Less than half (40%) of consumers report interest in chatbot experiences from brands, including 20% who said they’re very interested in interacting with the artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Read more…

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Businesses that employ human workers in call centers see the potential to save billions of dollars by automating conversations with their customers. That’s especially true for banks, whose operational cost savings will surge 3,400% to $7.3 billion worldwide in 2023 from $209 million this year, per a forecast from Juniper Research. Insurance companies will see their cost savings grow 333% to $1.3 billion by 2023 from $300 million this year as chatbots replace human claims processors in auto, life, property and health insurance.

French food group Danone teamed up with Spotify on an artistic campaign for its Light & Free yogurts aimed at young adults. Read more…

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Emmanuel Faber, chief executive of Danone, last year discussed how tastes have changed. “Consumers are looking to ‘pierce the corporate veil’ in our industry and to look at what’s behind the brand,” he said at the CAGNY industry conference. “The guys responsible for this are the millennials. They want committed brands with authentic products. Natural, simpler, more local and if possible small, as small as you can.”

Danone reported steady growth for 2018 and forecast that sales with rise 3 percent this year. The company this month said its specialized nutrition and bottled water divisions boosted fiscal Q4 2018 sales by 2.4% to €6 billion. For the full year, sales grew 2.6% to €24.7 billion despite the effect of a boycott campaign started on Facebook to protest Morocco’s rising food prices. Sales of its Activia yogurt brand were flat in Europe, stabilizing after years of decline.

For the company to compete more effectively against Facebook, Google and Amazon in digital advertising, Spotify will need to collect more personal information about subscribers to improve its ad targeting.

Fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger partnered with mobile app Unfold on an Instagram Stories template collection. Read more…

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Instagram is one of the most popular social media channels to reach young adults and teens. Almost three-fourths (71%) of U.S. adults ages 18-24 use Instagram, second only to YouTube (94%) in popularity among the demographic group, per Pew Research Center. Almost three-fourths (72%) of U.S. teens use Facebook-owned Instagram, and 15% said they use the image-sharing app most often, per a separate Pew survey.

Percentage of Streaming Viewers Who Use Another Subscriber’s Account

Group (Birth Years*) / Service Netflix Amazon Prime Video Hulu
Millennials (1981-1996) 18.1% 17.7% 20.0%
Generation X (1965-1980) 8.9% 12.7% 16.7%
Baby Boomers (1946-1964) 10.9% 19.5% 17.8%
Total 15% 16.5% 19.2%

Source: CordCutters.com survey of 1,127 people using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; 50.9 percent of survey participants were men, and 49.1 percent were women. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 81 with a mean of 37 and a standard deviation of 11.9. Respondents were disqualified from the survey if they didn’t use a video streaming service.

*Birth years from Pew Research Center.

Where do you get your fashion inspiration from?

Source Total Percentage
Instagram 56%
Pinterest 53%
TV 48%
Facebook 46%
Fashion Magazines 36%
Snapchat 26%
Other 20%

Source: Fashion Path to Purchase Study by Facebook IQ, Qualtrics-fielded survey of 6,090 men and women ages 18-64 in US, UK, DE, FR, IT and ES. The data were adjusted by the number of monthly active users of that particular platform (October 2017).