Whether “Amazon Anywhere” sounds like your sweetest dream or worst nightmare, it’s now a (virtual) reality. The new offering will let people buy physical goods – you know, t-shirts and stuff – within video games, virtual worlds, and mobile apps. Once you select something, the experience will match the familiar Amazon store with product information, pricing, availability, delivery dates and the rest.
It may or may not be “helpful and natural” to place advertising within a chat flow, as Microsoft promises, but it’s surely inevitable. Citing experience with the chat-enabled Bing search engine, they’ve released a new API that lets web publishers, app developers, and online services deliver ads within a chat platform from Microsoft or someone else. If details were provided, I missed them.
Apart from some pesky AI gurus who think it might destroy humanity, pretty much everyone else is excited to see what generative AI tools like ChatGPT do next. This Botco survey finds that 73% of marketers are already using it to create some type of content, and 66% of users see a positive return on investment. Training, cost and privacy concerns are the biggest roadblocks.
T-Mobile will allow advertisers to target more than 20,000 screens in 11,000 store locations. That’s a lot of screens, but how much foot traffic does the average T-Mobile store get? It’s also linking up with streaming media company Plex as a CTV partner.