Big Game Bingo: Here’s your “Watching the Big Game with Advertising People” bingo card.
Super Bowl Advertising! It’s finally here. The best night of advertising all year is this weekend. Watch and rates the spots here.
Twitter’s Custom Super Bowl Confetti: Twitter has been collecting tweets in support of the San Francisco 49ers, the Kansas City Chiefs and players, and is going to customize the traditional celebratory confetti with more than 100 unique messages, like “If you’re reading this tweet on a piece of confetti, then THE 49ERS HAVE WON THE SUPER BOWL!!!!! #NFLTWITTER”
Bitmoji TV this Saturday: Bitmoji TV premieres on Saturday morning, and it’s going to be immediately spread across the social web. It’s a Snapchat Show page where users’ Bitmojis star in animated episodes featuring various adventures. You can watch a Trailer with your Bitmoji today by clicking here on mobile.
Is 2020 the Year that A.I. Predictions Become Routine? A.I. predicted the coronavirus outbreak. A.I. predicted Billie Eilish would win Record of the Year. A.I. even predictse your Netflix recommendations (which btw, 75% of Netflix users select films recommended to them by the company’s machine learning algorithms). There will be bad predictions, too. But it appears this is the year that A.I. predictions lose their novelty.
Corona Beer Virus? According to Google Trends, a disturbing number of people think coronavirus is related to Corona Beer. Unfortunately @Corona hasn’t tweeted in exactly 800 days.
New Emoji Alert: The 2020 emoji update from the Unicode Consortium (the nonprofit organization that sets the standards for emoji compatibility, because that’s a thing) features gender-inclusive symbols, a smiley face shedding a single tear, a Groucho glasses face, ninjas, dodo, woolly mammoth, and an anatomical heart. In total 117 have been approved. Now we wait for iOS, Android and others to add them to our phones and networks.
Alexa, do my chores: USA Today has a round-up of some of the most popular uses for your Amazon Echo, including Find My Phone, regular alarms and reminders, make phone calls, use it as a night light, etc.
Podcast of the Week: This week NBC’s ‘Dystopia Beat’ reporter Ben Collins joined George Takei’s Oh Myyy Pod to talk about psychological factors motivating conspiracy theories online, in social media and the press.
Private, Micro-Social Networking: Dark social networks, like chat apps and text, are exploding and becoming extremely important. And this week MIT Technology Review writes about why private micro-networks, like Cocoon, Dex and Monaru could be the future of how we connect. Key quote: “It’s much easier to share the less curated parts of our lives when we feel accepted for who we really are and are less fearful of perceived judgment or rejection.”
Insta of the Week: This kid goes to restaurants and leaves brutally honest reviews of their Shirley Temples on Instagram for 163,000 followers.
GREG SWAN 