Walmart on its reported (and now confirmed) interest in buying Vizio:

We believe VIZIO’s customer-centric operating system provides great viewing experiences at attractive price points. We also believe it enables a profitable advertising business that is rapidly scaling. Our media business, Walmart Connect, is helping brands create meaningful connections with the millions of customers who shop with us each week. We believe the combination of these two businesses would be impactful as we redefine the intersection of retail and entertainment.

via Walmart

If you want something to outlast a particular profit-driven business cycle, you have to make it yourself and you have to make it intentionally to not be part of the profit-driven business cycle.

-Ken Lane

Finished reading: John Constantine, Hellblazer Vol. 7: Tainted Love by Garth Ennis 📚

This, to me, is the evolution of search.

The search engine naturally becomes a task execution engine—or a Task Rabbit engine—where you can search for something, have it do that thing for you, and never have to go do it yourself.

-Kieran Flanagan

Kipp Bodnar adds that this will happen via niche agents.

The classic search index isn’t king anymore and the classic 10 blue links have been enshittified.

Search is changing.

via the Marketing Against The Grain podcast (YouTube link)

You get what you build.

We wrote a dialogue with our music that was a continual growth.

We know what we’ve made and we know what our audience is building. They’ve helped us from the start.

We’ve been carrying each other from 2011. There’s no surprises. You get what you work for.

-Joe Talbot of IDLES

Brands are 🍄 🍄🍄

Slack is launching a suite of built-in AI features that serve up summaries of threads and channel recaps, while also allowing you to ask questions about what’s been going on at work. The workplace management platform first started testing Slack AI last year, but now it’s rolling out as a paid add-on for Slack Enterprise users.

AI already has a track record as a pay-to-use service so this type of move will be the norm, not the exception.

Tech giants can add-on AI tools for free to deepen their moats and increase lock-in, but others can generate revenue with them.

via The Verge

Federal Reserve officials continued to worry that inflation could stay stubbornly high during their policy meeting last month. That could keep interest rates at 23-year high for longer than previously expected

But

three rate cuts this year is a “reasonable baseline” expectation.

&

Investors now expect the first rate cut to come around the middle of year, according to futures.

0% rates are a thing of the past, but I could see the Fed cutting the rate in half by the time the dust settles.

via CNN

Rather than an attack on the platforms, we can see this as the culmination of what social networks were built for; in an environment pushed by the business model to favor crude measures of “reach” and “engagement,” the troll is the optimal organism.

&

the concept of human relationships most “tech visionaries” seem to have oscillates between Uncanny Valley ideas of “community” and downright transactional views of how people interact with each other.

via Marcelo Rinesi

ICYMI: What Apple’s iOS 17 privacy shift means for marketers

With iOS 17, the company will remove URL tracking parameters from links accessed in its Mail and Messages apps along with removing them from Safari Private Browsing
…
with Apple’s new Link Tracking Protection feature, user-identifiable information will be stripped from URLs

UTMs look unaffected, for now, hopefully