Buddy Holly Meets Instagram
Recently I was targeted with several high impact units on the homepage of the NYT.com for a new collection of Ray Ban-Meta smart glasses.
The ads feature large photographs of stylish youthful users donning the product, with text overlays describing capabilities like "Listen, Capture, Call, Livestream and ask Meta AI".
This last item on the list (ask Meta AI) is important because it is what makes the glasses "smart".
These are the first products to ship with Meta AI built in.
Meta AI is an assistant (think, Siri) that can provide basic services like question answering, text translation and location-based services.
Wearers can ask the assistant - What am I looking at? What does that say, in English? Where am I? - and receive answers directly back to the glasses.
The glasses are being compared to Google Glass, but in my opinion GG was more of a shape-shift for search engines than virtual assistants.
The other capabilities featured in the ad include - "Listen" referring to the built-in speakers, "Capture" referring to the 12 mp ultrawide camera, and "Call" and "Livestream" which refer to native communication services via popular Meta apps like Instagram and Facebook.
The battery life on the glasses is short for now (~ 4 hours) but they come with a neat charging case that combines the look of an old-school Ray-Ban case with the juice of an Apple Earpods charger.
IMO, these communications are well done. They are multimodal in format. Instructional in tone. And forward leaning in spirit.
They leverage both ingredient brands to maximize perceived value. Ray-Bans, as a classic choice for style icons across generations. Meta, as a future-proof social media and technology maker with billions of users everywhere.
While it feels early to me, if anyone can make this new category happen, it’s these two brands. So for now, BIG UPS to the collaboration behind the new Meta Rays.
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