People all over the world woke up to find a new brand name dominating the online conversation, and they’re not too happy about it. An outage at cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike caused a global tech meltdown that grounded flights and shut down banks, hospitals and newsrooms.

Apparently, this wasn’t a cyber attack. The company released a software update that tripped up machines running Microsoft Windows. Once a patch is released, it will probably take a few days to get everything back online—so buckle up for a long and trying weekend.

But beyond the immediate headache, CrowdStrike will be dealing with the ramifications of this brand-bruising headache for weeks and months to come. Trust in their rock-solid security promise took a hit, and that will weigh heavily on their reputation as consumers and businesses start questioning the company’s reliability.

A wide variety of brands, businesses and countries impacted by the CrowdStrike glitch.

American, United and Delta were grounded in the U.S. according to the FAA.

Airports felt the pinch, too. Hong Kong, Sydney, Berlin, Amsterdam’s Schiphol and Manchester, U.K., were all hit hard. At the latter, check-in counters were a mess, leading to massive lines. Even Ryanair, Europe’s budget flying king, was caught in the IT crossfire.

Britain’s NHS saw computer systems go dark in hospitals and doctors’ offices, adding to the chaos.

TV broadcasters weren’t spared, either. In France, top channels TF1 and Canal+ couldn’t air their shows. TF1’s presenter Christophe Beaugrand-Guerrin summed it up on X: “We’re ready to roll, but a massive breakdown behind the scenes has us stuck!”

Meanwhile, on these shores, 911 emergency lines in several states went haywire. The U.S. Emergency Alert System advised folks to contact local police or fire departments directly for emergencies.

As the dust settles, one thing is clear: CrowdStrike’s reputation has taken a beating, and so have the brands that depend on its tech.

This global snafu serves as a stark reminder of our fragile dependence on technology.

So, as we reboot and recover, let’s hope CrowdStrike has a plan to regain consumer trust—and fast!

Samsung just launched an app last week in Spain and Portugal that uses AI to turn words into a series of rhythmic vibrations. This helps improve the speech of those with a stutters and similar impediments.

Cheil Spain worked for nine months with medical experts and foundations to develop the process, which is explained in the case study below.

“A team of developers worked from scratch to generate the codes of the AI algorithm to create impulse and the different modes of speech practice,” says Alejandro Di Trolio, European creative chairman of Cheil. “We analyzed participant’s reaction and their improvements with the app. The voice over of the hero video is a real patient of one of the doctors that tested impulse with him.”

The app was tested with 200 patients in Spain, Portugal, the U.S. and Ghana.

“This project belongs to the technology with purpose initiative that has been trying to break barriers through technology for more than 10 years,” adds a spokesperson for Samsung. “This year we have opted for artificial intelligence to create this solution that helps to once again improve the lives of people with speech problems. Like all our projects, we have relied on experts from many countries and specialties to find an effective and open solution for everyone.”

The app is currently in beta and open to input from the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind and the Perkins School—both Honda partners.

“Our technical challenge was to figure out a way to scale visual descriptions to the more than four million miles of roads in the U.S. at any given time,” Hruska tells Muse.” We use computer vision, generative text, and text-to-speech AIs, in combination with eight discrete data sets pulled in real time to affect each description.”

Once revisions and updates made, Honda will decide how to release the app to a wider audience.

And can’t a gal take a bubble bath and play DJ with her fave tunes without mom walking in? That’s a no.

The campaign, part of the “Heat Happens” platform, will run across Latin America and jewelry is not up for grabs … yet.

“The Knocklace Collection comes as a humorous tool to raise awareness of the importance of privacy in a world where everything is overshared and overexposed,” says João Gandara, ACD at AKQA. “Knocklaces are being given to influencers who still haven’t left their nests. Sprite has invited them to create content sharing their experiences on being watched so closely while entering adulthood. Our main objective is to promote healthy conversations between Gen Z and their parents.”

Aluminum used to create the pieces came from recycled Sprite cans. Pay 4 Brain helped create the lockets, which include a sensor that sends notifications if the wearer is close by and will change screens to a safe screen, if need be. A photo can also be placed inside the locket, just like in olden days.

“We had to import devices from China, who produces the best, smallest and most trustful Bluetooth devices,” Gandara tells Muse. “We had to handcraft each locket to reach the high standards of the jewelry industry—every piece was meticulously washed, polished and put together with a pre-tested beacon inside. We had to precisely calibrate the radar on the app, so users could get the feeling of the real-time tracking.”

In an approach that leverages Google Maps, NGO StopAccidentes transforms traffic accident victims into guardians of Spain’s roadways who warn drivers not to suffer the same deadly fate. 

The campaign places markers on digital routes where people perished, their photos prominently displayed and stories retold. This should, in theory, boost drivers’ awareness of possible hazards and instill a heightened sense of caution.

The NGO worked with HeimatTBWA to create Spanish and English-language videos across YouTube, social media platforms and on the StopAccidentes site. These clips memorialize accident victims as “heroes saving lives.”

“This project is deeply emotional as it represents real people—families who have endured the heart-wrenching loss of their loved ones,” says Daniel Guiu, a copywriter at HeimatTBWA. 

StopAccidentes hopes to expand the initiative to the U.S., U.K., Europe, and beyond. 

“For the first time, people and NGOs from around the world have the opportunity to utilize this common feature of Google Maps to honor victims of traffic accidents in their respective countries,” says Guiu. “Individuals and NGOs worldwide can participate by creating their own pins to memorialize victims of road accidents. This means that any country in the world can be adorned with these meaningful markers, serving as poignant reminders of the lives lost and the importance of road safety.”

Guiu says its locations have already garnered over 100,000 visits on Google Maps.

“We believe that if we’re not seen, we’re forgotten, and it’s in this digital era that we have the means to ensure our presence is acknowledged,” Guiu adds. “Leveraging platforms like Google Maps, which are integral to modern navigation, we can ‘hack’ it to make safer roads.”

“As we brainstormed about how we could get Congress to act, we learned that phone calls are still one of the most effective ways to get the attention of our elected officials,” MullenLowe ECD Tim Vaccarino tells Muse. “But we also knew the calls would need to be memorable and personal so they wouldn’t be ignored like so many others on this issue. “

With that in mind, “We turned to those whose opinions of gun laws and violence could simply not be matched: the victims of themselves,” Vaccarino says. “By leveraging breakthrough developments in AI technology, we would be able to perfectly recreate the voices of these victims. They would be the ones to call and tell their own stories.”

MullenLowe and Edisen Tech ran audio and video files of victims through AI programs to generate the campaign. “Each recreated voice required just 6 seconds of reference audio, although we worked with more to ensure the highest quality and authenticity,” he says.

After that, “we worked with each of the victim’s families to write the phone call scripts, ensuring the stories we told were true and honest to their loved ones. This included their tone of voice and the cadence they would have had in conversation.”
 
“When talking with parents of gun victims about the idea, they reiterated that if just one congressperson’s mind changed on this issue, the entire campaign would be worth the effort,” Vaccarino says.

Along with Joaquin (who’s parents founded Change the Ref) MullenLowe created “Shotline” calls from:

• Uziyah Garcia – 10-year-old killed alongside 18 classmates and two teachers in the Uvalde shooting at Robb Elementary School.
• Ethan Song – 15-year-old killed by a gun left unsecured at a friend’s house.
• Jaycee Webster – 20-year-old shot and killed in his bedroom by a lone gunman.
• Mike Baughan – killed himself using a gun he was able to purchase in only 15 minutes.
• Akilah Dasilva – 23-year-old killed by a man with an AR-15 in a Waffle House mass shooting.

Along with the automated calls programmed to flood the offices of elected officials, activists and victims’ families will rally today outside the U.S. Capitol.

CTR’s past groundbreaking work includes “The Lost Class,” a multiple-Clio-Award-winning campaign from 2021. During his acceptance speech, Joaquin’s dad Manuel spoke as his son, imploring the creative community to do more in the fight against gun violence.

So, you wanna tout the promise of spatial computing to fuse real-world experiences with data and online environments? Better call Gene Wilder!

The late, great comic actor and other pop-culture figures appear via stock footage in a :30 from Apple hyping its Vision Pro spatial computer headset launching on Feb. 2. They chose a Gene scene from Young Frankenstein. (Hopefully Apple’s techs had better luck in the lab.)

Luke and Obi Wan show up, too, along with Iron Man and other familiar faces (donning various headgear, for the most part). Devo’s nerd-quirky “Uncontrollable Urge” zips along on the soundtrack. 

Obvi, the approach ties the tech titan’s products to the media/entertainment ecosphere—and, by extension, enjoyable mass consumption. The star power pops. It’s a pure tease packed with sizzle. Maybe that’s the best way to bring this particular (somewhat esoteric?) product into the public eye.

Dubbed “Get Ready,” the clip harkens back to the style of Apple’s iPhone launch 17 years ago. Those ads famously leaned into Hollywood clips.

For better or worse, iPhone changed the world. The Vision Pro, well, it’s priced at $3,499, and it’s function feels ill-defined. It’s all about transforming “how people work, collaborate, connect, relive memories and enjoy entertainment,” Apple says.

That seems a tad broad, but no worries. A CPU strapped to your face couldn’t possibly fail.

This month, on the heels of a long July 4 holiday weekend, digital strategists were caught off guard when a notification flashed across their phones: “Time Sensitive. Your pre-order of Threads, an Instagram app, is now available.”

Happy birthday, America! Threads had arrived early. Suddenly, we were scrambling to be early adopters while flashes of KPIs danced in our heads.

Unlike the Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky, which launched in beta earlier this year, Threads is brought to us by Facebook owner Meta. So, instead of starting your brand’s follower count from 0, you can take your already established Instagram following with you. Just don’t expect hashtags to work—yet.

Within seven hours, there were 10 million sign-ups and as of this writing, more than 150 million are equipped to thread.

Ah yes, it’s been a week+ filled with threading puns (e.g. “Threadfluencer”), but it’s been nice to see brand strategists having some fun. This is likely because marketing honchos and senior management haven’t yet approved a firm platform strategy. So, until the whole team catches wind of what’s really going on, I’m proud to say that comedy is alive and well on Threads.

Some observations and points to ponder:

• The website is www.threads.net (and .net derived from the word “network” as in The Social Network).
• Facebook made a very on-brand joke about the newest member of its Metaverse.
• The home feed, which includes a mix of accounts to follow, and recommended folks, is a nice change (though not permanent).
• In account settings, you can get a reminder to “take a break” when you spend 10, 20 or 30 minute increments on the app, and you can completely chose to ignore said reminder by tapping “Not now.”
• You can’t currently schedule threads = working weekends until further notice.
• #FollowFriday is back from the dead (but a reminder that hashtags don’t work yet).
• Brands are jousting and have used the occasion to reintroduce themselves with a fierce sense of humor due to having no official strategy in place.
• Wendy’s beef with McDonald’s has spilled over from Twitter.
• Subway is serving freshly baked threads.
• America threads on Dunkin’.
• Museums (including The Met) are breaking out historic threads.
• The social media team at Spirit Halloween deserves a raise.
• The New Yorker understood the assignment #NewYorkerCartoons. 
• KitKat’s social media manager really needs a break.
• Dominos threaded to say pineapple belongs on pizza, ending a years-long debate.
• Wawa created a promo code exclusive to their threads followers (and now anyone who reads this article).
• MTV made me miss MTV by kicking off their Threads account by pretending “we’re airing music videos” and taking requests. They fittingly opened off with a GIF from “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles, “because how could we not?”
• Gap posted “literally anything before 25 people have to approve.”
• NPR is back!

So, my fellow digital content strategists: treat yourself to an extra coffee today (and every day). You’ve earned it.

Jonathan Kratz, head of industry of Technology, Mobile and Connectivity at Meta, describes the current challenges advertisers are facing in this economic climate. He shares the guidance he is giving his clients and specific strategies to help advertisers increase their advertising performance.

Muse: We’re living in a time of economic uncertainty, and leaders are faced with the challenge of driving growth amid a continually changing business context. How are you helping your advertising clients navigate this challenging time?

Jonathan Kratz: I first want to acknowledge how challenging a time this is for business leaders. Leaders today have to sort through a host of conflicting signals on the economy at large, as well as the most dynamic business context in years, with dramatic changes in monetary policy reverberating through the market.

Are we headed toward a prolonged recession? Or is the soft landing already taking place, with the next wave of growth just around the corner? Depending on which data set you look at, and on which day you look, you might come to a different conclusion.

To support our partners navigating this uncertainty, we are arming them with data to help them make well-informed decisions for their businesses on Meta platforms. Specifically, we are underscoring the unique opportunity partners have to capitalize on the historically strong performance many are seeing on the platforms.

It’s true—performance on Meta’s platforms is as strong as it’s been in years and I’ve been helping give my clients the confidence to lean into that performance and capitalize on this “gold rush” moment. In Q4 2022, advertisers using A.I.-powered tools on Meta saw over 20 percent more conversions than the year prior. Combine this with the average price per ad decreasing 17 percent YoY, and you have a declining cost per acquisition that has resulted in higher returns on ad spend.

What’s more—we’ve seen this impact validated by researchers. We recently did a study with economists at UC Berkeley to understand the impact our services make, and they concluded that every dollar spent on our ads drives on average $3.31 in revenue for our advertisers in the U.S.

What are the contributing factors of this rise in performance at Meta?

There are two main factors leading to the increased performance we are seeing—the first being our investment in A.I. More than 20 percent of content in your Facebook and Instagram feeds is recommended by A.I. from people, groups, or accounts you don’t follow. Across all of Instagram, that’s about 40 percent of the content you see.

Since we launched Reels, A.I. recommendations have driven more than a 24 percent increase in total time spent on Instagram.

In-feed recommendations are contributing to engagement, and we’ve seen Reels time become more incremental to overall engagement on our services as we continue to improve our recommendation system.

In the area of A.I. models, we’ve been evolving our modeling in our ads ranking for many years, through numerous changes. A recent example is our work to support larger and more powerful models and use more advanced modeling techniques like transformers to improve our ability to select the best ad for each person. Using A.I., we can make thousands if not millions of iterations and combinations that ultimately optimize to drive improvements in performance. This was the huge step forward we have seen with our Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns product, and we are taking these learnings and building them into the rest of our ad stack.

The second factor is our increase in ad supply. Our core platforms have never been healthier. We reach more than 3 billion people monthly across our family of apps, and Facebook also reached the milestone of 200 million daily actives in the U.S. and Canada after last quarter reaching 2 billion daily actives worldwide.

We are fueling this growth in a couple ways. First, we remain focused on building engaging experiences for people who use our apps. We came into 2023 with a strong foundation as Reels continues to scale, driven by an uptick in video consumption across our platform. In fact, Reels plays across FB and IG have more than doubled over the last year.

The other side of growing supply comes from more effectively monetizing the surfaces within our apps, such as launching new placements on Instagram. In the near-term, enhancing the performance of Reels ads, in the same way we did many years ago with Stories, is a primary focus.

What can advertisers do to capitalize on this increase in performance you’re seeing?

Recently we have evolved our best practices and created something called the Performance 5—a set of strategies for advertisers based on proven tactics that we developed from extensive meta analysis of hundreds of tests. Whether your goal is to reach new audiences, drive lower CPAs, maximize ROAS, we believe these updated strategies will lead to better performance. They are:

• Account simplification
• Automation
• Creative differentiation
• Data quality
• Results validation

You can learn more about how to implement these strategies here.

What excites you most about the future of performance marketing, and how are you preparing for that future?

I think the advancements in A.I. is what really excites me about the future. But what is really exciting is that A.I. is not just a thing of the future, it’s here now. There is so much advertisers can do to lean into A.I. right now, while also preparing themselves for the future.

First is to recognize that A.I. has powered the Meta ads platform for years. A.I. is the foundation of our discovery engine and our ads business. Better performance and more cost effective inventory creates a unique opportunity to drive profitable growth for your business during a time when it’s never been more needed.

One way you can start testing now is with our Advantage+ shopping campaigns (ASC), an always-on solution for direct-to-consumer and single-branded retailers that drives online sales by leaning on new machine-learning models to connect relevant ads to interested shoppers. With ASC, advertisers can create a single campaign for multiple performance objectives, and Meta will automate the campaign creation process across targeting, optimization, creative and destination to efficiently deliver the right ad to the right person.

I’m optimistic about the future of our performance platform and I’m excited to see the ways marketers continue to leverage new technologies to continue to grow their business even in uncertain times.