I’m fully bought into the gospel according to Jon Loomer
When you obsess over targeting, it becomes an unnecessary distraction from what is most important: the ad copy and creative.
Stop creating unnecessary work for yourself. When possible, take advantage of automated features like Advantage+ Audience.
Creative is the biggest targeting lever we have these days.
Focus less on control and more on context.
(I love when laziness is a viable strategy.)
it’s teaming up with OpenAI to add the startup’s technology to iOS 18, the next version of the iPhone’s software
Sounds like OpenAI won the gig (Google always felt like a weird choice based on platform competition and default search payola scrutiny).
Now Apple gets to enter the consumer AI fray and establish a connection with its hardware platform while continuing to develop its edge differentiation and outsourcing hallucinatory reputational risk to someone else.
Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used.
…
Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer’s use as anything other than for pounding nails
How can you defy functional fixedness in your positioning, strategy, and marketing?
Or, how can you zig where others zag?
via Wikipedia (via The Ringer)
From The Guardian
fraudsters impersonated WPP’s CEO using a fake WhatsApp account, a voice clone and YouTube footage used in a virtual meet
Will AI make smaller better?
Scale is really only needed for data when it comes to model training. Larger headcount doesn’t equal better performance.
It’s hard to imagine this happening at a smaller company, especially one without a public-facing leader.
But, as always, humans are the weak link in the technological chain.
Benedict Evans’ prediction for WWDC:
More will probably be about how it uses LLMs to deliver new features, how much those can be run on the device (Apple is an edge computing company and its chips have had dedicated ML accelerators for years), and hence how much developers can do things on Apple silicon for no marginal cost instead of paying a cloud provider per token.
This could get minimal press but be the most interesting / impactful in terms of the average user.
This is what makes Apple different from the field and could turn its catchup attempts into a catapult.
About that ad-supported plan…
Netflix’s cheaper, ad-supported tier now has 40 million global monthly active users, nearly double the 23 million the company reported in January.
via CNBC
Netflix will launch an in-house advertising technology platform, by the end of 2025
…
This summer, Netflix will also expand its buying capabilities to include The Trade Desk, Google’s Display & Video 360, and Magnite who will join Microsoft as the main programmatic partners for advertisers.
The streaming platform removed the Basic plan for new subscribers last July, not it’ll get rid of it for good.
I wrote this last March:
If Netflix goes the roll-your-own route to replace the Microsoft stack, I wonder how long the ad-free basic tier will last.
A mystery no more.
A year ago, Google said that it believed AI was the future of search. That future is apparently here: Google is starting to roll out “AI Overviews,” previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. Pretty soon, billions of Google users will see an AI-generated summary at the top of many of their search results.
How does this impact your ad strategy?
via The Verge
Instagram is going small?
The platform is introducing a ranking change that will give smaller creators more distribution, replacing reposts with original content in recommendations, adding labels to reposted content and removing content aggregators from recommendations.
Plus…
a new way to rank recommendations that will show eligible content to a small audience that it thinks will enjoy it. As people engage with the content, the top performing set of Reels will be shown to a slightly wider audience, then the best of these will be shown to an even wider group and so on.
via TechCrunch