AI is a sea change.
For marketing:
Out: Control
In: Context
In many ways this is a return to an earlier era of marketing, just with a new technological underpinning meaning the mediums have changed.
Black Friday became the Turkey 5 weekend which feels like it’s becoming Black November with the way retailers are pushing sales earlier, but…
October’s and November’s share of US digital holiday consumer spending has not shown a consistent increase since 2018, despite retailers moving their holiday sales earlier
In retail, should you follow the competition so you don’t get left behind or follow the customer’s lead?
Creep or chill?
via Emarketer
Google Marketing Live continued a recent trend for Google Ads, making it more and more like social ad platforms as far as creation flow and targeting.
Social marketers will inherit the earth?
Which means, your creative is the most important part of your ad strategy.
Basically me, if you replace philosophy with marketing and the sign with a billboard promoting billboards.
While Google is Meta-fying its ad platform as fast as it can, Zuck+Co might be returning the favor.
Site links in your social feed!
The site links feature enables you to add multiple landing pages to your ads. Ads created without the site link feature can only include one primary landing page. The site links will appear as horizontally scrollable display labels under the main hero image or video. When someone clicks on one of the site links on your ad, they’ll be redirected to its designated landing page within the in-app browser to learn more about your business.
via Meta
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.