Headline: Gen Z is more likely to be OK with targeted ads — here’s what the numbers say / Shopping habits of the younger cohort differ significantly from baby boomers.

Here’s what this actually means:

Younger consumers raised post-social media are fine with their advertising normal. Internet native shoppers also shop differently than older shoppers.

No surprises here.

Product placements can drive searches and purchases, research finds

This is why:

• Apple made it easy to use their products in TV and movies
• Multimodal AI will change search behavior (just snap a pic of the screen and ask “where can I buy this?”)
• Streaming platforms (like Amazon (and video game companies)) want to make media shoppable

A glimpse of the future from the All-In Podcast:

The app developers—as they’re called today—are basically building in-stream utilities that are part of the chat interface that is the phone itself.

We used to write websites. Then we wrote apps. And now we’re going to write these in-stream services—these plug-ins.

Thinking about starting a podcast for your brand?

Will it be narrative or non-narrative?

Consider this:

When tested for brand favorability, brands that took a narrative approach to their podcast saw an average lift in favorability ten percentage points higher than those using a conversation or interview format.

I posted earlier this week about the new ChatGPT multimodal and how it's a glimpse into the future of how we interact with computing devices.

The Future: Consumer Computing

You can now (or soon can) talk to ChatGPT and ask it questions via pictures. This is a glimpse into the future of computer interfaces.

CuriousMarketers.ClubKyle Mensing

The next day, the All-In Podcast talked about much the same thing.

I think they—via the illustrations below—prove this belief out even more. (They also mention that inputs can (or will) have more options than just images and voice. Code Interpreter let's you input documents and code snippets, so that makes sense.)

Humans have five major sensory inputs we use to feed our brain computers. Up to this point, we've had one input type to interact with computers: text.

Multimodal is a way of mapping our multi-sensory experience onto interactions with computers, making them more natural for us.

We've adapted ourselves to the limits of computing. Now we might be able to adapt our computers to ourselves.

I don't love the examples OpenAI used in their demos. I see the hints of what they promise, but they lack oomph. This example though, this perfectly shows how you can use multimodal in your day-to-day to make life a bit easier:

To drive this point home even further, here's one of the guys who'd be on the Mount Rushmore of modern AI development sharing his take:

TLDR looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.

-Andrej Karpathy

And Google's BARD can now interface with a host of Google apps and services, almost creating a true smart, personalized assistant.

How do we extend our brand experiences into this new environment?

What does "brand" mean in this future?

(Basically, take all the questions people had about brands and the metaverse after the Grand Meta Rebranding™ and replace "metaverse" with "multimodal AI chat".)

Consumers are spending less on streaming TV services while increasing their usage of ad-supported options.

Peak streaming is behind us and providers have to start charging more to make the numbers work.

This means 2 things:

• We’re prime for a re-bundling
• More advertising options for marketers

All we have as marketers is trust.

If that’s a currency we’re willing to spend, then we get what we buy.

-Tod Maffin

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Multimodal.

ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak

We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT. They offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about.

I heard the news through a rather breathless podcast about the drop and was trying to find my way out of the hype machine, but I think this is actually a big deal.

Previous AI tools were really just supercharged versions of existing tech options. ChatGPT was autocomplete on steroids. DALL-E was reverse image recognition. AR filters were Hipstamatic 2.0.

But this new GPT4 feature is something more.

It's a new way for users to interact with computing devices in ways more natural to the history of human experience and development.

Here's one of the examples from the announcement:

If I were to ask someone to help me face-to-face, I would point out the bike and ask (just like the demo). I wouldn't give them the specific bike make and model as a preface to my question.

When I'm trying to get a question answered, I'm looking for an answer. I'm not specifically looking for a list of links to click about or a YouTube video to scrub through or a PDF to scroll through.

This is the closest analog of human-to-human information seeking interaction I've seen from tech outside of limited voice assistant stuff.

We're moving closer to ambient computing—when the screen gets deemphasized and devices act more as extensions of your person than external boxes you tap at. AirPods, smart watches, and voice assistant devices are the forerunners of this trend. Multimodal is a power up.

If true AR glasses are feasible (big "if" on the technical hardware end of things right now), think about not even needing to take a picture for that bike example. Simply look at your bike and ask for help lowering the seat and get instructions overlaid on your field of vision.

We as marketers need to start thinking through how we can best serve customers through experiences like this in the future. And how our methods of distribution and promotion will change.

TikTok Shop is going hard for the holidays, but not everyone is pumped about it.

Quickly, quietly, TikTok is handing China the economic checkmate it needs to sunset the idea of American Dynamism for good.

Geopolitics isn’t my arena, but I’m not high on TikTok Shop.

Because: the intention to produce their own goods in China has already been stated. Plus, China has no incentive to create a platform that benefits Western brands over Chinese companies.

Having a product go big on TTShop seems like an invitation to have it copied and branded by the platform to compete with you.

The algorithm is the brain behind my opinion.

via the Digital Folklore podcast

See what I mean?

We are the messaging team on TikTok. Our team’s mission is to facilitate meaningful user connections through TikTok’s messaging experience, which is still in its infancy.

Collaborative creation is now creation and distribution.

Social media is splintering into content created by the few and private sharing by the many.

Or, all social apps are becoming messaging apps.

As it works to better align the app with evolving user behaviors, Instagram’s rolling out a new option to share feed posts with Close Friends only, providing another way to facilitate more enclosed group engagement.

Buzzword bingo: social is becoming a dark forest

Apple suddenly remembered it had a podcast app and wants to pull a Spotify and YouTube Music by diversifying the (non-music) content you can listen to.

Apple Podcasts becomes the best way for listeners to access many forms of premium audio content — podcasts, news briefs, narrated articles, radio shows with full music, educational courses, guided meditations, sleep sounds, and much more — all in one place.

We’ve had the golden age of TV. Time for the golden age of audio.

In the world of email marketing, clicks are more valuable than opens. Especially now that many email providers have anti-tracking measures that spoof opens (either inflating or deflating your number depending on implementation).

Reporting on open rates is like reporting on impression totals for paid ads.

This thread gets a lot deeper on this topic.

Speaking of holiday shopping season, it’s not all about the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) madness.

According to the new Capterra “2023 Retail Holiday Preparations Survey,” Labor Day is displacing Black Friday and Cyber Monday as the top-performing holiday sales event [for small-to-mid-sized retailers].

Holiday shopping is starting earlier and earlier (thanks pandemic supply chain shenanigans!) and BFCM is getting more and more dominated by big budgets and frothy algorithm auctions.

Once the online checkout process starts, you want it to be as easy as possible for the shopper.

Shopify is trying to help merchants out with its new one-page checkout.

If you can’t enable it yet, you should be able to within the next week or two. Perfect timing to iron things out before the holiday season kicks off.