Agile Creativity: 7 Tech-Inspired Tips

There's no question that technology has fundamentally transformed the business of advertising. We think the really exciting changes come when we are able to re-imagine not just the ads themselves, but the whole process of conceiving and developing them. The "Mad Men" of the future will not only be fluent in technology, but also in the evolving, highly adaptable, "launch and iterate" style that has become the signature of Silicon Valley.

Developed in close partnership with ad industry executives, Agile Creativity is a playbook that agencies can use to brainstorm ways to be faster and more collaborative in their organizational structures and creative processes. Explore the best practices.

Last week we hosted a G+ Hangout on Air “Coders and Creatives: 2 Angles on Agility” featuring Google engineers and ad executives. The discussion centered around new models of collaboration, how creativity can thrive in a condensed timeline, and the power of prototyping both products and ideas. If you missed it, watch the highlights video. If you’d like to see the full 50-minute hangout, head here.

Also, check out Ad Age’s article on Agile Creativity for more information.



Posted  by Torrence Boone, Managing Director of Agency Business Development - Americas

Voice Search arrives in 13 new languages

“Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:

Basque Bulgarian Catalan European Portuguese Finnish Galician Hungarian

Icelandic Norwegian Romanian Serbian Slovak Swedish

Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.



This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.



As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.



Posted by Bertrand Damiba, Product Manager

Voice Search arrives in 13 new languages

“Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:

Basque Bulgarian Catalan European Portuguese Finnish Galician Hungarian

Icelandic Norwegian Romanian Serbian Slovak Swedish

Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced.



This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.



As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes.



Posted by Bertrand Damiba, Product Manager

Accelerate: A deeper look at attribution

Today, we're kicking off an educational series about accelerating your affiliate marketing business. We’ll be sharing insights that emerged from the Google Affiliate Network Client Summit, an annual event in July that brings together affiliate advertisers, publishers, partners and Google. The theme for the event this year was Accelerate, highlighting Google’s commitment to growing the affiliate channel for all.



In today’s post, you’ll hear from Neil Hoyne, Google's Global Program Manager for Attribution. Neil leads efforts to bring companies stronger insights into the measurement and valuation of their customers' journeys, working to improve conversion rates through better utilization of Google Analytics as well as advanced attribution modeling.

At the Google Affiliate Network Client Summit, Neil led an engaging session on attribution, encouraging companies to identify more actionable performance metrics and build stronger industry relationships as the advertising market continues its rapid evolution away from last-click valuation. Watch the video below to learn more.

We invite you to continue this conversation with Neil by sharing your comments on this post or via Twitter (@nhoyne).



Posted by Erica Sievert, Product Marketing Manager

Google and GroupM Fill Retail & Restaurant Marketers’ Carts with Digital Trends and Insights at Spark Event

The second event in our Spark education series we co-hosted with GroupM Next was hosted today,
focusing on trends, research and digital opportunities in Retail and QSR. Launched in June, Spark is a series of custom, co-programmed events created to deliver unique education and innovation experiences in an intimate setting for GroupM clients and media agencies.

Spark: Retail & Restaurants took place in New York with brand marketers from retailers and
restaurants, and media professionals from Maxus, MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare in attendance. After a welcome from GroupM Next CEO Chris Copeland, Google’s Torrence Boone, Managing Director, Agency Business Development, and Brett Goffin, Emerging Business Lead, Mobile, as well as Pat Monteleone and Jesse Wolfersberger from GroupM Next, Bryan Gildenberg of Kantar, Steven Rosenblatt of Foursquare and Tim Zagat, co-founder and CEO of Zagat, took the stage to share insights into the intersection of retail and digital, and ways that brands in these industries can benefit from what’s taking place.

Hot topics included:

• Shopper/consumer trends
  


• Converting consumer demand and desire into action
  


• New research from GroupM Next on showrooming and how to keep buyers in-store
  


• Using digital innovatively to build brands and reach customers 1:1 through marketing

In-store shopping. E-commerce. A digital footprint. Mobile. Local visibility. Price comparison…and more. These are all things retail and restaurant marketers should be factoring in their marketing strategies to maximize traffic, engagement and revenue. With these in the forefront, retail and QSR companies will prosper in today’s digitally-driven world. For the future, as brands engage more strategically and proactively via channels and emerging platforms that enable hyper-targeting across digital media, social interaction and location-based targeting, they’ll attract and retain loyal customers, while emerging ahead of the competition.

Launched: Switch between your preferred currency and timezone

With our international launch earlier this year, we enabled you to set your preferred currency and timezone. We’re pleased to announce that if you changed your settings, you can now switch between your preferred settings and the default currency (USD) and timezone (Central Time) when viewing reports. This enhancement allows you to view your reports in the format that's most relevant to you, and is available for all reports except for payment reports.



 Switch between your preferred and default currency:

Switch between your preferred and default timezone:

If you're a Google Affiliate Network publisher, please note that you can only view the reporting currency you’ve chosen in your AdSense account. It’s not possible to change this once you’ve set it.



Posted by: Kurt Spoerer, Google Affiliate Network Product Manager

Scheduled Release track features update 8/14/12

Calendar: Users have had the ability to change the colors of calendars from a default color palette. Users can now choose a custom color if the default palette does not meet their needs.



The following features are intended for release to these domains on August 21th:

Spreadsheets: Users now have the ability to name a range in a spreadsheet. You can then protect such a named range instead of protecting the whole sheet. You can also use the name of the range in formulas.

Spreadsheets: Users can now pick the color and style of cell borders. This features is accessible as an added option through the cell borders toolbar button.



Release track: 

Scheduled



Editions included: 

Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education



For more information:

http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=63175

http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37227



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