Today in Digital Marketing - AI Wrote This Episode Title. Do You Care?

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, April 2nd. Today, AI is writing more marketing copy these days, but how many consumers can tell that you cheaped out? Also, LinkedIn tries its hand at a TikTok clone, Amazon abandons one of its most talked about technologies, and Google promises to stop doing what none of us realized it was doing. I'm Todd Maffin. That's ahead today in digital

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Starting point is 00:01:02 R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A. Let's face it. It's a compelling argument. Get AI to write our ad copy. It's faster, easier to scale, and much cheaper than a human. But can consumers tell that you took the lazy way out?

Starting point is 00:01:19 That's what Binder, a digital asset management company, set out to discover. They gave AI this prompt, write 300 words on how to clean your car. Then they gave the same instruction to a human copywriter and they showed both versions to 2000 consumers. And the results? A crapshoot. Exactly 50% of consumers could tell that the copy had been generated by AI. Millennials could spot the fake copy the best. Previous research has found that group to also be the most likely to use AI tools

Starting point is 00:01:52 for content generation. The study tested this against both US and UK consumers. Americans were about 10% more likely to spot AI copy than their British counterparts. As for which of the two versions people preferred, 56% picked the AI-generated article. That was the same for all age groups, except for one, and if you think it's the boomers, you're wrong. In fact, people aged 16 to 24 were the only cohort to prefer the human written content, though that margin was only 55% to 45%.

Starting point is 00:02:28 This tested a full blog post, remember? My guess is that far fewer people would be able to figure out whether AI wrote a smaller chunk of content, like a product description or a headline. One of the unfortunate byproducts of the ad platform's obsession with jamming AI into all parts of the media buying process is that as they add AI, invariably, they remove direct control. You only have to compare what a Google ad campaign looked like five years ago to a Performance Max campaign today to see all the levers which have been removed. But one interesting trend in the last half year or so is the same platforms returning some of those levers. Case in point, last week, Meta rolled out a new targeting option to its Advantage Plus

Starting point is 00:03:16 shopping campaigns. The targeting option is engaged customers. And while this sounds like an auto-generated cohort, in fact, it's basically just a new spot for a custom audience. To use the engaged customers audience segment, you give Meta one or more of your existing customer audience groups that you feel represent your best prospects, perhaps past shoppers, or people who viewed a product more than three times but haven't bought yet. And there's reporting to go along with it. Under the breakdown menu and demographics by audience segments, you'll now see a way to view by new customers, existing customers, and engaged customers. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

Starting point is 00:03:59 Hell, even LinkedIn is going full vertical now. Yes, the business-focused social network is trying its hand at the vertical video format with a dedicated video feed in the app. And yes, it looks pretty much identical to TikTok, right down to the placements of those four icons on the right-hand side of the screen, a format which everyone else, like YouTube and Instagram, also copied. This is only in a small test group for now, but that test does give this feed its own button on the bottom row. Tapping on that button gives you basically the TikTok experience.

Starting point is 00:04:31 Quoting social media today, quote, the question then is, will there be enough entertaining business-related content to fill a short form video feed every day? I mean, the push will likely be to get more LinkedIn influencers to create videos of their regular text updates in order to drive more engagement, which could be good in adding more context and value to these updates. But then again, I don't know that all those business inspiration posts are going to do as well as video clips, unquote. If this all sounds familiar, it's because four years ago, LinkedIn tried to copy the Stories format, which at the time had started to pick up steam. Then, less than a year later, it announced it was dropping the format.

Starting point is 00:05:14 The same thing happened with Twitter around the same time, which called its posts their fleets. I, for one, can't wait for the thousands of Hustle Bro information marketing webinar pitches. No word on when this will roll out to everyone, but you know it will, and probably soon. One thing that is not rolling out, surprisingly, is Amazon's much-ballyhooed Just Walk Out technology. We saw this tech in some of their concept grocery stores. Cameras and sensors in the ceiling tracked what people put in their carts, so they just had to walk out and they'd be charged for the products automatically. No cashier, no self-serve checkout kiosk. Except, it turns out, it was a lot less automated than we all thought.

Starting point is 00:06:00 The information reported that, quote, the system relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts, unquote. So while it got a lot of media attention and half their Amazon Fresh stores used the technology, today a company executive told media they would be mostly walking away from the technology. There will be some places the Just Walk Out tech will still work. They're keeping it around in a few stores in the UK. They just added it to some ballparks in the US, and no word on whether those will stay in place.

Starting point is 00:06:33 But not to fear, enter Dash Carts stage left. Dash Carts are Amazon's new play. Shopping carts with a screen and product scanner attached, which let you scan products as you shop. As long as you have an Amazon account, of course. If you don't, you'll be relegated to a self-checkout kiosk. Will that lineup be the green text bubble of the grocery world? Focus group testing has been a mainstay of the market research world for generations. It's helped brands figure out what their logo should look like, what products to drop, and so on.

Starting point is 00:07:09 But sometimes it's hard to ask the tough questions. So now some agencies are asking AI to sit in the chairs instead of people. Quoting Adweek, Quote, At agency Supernatural, chief strategy officer Mike Barrett asked an AI-generated persona what the most impactful challenges of cancer are, informing the campaign for a healthcare brand. It's not the treatment or chemotherapy, the virtual cancer patient responded. It's the fact that nobody knows how to talk to you about it. It feels lonely and isolating. This insight led to the agency creating 12 AI-generated personas for the brand.

Starting point is 00:07:46 You would never ask a real person that question, Barrett told Adweek, unquote. As for how accurate the responses are, one recent study found that data from AI subjects were about 75% to 90% on point with what human subjects would say. Supernatural says it's also using AI as focus group subjects for products around women's health and fertility. And finally, as part of a legal settlement, Google has agreed to delete web browsing data it collected from users

Starting point is 00:08:21 while they browsed in incognito mode. In related news, Google collected web browsing data from us while we browsed in incognito mode. And the reason was because, of course, they did. Google's web browser is and has always been a Machiavellianly brilliant Trojan horse. Less about providing the world with a safe and fast browser, more about being able to see where everyone goes on the web and what they do there.

Starting point is 00:08:48 It's the same thing Facebook did when they bought a VPN service, then made it free, then recommended people use it, you know, for safety. Never mind that Zuckerberg was collecting reams of data on what you did off his platform. Safety, I tell you. This legal settlement with Google stemmed from a lawsuit filed four years ago by three Chrome users, quoting the Register, quote, specifically the search behemoth's privacy policy claimed that users could control the information Google collects. But as alleged in the lawsuit, Google didn't provide the privacy it promised and implied through services like Chrome's incognito mode. Chrome's incognito mode only provides privacy in the client by not keeping a locally stored record of the user's browsing history.

Starting point is 00:09:33 It does not shield website visits from Google. The lawsuit was filed because the plaintiff said the language Google used at the time suggested otherwise, unquote. For its part, Google called the lawsuit meritless and said, quote, we are happy to delete old technical data that was never associated with an individual and was never used for any form of personalization, unquote. But that doesn't quite square with the effort the company spent defending itself against the lawsuit, at one point submitting 4,500 pages in an argument to try to get the case dismissed. That attempt, of course, failed.

Starting point is 00:10:08 Internal communication revealed through discovery found Google employees called Chrome's incognito mode, quote, misleading, effectively a lie, and a problem of professional ethics and basic honesty, unquote, according to a plaintiff declaration. In the end, on the eve of the trial, the parties settled. In addition to deleting the user data it had collected and kept, the settlement requires Google to inform users what data it collects on what you do and where you go, even in private browsing mode. Don't forget to follow us on social media. We are almost everywhere.

Starting point is 00:10:48 Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads, Mastodon, Blue Sky, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Go to todayindigital.com slash social or tap the link at the top of the show notes. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - AI Wrote This Episode Title. Do You Care?

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