Revolutionary health breakthrough in under an hour

Samsung delivered the festival's most groundbreaking innovation with "The Mind Guardian," an AI-powered game that evaluates cognitive performance through sophisticated algorithms. This free application achieves early Alzheimer's detection within 45 minutes using 97% accuracy rates.

The breakthrough technology operates without medical questionnaires or intrusive examinations – participants engage with an entertaining, user-friendly interface. Upon completion, comprehensive medical assessments emerge automatically. Samsung research indicates early disease identification can expand lifespans by a decade while significantly minimizing neurological decline.

Anti-fraud "virtual grandmother"

British telecommunications provider O2 deployed an innovative anti-fraud strategy through artificial intelligence. The company engineered a "virtual grandmother" persona – an AI entity trained on authentic scammer conversation data, featuring synthesized speech that projects warmth while maintaining persistent behavior.

This digital guardian intercepts fraudulent calls and sustains conversations extending 40 minutes, strategically misdirecting criminals with harmless discussions about baking recipes and misplaced eyewear. Each moment scammers spend engaging the virtual character represents time unavailable for targeting genuine elderly victims.

The initiative generated £36 million ($45.3 million) in media value while enhancing brand perception, achieving these results through minimal financial investment.

Burger King outsmarts FIFA sponsors

Burger King demonstrated a strategic AI application by outmaneuvering companies investing millions in FIFA gaming sponsorships. The brand recognized that "FIFA 25" announcers verbally acknowledge every player's name during gameplay, extending beyond celebrity athletes to include lesser-known participants.

The company incentivized free hamburgers for users scoring goals with any player named "King" receiving passes from teammates named "Burger," requiring social media documentation. This approach produced 200,000 brand references within seven days, surpassing McDonald's recall metrics despite zero sponsorship expenditure.

Beauty standards campaign challenges digital deception

Personal care manufacturer Dove addressed troubling research indicating one-third of women modify their appearance following exposure to AI-generated imagery. Collaborating with Pinterest, the organization launched an initiative enabling women to personally define authentic beauty standards through customized video content.

The program achieved over 4 billion impressions, accumulated half a billion video views, and captured the festival's premier recognition – the Grand Prix award.

Beyond accolades, Dove reported that Pinterest's recommendation algorithms began recalibrating their understanding of "genuine feminine beauty" based on campaign data.

Corporate resistance to technological advancement

Contrasting successful AI adopters, several major corporations deliberately avoid artificial intelligence integration. Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard initiated his festival presentation, stating, "Sorry, but I'm not going to talk about artificial intelligence."

Pritchard offered only generic statements about adopting AI technology "like any other technology," while evading specific implementation questions. Significantly, Procter & Gamble secured no major festival recognition this year while continuing substantial investments in conventional television advertising.

Industry evolution strategies

Festival experts proposed methodologies for merging artificial intelligence with human innovation. Veteran advertising creator Sir John Hegarty recommended using AI to resurrect historical figures – envisioning consultations with Steve Jobs regarding future iPhone development or Coco Chanel concerning upcoming fashion collections.

YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan described emerging scenarios where content producers employ artificial intelligence as "collaborative assistants," facilitating high-quality output through dramatically reduced timeframes and budgets while preserving human creative input.

The festival established definitive distinctions between competing philosophies, with performance metrics demonstrating substantial advantages for technology-embracing brands compared to those maintaining resistance.

The writer is a Digital and AI strategist and consultant to companies and organizations in Israel and worldwide, and a lecturer in the MBA program at Ono Academic College.

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It's amazing what one Olympic Games can do. Until Tokyo, our constant question every Olympic day was: Will we get a medal? Now, in Paris, almost every day since the opening, we've been wondering – how come we don't have a medal yet?! We've grown accustomed to success. And rightfully so, it turns out.

How fortunate we are to have judo to fulfill our hopes. Since 1992, judo has been our true national sport. Israel was never considered a world power in any sport. In recent years, that has changed: There isn't a judo enthusiast in the world who doesn't know Israel.

Video: Judo medalists receive warm welcome upon arrival in Israel / Credit: Shmuel Buchris

Every few weeks, our judokas hop between competitions around the world, collecting titles and bringing much honor to Israel.

Once every four years, they arrive at the Olympics and deliver the goods – goods that fill us with pride, and this time, also provide us with a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Indeed, those who follow closely – and in recent years, several Facebook and WhatsApp groups have been doing just that (including dedicated Olympic groups) – knew that barring any mishaps and given a reasonable draw, Israel would return from Paris with one or two judo medals. Sure enough, Inbar Lanir and Raz Hershko lived up to expectations, and Peter Paltchik managed to outdo himself when it mattered most. In what other sports do we have such certainty?

Sometimes, it's hard not to think about what would happen if we concentrated most of our Israeli sports resources on productive disciplines like judo rather than on sports that have brought us so many disappointments and so few titles.

Almost everything has probably been said and written about an Israeli medal in the shadow of the year we've had. The thing is, words cannot describe the intensity of emotion, the release, the love, and the energy that flowed through the Champ-de-Mars Arena. It turns out that money can't buy such a powerful experience – only a silver medal can (and a bronze, too).

Even given the security constraints we had to adopt in Paris, even more than at any previous Olympics, the level of Israeli support on the first day felt like being at Bloomfield Stadium, from chants to personalized cheers.

So what's next? Israeli judo has one stone left to turn. This is, of course, an excellent reason to secure tickets for Los Angeles 2028. And this time, we're not coming back without hearing the national anthem on the mat.

The post Olympic success proves judo is Israel's national sport appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

It took Dr Pepper, the American soft drink brand, a full 40 years to catch up to Pepsi in the battle for second place in sales. How symbolic it is that the surprising turnaround in this quintessentially American contest, largely credited to the brand's activity on TikTok, is being announced on the very day that Donald Trump, the former and perhaps future US President, launches his official TikTok account.

You're not mistaken if Trump's official TikTok account sounds suspicious to you. As president, Trump banned TikTok. In the 2020 campaign, both Trump and Joe Biden steered clear of the platform. However, the roots of the conflict between Trump and TikTok stretch back to mid-2020. A viral campaign on the Chinese network at the time called for people to register for Trump's massive campaign rally – and then not show up, of course. As a result, while Trump's team reported over a million ticket reservations, it turned out that hundreds of thousands of them had been made by his opponents. Consequently, Trump's team failed to fill even half the capacity of the massive convention center.

Since then, Trump has kept his distance from TikTok throughout the campaign. Biden and Kamala Harris, who were also flying under the radar, recognized the platform's potential and knew how to leverage it at the right moment by disseminating campaign messages, such as the video of the fly crawling on Trump's vice president throughout the televised debate, accompanied by the slogan "Truth over Flies" on the accounts of highly followed and exposed influencers. On Harris's niece's account, for instance, Harris starred in one of the most famous and viral videos, even dancing for her amusement.

While it took Trump several years to make Twitter his home turf, it seems TikTok – where everything happens much faster, stronger, and higher – was his true natural habitat long before he joined: aggressive, extreme, noisy, favoring "wham-bam" tactics and fake news.

Not exactly America's Nelson Mandela when it comes to forgiveness, Trump remembers his TikTok boycott. But he has swallowed his pride, opened a TikTok account, and amassed nearly three million followers in less than a day. While on paper, Trump's move to TikTok may seem like a game-changer, the outcome can still go both ways: The Chinese, as we all learned the hard way during the war, can uplift or crash every account according to their interests, or in this case, their blood-stained history with Trump.

Will Trump be able to do to Biden in four months what it took Dr Pepper 40 years to do to Pepsi? No doubt he can deliver on TikTok. The question is whether the Chinese will allow it.

Itay Tsamir is a Digital Strategist, Lecturer and Consultant
www.tsamirdl.com

The post Is TikTok the key to the 2024 presidential race? appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

"Ask and you shall receive." This quote does not belong to the CEO of a large hotel chain or the waiter at your favorite cafe, but rather to Mark Zuckerberg. There's no reason to be surprised by this strong service-oriented sentiment – that's what happens when you launch a social network that reached 100 million users in five days but lost the interest of most of them in a much shorter period than that.

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Over on the other side, Elon Musk has been warming up. The owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, is not the kind of person who needs to get warmed up. After the two decided to have "a cage match", they ultimately decided – being the geeks that they are – to hold this duel by launching a new app and renaming an existing one. Now, the question is which of them will win.

X has experienced a rollercoaster since Musk joined Twitter. Canceling "censorship", bringing back blocked accounts (hey, Donald Trump), subscriptions for the blue checkmark, user abandonment, and the appointment of a new CEO instead of Musk. But if all this is not enough – advertisers are additionally no longer willing to advertise on the platform in the same scope as before.

Meta, having become the world's leading one-on-one communication powerhouse with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and also as a strong competitor for the Fun niche through Instagram, the prospect of taking over the public square by shaping public opinion and on the way to scoop up the advertisers disappointed with Twitter, became all the more attractive.

A few days after the unprecedented launch of Threads, the number of daily app users took a deep dive. The reason: It's boring! The algorithm seems to prioritize influencers who are (almost) all geared towards producing much "softer" content, that advertisers love. However, no one travels all the way to the town square just to eat cotton candy. Threads has tried to have it both ways, but that plan is not going so well.

The winner, paradoxically, will be the one who knows how to step back faster.

Twitter in the days before Musk knew how to provide users with the entertainment they expected to find in the town square, but was less successful in profiting from it. Zuckerberg and Musk know how to make money from a strong product. Moving forward, only the one who will be able to bring back the good old Twitter town square – one that allows for heated discussions but also knows how to set limits when necessary – will receive both the users and the advertisers.

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