I collaborated this year’s Voya Financial Colloquium on Oct 19-20, with the theme being “Marketing in the Digitalized Marketplace.” The colloquium gathered marketing researchers from across the country to discuss research in the growing areas of user generated content, social networks, new media, and digital analytics.

Shijie Lu (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) spoke on Dynamic Effect of Digital Badging on User-generated Content Platforms. This research empirically examines the dynamic effect of digital badging on individual user’s content consumption, interaction, and generation behavior on a UGC platform. An interesting fining is that in the long run, digital badges awarded by the platform can encourage content generation but suppress content consumption.

Xueming Luo (Temple University) spoke on Targeting and Retargeting Experimentation and Machine Learning: Mobile Big Data Analytics. This study combines large-scale randomized field experiments and machine learning approach to investigate the optimal strategy to distribute targeting and retargeting advertisements. An interesting finding is that targeting and retargeting strategies should be personalized based on the receivers attributes such as gender, age, and locations to maximize firm profits.

Yakov Bart (Northeastern University) spoke on Online Advertising Effectiveness across Media Channels and Countries. This study investigates online media advertising effectiveness using three controlled field experiments in the U.S., China and the Netherlands. For the real-world stimuli in the automobile industry, the results show that advertising effectiveness of online videos is consistently stronger than social media, banner and search, and that the relative strength of social media increases the further the consumer is from purchasing.

Ying Xie (University of Texas, Dallas) spoke on A Structural Model of Network Dynamics: Tie Formation, Product Adoption, and Content Generation. This research models the co-evolution of individuals’ friendship tie formations and their concurrent online activities within a social network. The results show that the total number of friends and the number of common friends this potential friend are important drivers of friendship formation. While having more friends does not make a person more active, having more active friends does increase a user’s activity levels in terms of both product adoptions and content generation through peer effects.

I recently interviewed with Stamford Advocate about Kayak’s “virtual assistant,” a voice-activated booking assistant powered by artificial intelligence technology. Here is the link: http://www.stamfordadvocate.com/business/article/Kayak-sees-potential-with-voice-12264401.php#photo-14315315.

And the article is below.

Kayak sees potential with voice technology-assisted bookings

By Paul Schott

Published 3:32 pm, Monday, October 9, 2017

STAMFORD — Virtual assistants can do far more than find the nearest gas station or get the score of a big game. Now they can help users schedule their next vacation.

Reflecting the prevalence and sophistication of artificial-intelligence services, Stamford-based travel firm Kayak has quickly expanded its use of the technology in the past two years. Among its latest innovations, it has launched hotel booking with Amazon devices featuring the voice-activated Alexa assistant.

“This work is based on the explosion of everyone having one of these devices in the house, starting around the end of 2015,” said Kayak Chief Scientist Matthias Keller. “And, in the past, we’ve had great success with being early on new technologies. Our people were really excited about this, and it was a great match to develop with Alexa.”

The Kayak service on Alexa — known as a “skill” — launched in May 2016. In its first iteration, it allowed users to search hotels, flights and rental cars; provided updates on flight arrivals and departures; and gave travel recommendations for given budgets.

Making technological improvements and gaining the support of booking partners allowed Kayak to add hotel booking this summer.

At the same time, Kayak has added its services to a growing number of Alexa-powered devices. Last month, it announced that it would support the Echo Show, which has a touch screen.

“We have the most advanced travel skill on Alexa,” Keller said. “We think people really like doing the things we offer on there.”

To use Kayak with Echo Show, users would sync or create a Kayak account, activate the Kayak skill in Alexa and link the account. Once the account is linked, a user could say “Alexa, ask Kayak to book me a hotel room in Boston from Oct. 15 to 17.”

The Echo Show version of Kayak provides up to 10 bookable hotel options, which users could see with finger scrolling. They could also ask Alexa to “select No.2,” for more details such as pricing. To book, a user would say, “Alexa, book this hotel” and use his or her Kayak account to confirm the reservation.

Some marketing experts see virtual assistants as particularly well-suited to customers with disabilities who might have difficulty typing or seeing the text on a screen. At the same time, the technology might not be as ideal — at least not with the current technology — for users who have complex booking requirements that cannot be easily dictated.

“The accessibility is an advantage for these kinds of virtual assistants,” said Jane Gu, an associate professor of marketing in the University of Connecticut’s business school. “Marketers need to think about which target groups will benefit from this feature. Identifying the right segment of customers who have the most need for these services is a good direction in which to go.”

Kayak officials are working on adding flight bookings through Alexa, but creating such an option is more challenging than offering hotel reservations because of the extra regulations and security layers tied to buying plane tickets. For example, users cannot enter with a voice service a credit card’s CVV number, which would be a necessary step to book a flight.

“There are more regulatory obstacles in the way that we’ll hopefully figure out soon,” Keller said. “We are hoping to move everything in the direction to get to a point where you can make any sort of purchase in a secure way on these devices. We don’t have any timeline for the flight bookings, but I’m hoping it’s not another year.”

Kayak officials said they are seeing an increasing number of customers trying out the Kayak skill, although they declined to give numbers.

Investment bank RBC Capital Markets predicted earlier this year that some 60 million Alexa devices would be sold in 2020, bringing the total number of installations to about 128 million.

Since the beginning of 2016, Kayak has also launched search, tracking and planning functions with other assistant services such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams and Google Assistant.

I was interviewed by WFSB Channel 3 TV about “Pink Tax” in November 2015. The link is here: http://www.wfsb.com/story/30554672/pink-tax-forces-women-to-pay-more-for-products. Below is the article.

Pink Tax forces women to pay more for products (WFSB)