BOTW: Announcing The AI Upfronts; Has Elon gone after Substack?; SCA falls below $200m
Welcome to an Easter edition of Best of the Week, written on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning in a 13th floor hotel room overlooking Sydney’s Railway Square (hit me up if you want to catch up – I’m in town for the next couple of weeks).
Happy Draw A Picture of a Bird Day.
Today’s topics: Why you shouldn’t place your bets on a single platform; SCA’s market cap hits a new low, and the AI Upfronts.
Ready for a weekend maths quiz? Try putting these numbers into an equation…
Unmade’s paying members get 30% off a pair of tickets for our conference humAIn – human creativity x AI. That’s a saving of $216.
Unmade’s members are also entitled to a free copy of Tim Burrowes’s Media Unmade – Australian Media’s Most Disruptive Decade, which has a recommended retail price $34.99.
Unmade’s paying memberships start at $65 per month, and you can cancel any time.
You do the maths….
Announcing The AI Upfronts
Cat McGinn, curator of Unmade’s forthcoming conference humAIn – human creativity x AI, writes:
In what we believe is a world first, we’re delighted to announce Unmade’s AI Upfronts.
The AI Upfronts will be part of the program for humAIn – human creativity x AI. The event focuses on the use of AI within the media and marketing world, and takes place on July 12 in Sydney.
Like the traditional upfronts in which media owners showcase their upcoming content, new properties and advertising opportunities for the coming year, the AI Upfronts will help our audience find the AI-powered products and services that offer genuine utility to the marketing and media sectors now and in the near future.
The initial conversations we had when we decided to support this emerging sector by building a community and event focusing on AI in media and marketing have changed beyond recognition in only a few months. Over 100 new products and applications built on OpenAI launched last week alone.
The number of services, startups and companies claiming to be the solution to a huge range of professional challenges has proliferated. Against this dizzying array of new and emerging vendors, the wider discourse around the use of AI oscillates between the evangelical and outright doomsday prophesying. Our ambition is to steer a steady course through the hype.
As PJ Pereira, (founder & Creative Chairman, Pereira O’Dell), who is a member of our humAIn advisory panel, put it to me this week:
“AI is like a giant wave coming in our direction. You can either run for the mountains or you can grab a board and try to surf it. But standing in the sea shouting that it’s evil is futile. You’re going to be swept.”
Our intention is that delegates to humAIn will leave with a playbook in mind for how to surf the AI wave in their own jobs.
The AI Upfronts format will feature a round of lightning pitches. At the close of the session, the audience will be able to vote on the pitch they feel is going to offer most benefit to their work lives.
There are still some spaces available for pitches – please send your proposal, explaining the relevance and use cases for media and marketing, to me at Cat@unmade.media.
Discounted earlybird tickets for humAIn are now on sale. We’ll be capping the number of attendees for the event at 320. There are currently 247 tickets remaining.
Locked out
Tim Burrowes writes
Early last month, I experienced a sinking feeling. I’d just done something dumb, and putting it right was about to become an enormous pain in the backside.
I’d switched to a newer iPhone. After a cursory check that my apps had carried across, I did a factory reset on the old one, before getting rid of it.
A few days later, I realised my error. Authenticator apps. They hadn’t moved over. Soon I would regret my caution in switching to two-factor authentication wherever I could.
Luckily, with phone calls to my bank, and backup methods like phone or email, I was able to methodically get most things up and running again.
The only service I remained stuck with was Meta. I couldn’t sign in to its Messenger app on my new phone. I wasn’t bothered about getting into the Facebook app. Like TikTok, I deleted the Facebook mobile app long ago when I realised how much it was distracting me. Stolen focus indeed.
It was a relatively minor inconvenience – I was still logged in on desktop when I needed Facebook.
But I couldn’t let it lie. The minor inconveniences of not being able to use Messenger on my phone began to annoy me. I kept missing messages from the lady down the road telling me when my eggs were ready to pick up.
So I decided to get to grips with the problem, by reinstalling 2FA on the new phone. On desktop, I tried to make the switch inside Facebook by temporarily turning off 2FA. This turned out to be a terrible mistake. It promptly locked me out of desktop too, demanding a code from my now wiped authentication app. The only other alternative it offered was a code generated from the Facebook mobile app I didn’t have.
From minor inconvenience, it became noticeable in lots of minor ways. I missed alerts from the Tasmanian Aurora group for good sky watching nights. My local Facebook page was where I used to look on a Sunday night to find out which bins to put out. More widely, I felt a little less part of the local community. In an isolated place, that group was my main source of local news.
Then I realised I was locked out from online games like Words With Friends and Risk where I’d paid for premium tiers and forgotten I’d used a Facebook ID (remember when that seemed the convenient thing to do?)
And of course, I’ve no idea what messages I’ve missed because I can’t see them.
For the most part, it’s the little, local things I miss. Not the publishers who populate the news feed. When Facebook probably cuts them off when its News Media Bargaining Code deals expire next year, I suspect it will have less impact on users than you’d think.
The impact on my work was relatively minimal. We only recently started to build a Facebook presence for Unmade. And prior to the lockout, when I’d tried to experiment with some Facebook ads to promote our Unmade event, I couldn’t get into my long dormant advertising account. It was easier to spend the money with LinkedIn rather than figure it out.
But if it had occurred slightly later, after we’d begun to build more of a presence, it would have been far more of a professional pain. If we’d been relying on it to promote an event at the time, it would have had business consequences.
None of those reverberations are a surprise though. I’ve always known that when you build on someone else’s land, it can be taken away at any moment. News publishers experienced that when they lost much of their traffic when Facebook changed the News Feed algorithm back in 2018.
Last night, came another example where a platform can abruptly change the rules. Twitter started blocking links to Substack posts.
Whether this was a whim on the part of erratic owner Elon Musk, or a mistake caused by most of the staff having been laid off is hard to say. I did message the Twitter press email address for comment this morning, not so much because I expected a reply but more so I could see whether I would get that infamous auto reply poop emoji. I did.
For a freedom of speech champion, Elon sure doesn’t seem to do much for freedom of speech. I wonder whether the move was aimed at his Substack critics like Casey Newton’s Platformer.
Still, journalists aren’t entitled to amplification just because they previously got it from a platform. I’ve noticed we get a lot less traffic from LinkedIn and Twitter posts than we would have five years ago. The platforms’ algorithms preference posts that keep users within their own ecosystems. Self interest trumps utility.
The only solution for brands or publishers is to view any platform relationship as purely transactional – play multiple bets and get what you can from the relationship, but never bet the business on it.
One day it will end with the poop emoji.
Unmade Index: SCA drops below $200m
Southern Cross Austereo entered new territory on Thursday, with the company’s market capitalisation dipping below $200m for the first time.
The share price hit an all time low of 82c, before recovering fractionally just before the close of business to finish the day at 83c, giving the company a market capitalisation of $200.8m.
The company’s valuation is a far cry from that of 2011 when regional player Southern Cross Media (which at the time had a market cap of more than $800m) took over the metro-focused Austereo at a valuation of $741m in a bid mainly funded through debt.
Fellow audio company HT&E, owner of ARN, also dropped yesterday, with its share price falling by 1.77%.
This week, SMI’s data for February revealed that agency adspend in the audio market had fallen by 8.1% compared to February 2022. That included a 7.8% fall in radio revenue and a 10.8% fall in what had until now been the growth medium of digital audio.
SMI has previously revealed an 8.9% fall in the audio market for January.
Elsewhere on the index, real estate platform Domain had the biggest fall of the major stocks, dropping by 3.58%. Print and marketing services company IVE Group dropped by 3.12%.
The Week in AI: Dream it, make it; Legislators awaken; AI at the business end
Searchable
Google will start integrating AI-driven chatbots in to its search, CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. This comes after Microsoft integrated ChatGPT with its rival search offering Bing. Pichai appeared to acknowledge this was driving the company’s response: “We were iterating to ship something, and maybe timelines changed, given the moment in the industry.”
Customer service
Sales people using AI assistance doubled customer purchases and were more than twice as likely to solve customer questions that required creativity, a research paper to be published in the Academy of Management Journal suggested.
AI made this:
AI-powered product manufacturer DreamBox launched a product it claims will allow consumers to upload their AI-generated product ideas and turn them into physical reality.
Publish
Online publishers are already experimenting with AI to improve their SEO performance. Publishers including Ingenio, Team Whistle, BuzzFeed and Gannett are using generative AI technology to optimize headlines and keywords for search and to identify topics to create traffic-driving content, Digiday reported.
Fate attenzione all’AI
Privacy regulators in France, Ireland and Germany began to explore how the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could apply to generative AI companies. The move followed Italy’s temporary ban on ChatGPT. Privacy legislators are pushing for more stringent measures to ensure data protection compliance. GDPR has presented a significant challenge for marketers in ensuring that their customer data is protected; should generative AI become subject to the same restrictions it could present a significant deterrent to adoption.
Who controls the present…
AI image generation service Midjourney blocked images of Chinese President Xi and has stopped users from using the Chinese President’s name in their prompts.
The business end of AI
The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence published its Artificial Intelligence Index for 2023. Among the findings in the 386-page report was data suggesting increasing demand for AI-specialists in every industry sector, and growing attention from regulators.
Campaign of the Week: Exhibit A-i
In each edition of BOTW, our friends at Little Black Book Online highlight the most interesting marketing campaign of the week
LBB’s AUNZ reporter Casey Martin writes:
The week’s campaign of the week is Exhibit A-i, created for law firm Maurice Blackburn by Howatson+Company.
The project uses AI-created images to illustrate the accounts of survivors of offshore detention in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.
Time to let you get back to your chocolate, hot cross buns and whatever else piques your long weekend fancy.
We’ll be back with more next week.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
