’s my personal mission to make sure that the ROI (regardless if my app gets selected) will be positively felt, tenfold!

Fun background story on how I discovered VR

So my life has been weird the last few years. In 2012, I left my hometown of San Jose and my budding career in the public sector and began a life of nomadic traveling around Europe, North Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Amidst these travels in 2014, I discovered I had a knack for coding and started career transitioning as a freelance web developer. I decided I would provide paying services from clients (including Issa Rae!) and use those funds to fund my volunteering at NGO’s overseas. 

While undertaking my Master’s in Interaction Design at the University of the Arts London, I had fell in love with VR development and experiences. My course had a makeshift Maker’s Lab/Studio with an unused Oculus DK2 and with some googling on how to operate it, my life had changed. I worked day and night for four months straight learning Unity 3D and configuring/troubleshooting it to work on a Mac OS X with the last runtime version/plug-in developed for it. 

(Mitigating Unconscious Bias with Virtual Reality from Clorama on Vimeo.)

Not knowing the industry around VR, I started working in London as a UX’er for a small startup tech consultancy that also had an Oculus DK2 setup which I thought was fate. I tried to start a VR community within the office and held a few brown bag lunch training sessions on Unity 3D to see if I could get passionate friends with me on this but failed. 

In the summer of 2016, the company went out of business and I was the first to let go. I moved to France--to a medieval ‘wine country’ town called ‘Sancerre’ at the top of a mountain, two hours south of France. I spent 3 months in solitude trying to figure out what my next steps in life would be. At this point, social media became my source to keep my eyes on the new VR community happening in Silicon Valley. I started to feel MAJOR fomo and decided that this, plus Brexit happening, was a sign that it was time to come back home. 

Learning about Launch Pad

I came back Sept 8th to San Jose, and started my first week at Silicon Valley AR/VR Academy hosted at Cisco for 6 weeks. Four weeks in, I started my first shift as a Brand Ambassador on the Oculus Team (via a staffing agency). It was my first time at Facebook HQ having been away from the Bay Area/USA for a few years, and I was so embarrassingly star struck and couldn’t contain my emotion walking into Building 18 offices. At this point, Oculus was a dream company and I was fortunate enough to get meet Ebony on day 1!

Selfie at Oculus Connect 3!

I remember asking her a whole bunch of questions about the company and telling her about my passions to work in this field now that I had relocated back to my hometown in Silicon Valley. She told me that I should look into this Launch Pad for 2017 and after doing some research online, I read through a few of the blogs by the first cohort participants and knew this program was for me!

My VR rap sheet since coming back to Silicon Valley

During this time, I’ve been balancing freelance work as a VR developer for the London Neuropsychology Clinic and University College London. In December, I had gotten a promotion to Demo Specialist for a staffing agency on the Oculus Team which was super exciting. From November to February, I was assigned to the UX Research team to conduct user testing under the Head Researcher, Richard Yao. 

Demo video of my first contracted google cardboard app for the London Neuropsychology Clinic exploring ‘embodiment’ methods for healthcare practitioners at the Unconscious Bias Conference held in November 2016. 

I also participated in the Silicon Valley AR/VR Academy for a 6 week VR learning program. And then got an opportunity to work as a Lead UX Researcher at Code for America, where they’ve indulged my vr obsession in the office and have allowed me to work on side initiatives of 360 filming nonprofit stakeholders that we are partnering with

My Aspirations for 2017 Launchpad

Aspiration #1: Slay.

It’s been a whirlwind this month of June between the excitement and anxiousness of getting accepted into Oculus Launch Pad.

I was traveling for work to Alaska and made sure to come back for this weekend...between cancelled flights, delays and figuring out Caltrain/Lyft to make the commute from SF to Menlo Park, the experience was unforgettable meeting all the other Launch Pad participants and the amazing sense of immediate community that I arrived to--united by a passion for VR, regardless if we were strangers.

Arriving at Facebook HQ on June 10th and meeting all the different people doing “the lord’s work” (aka helping shape and contribute to the growth of VR) :’).  Learning the different ideas that people are working on has been extremely motivating for me to continue on my path to creating VR experiences.

Now more than ever am I committed to continue pushing myself as a creator, researcher, and developer to take this challenge of making an idea come to life by the end of these 13 weeks.

Rough sketch in Tiltbrush for what the starting home environment would be for my game “Reincarnation”. You pick a life mission and the player is assigned a body, cultural society to inhabit, and will have to work through branch narratives reach objective (aka meet life goal).

I was struggling between the ideas of creating games, training videos (building on my MA research thesis), or exploring something new all together --taking advantage of my fellowship with Code for America in Civic Tech and exploring ways to bridge the empathy gap between stakeholders in VR.

Given the short amount of weeks and some feedback from peers, I think I will continue the gaming route, to create a concept prototype that can be used to be a starting point for a VR product that can also have a social impact (unconsciously ;))

Most importantly, 

I’m excited to build a network of peers and friends who are just as passionate and skilled at VR as I am. This alone gives me the home I’ve been looking for as a women of color, struggling to find her ‘people’ in the space of VR. The people and the energy I feel from this group alone is almost overwhelmingly beautiful to me and I’m still trying to get over the shock that this is actually all real. Please bear with me, people. But rest assured, I’m joining this party in the weeks to come. :)

My portfolio website: www.creativeclo.com/loves/VR.html

[oneangrygamer]

Google-Sponsored Ambassador Program Seeks To Double Women Working In Games Over 10 Years

The Women in Games initiative has launched an ambassador program that’s being sponsored by Google’s Women Tech Makers division. The idea is to double the amount of women working in the video game industry over the course of 10 years. (more…)

[krisrampersad]

Google Doodle remembers steelpan FesTTscapes as LiTTscapes celebrates 10 and digital edutainment

Google Doodle remembers steelpan FesTTscapes as LiTTscapes celebrates 10 and digital edutainment

As LiTTscapes – Landscapes of Fiction embarks on its celebrations of its 10th Anniversary, Google today celebrates the steelpan with a google doodle. The steelpan features as FesTTscapes in LiTTscapes and in our global LiTTributes that connect crucial development issues with Caribbean creativity and heritage through edutainment. Learn how you too can celebrate with us and connect your creative…

[martechadvisor-blog]

OOH Yeah! A Brave New World!

Out-of-home (OOH) media/advertising has come of age in more ways than one. After all, can you name one tactic that hasn’t been digitalized? Get set to meet Digital 20.0

Adtech evolution in retrospect

Do you want to take a guess on the origins of OOH? Remember The Mummy…..? Yes, dating back to over thousand years, Egyptian civilization used obelisks of tall stone to communicate treaties and laws to people!

Let’s go through a timeline before ‘tech’ became an obvious suffix to advertising.

Some journey that, isn’t it? OOH, as we see it today, is around us through a plethora of touchpoints. Noticed Nicole Kidman for Etihad at airports? Or, Kristen Stewart for Chanel at malls? Or, the ‘Shot on iPhone 7’ campaign on busy commercial squares? There’re sub-touchpoints within these touchpoints too. That’s what makes OOH comprehensive in terms of targeting and reach.

Digital-OOH: DOOH Wow!

With tech, OOH is fully prepped to provide what other forms of advertising already promise –personalization. Whatever be the market, demography, and clientele, modern-day OOH or DOOH doesn’t operate on the ‘one-for-all’ mode anymore.

With advancements in the art and science of pixels, every year an array of new screens come alive. This is reflected in the ever-growing number of digital screens and interactive billboards for OOH in public spaces. Lifestyle upgrades along with higher spending powers have seen DOOH prevail effectively in state-of-art airports, malls, multiplexes, theme parks, parking lots, hotels, and so many others – DOOH is all around us.

Powered by expansive sources of data, especially with the smartphone wave, hypertargeting and personalization through DOOH is now a reality. Therefore, OOH campaigns now revolve around creative impact, innovation, and meaningful reach. Companies are maximizing the usage of factors like facial recognition, geo-targeting, and augmented reality (AR) to ensure continuous engagement levels wherever their target audience may be.

DOOH, especially interactive formats, can serve as invaluable data collection points for brands. For interactive forms of DOOH, facial recognition is the pivotal technology, and geo-targeting comes a close second. Geo-targeting can be defined as ‘delivering different content or ads to people based on their geographic location’. It is executed via geofencing technology which creates an intelligent layer enabling actions based on a set ‘area’. This area is built by establishing a ‘virtual fence’ clouted through different geofencing-enabled technologies like a platform for managing digital signage content. Geo-targeting compliments DOOH impeccably.

Michael Provenzano, CEO, Vistar Media:

The biggest challenge of out-of-home historically has been that there was no real way to directly tie any impact results back to the actual campaign exposure. With location data, you can understand consumer movement enabling marketers to validate store visitation and household validation.

In-store visitation is a crucial KPI for retailers in a range of industries, from the big box retailers to telecom, QSR, and casual dining. If they can invest in media and then see an increase in the number of people visiting their stores, and therefore increasing sales, that demonstrates the ROI of that ad spend and is a huge win for their business. Vistar measures foot traffic by using location data to identify audiences that have been exposed to a digital out-of-home campaign and then visited a physical store location. This provides a powerful view into the impact of OOH media exposure.

Visitation is great for retail marketers, but for some marketers in areas like automotive and CPG, sales are the final KPI that matters. In a similar way that location data tells us where someone went, it also can tell us where someone lives. Some of the largest transactional data sets for sales are stored at the household level. By combining location data with transactional data, we are able to understand what households are exposed to what ads and understand how sales were changed at a selection of households.

DOOH: Forms and scale

When you want a message delivered at a broader scale, interactive DOOH with hashtags or Instagram feed is a great option to gather data or/and information. There are some fine examples of this.

When using interactive DOOH to deliver a more one-on-one content, apart from the usual hashtags, email ids and mobile numbers (for OTPs) or QR code scanners provide essential data on a deeper, personal level. For that, DOOH gets beyond just those digital billboards. There’s a host of digitalized sub-touchpoints for one-on-ones. Digital standees at events, malls, airports, bus stops, fests, and more serve the purpose well. In-flight interactive digital screens have become common in most airplanes providing data to airlines that is decisive to improving CX. The collected data and resulting insights can feedback to power your marketing technology stack too.

More examples of the power of DOOH:

Pepsi (#LiveForNow) – Long live AR, and see how Pepsi used it to promote Pepsi Max.

British Airways (#lookup) – BA used GPRS to delight audiences with its #lookup campaign. Every time a BA flight passed over Trafalgar Square, a little child in a digital screen pointed to the sky!

Barncancer Founden – A Swedish DOOH for a social cause! To spread awareness and empathy on how cancer affects young women. A camera identified an incoming train and the hair of a 14-year old blew vigorously with the wind and ultimately flew away. Strong! Social! Emotional!

Thus, with well-directed DOOH, you can surprise, entertain, and even bring a tear to the eye. DOOH allows you to feed your appetite for creativity and innovation. Increasingly, we will see companies executing customized-DOOH campaigns. In short, next time you’re facing a digital screen close to a salon, imagine Rachel Weisz spraying Bvlgari eau de toilette on you! A virtual moment totally worth it, right?

Tech companies embracing OOH

Executing OOH campaigns doesn’t always mean roping in celebs as brand ambassadors. Though it seems a great fit for high-end, luxury brands, OOH is more about making the right brand associations. While tech bigwigs have always showcased their products via OOH, ads for services using the outdoor medium was limited. However, the famous OOH campaign by Accenture (remember, ‘high performance delivered’) meant that technology companies and B2Bs started to embrace OOH ads for their services. Since then, instances of tech OOH/DOOH have surged.

Provenzano explains:

Data-driven targeting, specifically location-based audiences, opens up new ways for B2B marketers to take advantage of the impact of OOH while still reaching a defined professional audience.

For example, a security software provider trying to reach IT decision makers might target an audience of individuals attending a cybersecurity conference. The campaign could activate DOOH media in areas physically surrounding the conference, as well as analyzing the movement patterns of conference attendees and continuing to reach them at high impact moments throughout their daily routine, such as in office building elevators, transit screens and digital kiosks in areas they are likely to be.

Vistar recently ran a campaign that used location targeting to identify two distinct audiences of large corporation employees vs. small businesses and then reach them throughout their daily routines with DOOH media. According to a panel survey after the campaign, a majority of those exposed identified themselves as business executives, and the campaign drove boosts across both brand and product awareness.

A special advantage of OOH is location. Environment surrounding people can be utilized to make strong impacts. Google did just that when it promoted its rebranded app leveraging location-based OOH campaigns across NYC.

OOH has also been endorsed by the likes of Apple, Facebook, Snapchat. It’s a clear testimony to the fact that DOOH allows direct offline and online communication between brands and audiences. OOH also syncs well with social/digital as it can trigger online searches or invite a viewer to directly engage with the brands’ social pages.

OOH: The programmatic panorama

Adtech players began offering programmatic OOH in 2015. However, the sensation was when Google introduced DoubleClick to OOH which signaled a significant, giant leap. Why? It meant OOH ads can now be traded programmatically with the automation process of DoubleClick. Sensational, because of the sheer power of internet data that Google houses.

Provenzano adds:

One of the main drivers in the growth of OOH this year is the push to tie OOH to measurable ROI - and programmatic is a mechanism driving this shift. Digital buyers are increasingly looking to add OOH into their broader omnichannel media mix, and media owners are eager to tap into growing digital budgets. Transacting digital out-of-home programmatically requires systems that have been built to handle the complexities of OOH, such as measuring a 1-to-many medium, managing creative approvals (which have stricter regulations due to their public display), creative transcoding to fit the huge variety of screen displays, and much more. At the same time, programmatic systems that have been built from the ground up to handle these challenges are also offering new opportunities for buyers to reach their audiences in targeted, measurable ways across a very impactful medium.

Through programmatic OOH, creative messages are displayed by analyzing historical and real-time data encompassing a range of sources such as weather, sporting events, leisure, and more to ensure the right billboard at the right site shows the most relevant ads at the right time. When the audience around the site is not relevant, brands can opt to show no ads. Informative digital billboards can now display exactly what audiences are searching. Programmatic OOH also provides streamlined branding avenues as recall/recognition gets augmented. Adtech companies are establishing partnerships with media agencies to take programmatic OOH to newer heights. With such heights, personalization scales too! It’s like a choice between Kristen Stewart or Rachel Weisz spraying Chanel or Bvlgari based on who is near that screen – a Millennial or me!

As DOOH continues to get integrated with the best-in-class adtech to reach people on the streets of Brooklyn or The Venetian in Vegas, it will become more integral to digital marketing programs. Time to take it outdoors! Take it OOH!

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor