Today in Digital Marketing - Ron Jeremy Was Right.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, January 10th. Today, how a veteran porn actor predicted the future of advertising. Say goodbye to any decent ad targeting to teens on Meta's ad platforms. Amazon's Prime service is now available to third-party merchants. Agencies say their prospects are looking up. And some welcome updates to Google Docs. I'm Todd Mathen. Here's what you missed. Today, digital marketing. Years ago, like more than a decade ago, I used to be a producer for Canada's public broadcaster, the CBC.

Starting point is 00:00:36 And the very first piece I did, on my first day, working for the network's pop culture show, was to interview legendary porn actor Ron Jeremy. The story was about the last 35mm porn theater in Vancouver closing down. I asked him what the future held for his industry. I was not expecting his answer. There's going to come a day when every actor in Hollywood is going to have one day of work, except for theater.

Starting point is 00:00:59 They're going to walk into a set. The director's going to go, okay, face forward, turn around, get naked, put your clothes on, smile, look sad, look scared, do all the vowels, do the consonants. Okay, you're dismissed for life. You know what I mean? You'll never need the actor ever again. The future of acting in America or Canada will probably just be theater because you'll never need the actor ever again. As technology goes on, they won't need any of us.

Starting point is 00:01:28 Turns out he was right. We're starting to see AI create images from text, videos from a prompt, and now, the voice of anyone from just three seconds of audio. Microsoft has developed a new text-to-speech AI model called Val-E that can simulate a person's voice when given just a three-second audio sample. Once the system learns a specific voice, it can synthesize audio of that person saying anything while preserving the speaker's emotional tone. According to its creators, Valide could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, or editing and changing the recordings of someone's speech, or even unique audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models

Starting point is 00:02:05 like GPT-3. In other words, we may be able to soon do exactly what Ron Jeremy predicted. Bring in your voice actor of choice, get them to say a handful of things, then dismiss them and use their synthesized voice for a lifetime of ad campaigns. Legalities and contract issues aside, of course. The new tool comes from Meta's Encodec audio compression technology, which uses AI to compress better than CD quality audio to data rates 10 times smaller than even MP3 files without the loss of quality. As Gizmodo points out today, while current text-to-speech systems are capable of producing very realistic

Starting point is 00:02:43 voices, they often require high quality and very clean training data, which is usually recorded in a studio with professional equipment. But now, Val-E is able to simulate almost anyone's voice without them having to spend weeks in a studio or in your stepsister's laundry room. Meta announced new rules for ads targeting teens today, and if your demo is Gen Z, you're not going to like them. Starting next month, the company will remove the option for advertisers to target teen users based on their gender on both Facebook and Instagram. So digital marketers will be limited to targeting teens by location and age.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Advertisers will also no longer be able to target ads personalized to users under 18 based on their in-app activity and engagement. Things like who they follow on Instagram or Facebook pages that they've liked. Meta says the changes are set to come into effect next month. On top of that, the youth of the nation will also have more choices about which ads they see and why.

Starting point is 00:03:48 Starting in March, teens will be able to go to their ad preferences within settings on both apps and choose see less or no preference to control the types of ads they're exposed to. From ad targeting restrictions to reducing ad discrimination, yesterday, Meta announced it's launching a new AI-based variance reduction system in the U.S. in an effort to reduce bias in the distribution of ads. The feature comes after a year of working with the Department of Justice following a discrimination complaint alleging Meta propagated housing discrimination by letting advertisers exclude protected groups from their marketing campaigns. According to Meta, the system uses

Starting point is 00:04:31 new machine learning technology in ad delivery so that the actual audience that sees an ad more accurately reflects the eligible target audience for that ad. After the ad has been seen by enough people, the system will measure the aggregate demographic distribution of those who've seen the ad. Then it compares this information with the population of people who are more broadly eligible to see the ad. And if there's a difference in distribution,

Starting point is 00:04:56 the system will automatically adjust the pacing of campaigns to reduce variance between the audiences. The company added that this VRS system will not have access to users' age, gender, or race. It says the new anti-discrimination method will initially apply to housing ads, but will eventually expand to U.S. employment and credit card ad campaigns. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

Starting point is 00:05:29 No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. The program, which was tested last year, let Prime members shop on other retailer sites using their Amazon account and receive free two-day delivery. Previously, the service was invite-only, but now it will expand to all U.S. merchants by the end of the month. The company also announced a new add-on to the program

Starting point is 00:06:17 that lets merchants display customer reviews and ratings from their Amazon listings on their own online stores. A seller can't control the reviews that show up on their site, though. For example, negative reviews can't be removed. Amazon did not disclose how much it will charge merchants to use Buy With Prime. Agencies are overall optimistic about heading into the new year, according to a new study from Digiday. But there has been a clear shift away from unfettered optimism to being more cautiously optimistic. Last year, half of the respondents said that they strongly agreed they were optimistic about their company's prospects for 2022. This year, only a third report being strongly optimistic.

Starting point is 00:07:02 Similar differences emerged regarding agencies' overall optimism about the industry. Last year, a third indicated that they were optimistic about 2022 prospects for the agency. That fell to less than a quarter this year. Further, the report shows that agencies believe their companies will perform better in 2023 than the industry as a whole. 85% of agency pros said that their companies had a successful 2022. Three out of four said that agency business overall had a successful year. This suggests many agencies consider their own businesses to be faring better than the overall landscape.

Starting point is 00:07:41 And finally today, a couple of handy updates from Google Docs to share with you. First, Google announced yesterday that its voice typing feature is getting a couple of upgrades. The feature is expanding to most major browsers. It's currently only available in Chrome. Didn't say exactly what most major browsers were. It's also getting an update that will reduce transcription errors and minimize lost audio during transcription. Google also said slides, voice-type notes, will now contain automatically generated punctuation. They say this feature is rolling out now, should be fully available over the next month.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Google also announced yesterday that it is adding a feature to Google Docs that lets you see non-printing characters like spaces, tabs, and various types of breaks. With this feature, which will be available in the View menu, you can see a visual representation of what controls the formatting in a document. Before now, people had to rely on third-party add-ons to see non-printing characters. So no one said when I turned 50 that I would have to become an expert on my family's medical history. She's more and more every time I go into a doctor or in today's case, an ophthalmologist. I get the, so tell me about your family history with glaucoma and this and that.

Starting point is 00:08:57 And like, I don't know. So over the last year, I've been assembling that list, kind of morbid list. But good thing that I did have that and went to the ophthalmologist when I did, because it turns out I have very high risk of something called angled closure glaucoma, which sounded terrifying when he described it to me. Basically means that my eye isn't draining properly. I didn't even know the eyes had to drain. Anyway, stop listening if you're a bit squeamish,

Starting point is 00:09:23 because the procedure to mitigate this is to numb my eyeballs and then use a laser to zap a hole in each eyeball, which is happening in February. Happy Tuesday, I guess. Anyway, thanks for listening. I'll see you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Ron Jeremy Was Right.

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