Cadbury’s real-time chocolate polls
Forget any looming general elections we may soon have to struggle through, as this month, Cadbury’s have asked the UK’s public to answer a much more pressing question. They’ve asked us to vote for our favourite limited edition Cadbury Dairy Milk flavour. The winner of the three shortlisted will remain as part of the range.
This comes following from a campaign they launched this time last year. They invited any aspiring chocolatiers to create a bar from three different ingredients. These included the likes of caramel, chilli and cashews.
The three shortlisted flavours chosen are:
- The Raspberry Shortcake
- Simply the Zest
- Choca-latte
Unlike most elections, Cadbury’s have developed a digital out-of-home ad format. They’ve placed the real-time polling campaign across 50 large digital format screens and more than 500 digital ‘6-sheets’ with the help of Posterscope.
Have your say on the outcome here.
Instagram’s brash move to attempt to ‘remove pressure'
With the vast amount of pressures everyone seems to be under today, Instagram have taken it upon themselves to attempt to take one away from us. They will trial hiding the number of likes pictures receive from public view.
Currently, users see a running total of people who have liked a post. In the trial that will be initially rolled out in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Brazil, users will see just one user name along with "and others" below posts.
There are many studies linking social media platforms to mental health problems. These include anxiety and depression, especially amongst younger users. Instagram hopes to help tackle this issue with their change.
However, many have jumped to express their concerns over the proposed changes. From influencers who often rely on the number of likes they can generate to determine the prices they can charge brands to advertise, to brands themselves that rely on 'likes' as a means of tracking the success of social campaigns.
Is digital advertising in the UK causing more harm than good?
This month, The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation aiming to assess three potential risks UK consumers face today in connection with the UK’s digital advertising market. These being:
- The extent of market power online platforms have today and the impact this has on consumers
- Whether consumers are able and willing to control how their data is collected and used by online platforms
- Whether competition in the digital advertising market is distorted by the market power held by online platforms
Dependant on the CMA’s findings, they could make detailed recommendations to the government as to how to tackle issues identified.
It’s expected the report will build upon proposals outlined in an independent review conducted earlier this year by former Obama adviser Jason Furman. This report found the sector to be "dominated by two players [*cough* Google and Facebook *cough*] and suffering from a lack of transparency".
Is it a bird, is it a plane..? Could AI have the answer? Possibly not.
The advancement of AI technology in recent years has been astonishing. Just last month, we discussed supermarkets’ use of it in catching thieves at checkouts.
However, researchers have this month been looking into how accurate AI technology is with image tags. From this research, they have released a database of 7,500 images that AI systems are struggling to identify correctly. And the results are… amusing to say the least. They varied from a butterfly that was assumed to be a man-hole cover, to a squirrel that was identified as a sea lion.
Unless man-hole covers have had a major revamp that we weren’t aware of, we think there’s still some work that needs to be done.
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