In this week’s episode, Stewart and Travis discuss how Google’s announcements at its I/O event will affect marketers and marketing this year, and we also discuss how AI is helping B2B markets. We then get to interview the awesome Super Evil Megacorp’s Kristian Segerstrale, who gives us the lowdown on how to create amazing communities and how to sound like an evil genius.
And don’t forget: You can win a Huawei MediaPad M3 tablet in our fantastic giveaway, details of which you can find at the end of this article.
- Welcome to VB Engage episode 53! [00:10]
- Stewart is in Prague, moving around Europe while Travis remains grounded in San Francisco for the MarTech Conference, Informatica World 2017, and the Cohere One Conference. [01:00]
- Stewart attended VR World in London and flew to Prague for the Socialbaker’s Engage 2017 Conference, where hundreds of people gathered to learn how social media can work for them and how to deal with AI and enormous amounts of data. [02:40]
- Informatica just released the CLAIRE engine, which puts artificial intelligence in their data management platform. [02:55]
- Google also held its annual developer festival, Google I/O, where the company announced upcoming releases and features for Google Assistant. [04:15]
- Pinterest has added a live camera search feature that will help users discover similar pinned images or topics. [05:10]
- Check out Sabrina Atienza’s article and why AI is still not ready to replace human sales reps. [05:30]
- Stewart agrees that AI can help with high-waste menial tasks but is not very good at emotional intelligence. And sales has always been an emotional game. [06:30]
- AI can help sales reps know when exactly to call a customer and what to talk about, and it can look at email open rates. But it still comes down to reading between the lines and having the emotional intelligence to pick up on subtle cues and body language. [07:40]
- Nudge AI is a new tool that uses AI to provide sales insight and engagement opportunities without hours of research. [08:45]
- Mintigo raised 10 million dollars to develop its platform that can collect data from over 50 million companies all over the world to help you identify your prospects and sell your product. [09:45]
- Stewart surveyed over 2,500 consumers on how people are using their smartphones to buy products and how AI is transforming the mcommerce industry. [11:15]
- Surprisingly, if you scale the results of the study, 29.1 million Americans have yet to make a smartphone-only purchase. [11:30]
- People are still not comfortable with the idea of inputting their credit card information on a smartphone device. Check out the full details of the study here. [13:00]
- Please welcome our guest, Kristian Segerstrale, CEO of Super Evil Megacorp! [14:30]
- How does AI and machine learning affect you and what you do? [15:55]
- Super Evil Megacorp is the company behind Vainglory, the world’s largest touchscreen eSports game. [16:15]
- In gaming, your experience is shaped not just by yourself and the game, but also by all of the other players. [16:30]
- You see a rapid evolution of marketing techniques and technologies that help you get the right message in front of the right user. The App Store has become so crowded that no matter how well you do, it is very expensive and doesn’t always scale. [17:30]
- Mobile gaming has discovered that brand, community, and organic advocacy are drivers of growth. [17:45]
- Yes, there is a lot of optimization and improvement on the marketing end, but it will not be a “game-changer” in the mobile gaming market, compared to the evolution of community learning and brand learning. [18:30]
- How have you engaged this community and how do you continue to drive engagement? [20:15]
- Community is at the heart of everything. If you create a competitive game, the community decides whether it’s worthy of their time. [20:25]
- Start the game with a letter from a developer. Make it a priority to be where the community is. [21:10]
- Like basketball, it isn’t exactly fun to play if nobody else is playing. [21:45]
- The more work we do, the community rewards us tenfold. [22:45]
- Push messaging/notifications is the primary medium of communication in the gaming community. [24:45]
- Minimize the messages you send, maximize the messages your users are sending you. [25:30]
- People would rather hear from their friends than from us (game developers). Engage them using direct chats between each other. [25:40]
- No technology or tools in the world will solve community engagement for you if you don’t have a burning desire to do it. [27:30]
- Super Evil Megacorp was founded on the idea that the future of play on a touchscreen is no different from how people like to play on different gaming machines. There is an increasing number of people who would like a long-form gaming experience that has no access to gaming consoles. [29:30]
- Everyone who’s been in the game industry feels that every game company, over time, ultimately becomes evil in some way. And so we decided to just be honest about that from day one. [30:25]
Competition time! It’s the final week until Travis and Stewart announce the winner of the Huawei MediaPad M3!
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
To mark our podcast-iversary, we’re giving away a Huawei MediaPad M3! Entering the competition is easy — just click the image to get started with your entry below and earn extra points by completing simple tasks. The more points you have, the more chance you’ve got of winning the MediaPad. Our special thanks go to Huawei for donating such an awesome prize. Good luck!
Above: No image? That’s OK – just click here to enter.
Next week, we interview Taylor Freeman, the CEO of Upload VR. We discuss mixed reality and the ethics of virtual reality and the brain.
If you missed last week’s episode, we had the opportunity to interview Adelyn Zhou of Topbots. We get schooled on the latest in AI, how smaller businesses can get involved (it isn’t just for Fortune 500 types), what’s going on with chatbots, and whether Zhou prefers Decepticons or Autobots.
As always, thanks for tuning in. Please rate. Please review. Please subscribe. Please enter the competition. That’s a lot of pleasure right there. What other podcast delivers that?
