Today in Digital Marketing - The Lawsuit That Could Break Marketing AI
Episode Date: November 22, 2022Reduced engagement... serious brand safety issues — why one brand spending millions on Twitter ads finally bailed out. Also: Who's liable when marketing AI makes a mistake? Snapchat struggles to... attract influencers. Amazon's getting creepier. And in case you think YOUR day is bad? Just be glad you're not the social media manager at KFC. ✅ Follow Tod on Social Media (LinkedIn, Mastodon, TikTok, etc.)If you like us, you'll love Stacked Marketer — the free daily newsletter. It covers breaking news, tips and tricks, and insights for all major marketing channels like Google, Facebook, TikTok, SEO and more.👉 SIGN UP FREE NOW✨ GO PREMIUM! ✨ ✓ Ad-free episodes ✓ Story links in show notes ✓ Deep-dive weekend editions ✓ Better audio quality ✓ Live event replays ✓ Audio chapters ✓ Earlier release time ✓ Exclusive marketing discounts ✓ and more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premiumfeed 🤝 Join our Slack: todayindigital.com/slack📰 Get the Newsletter: Click Here (daily or weekly)✉️ Contact Us: Email or Send Voicemail⚾ Pitch Us a Story: Fill in this form📈 Reach Marketers: Book Ad🗞️ Classified Ads: Book Now🙂 Share: Tweet About Us • Rate and Review 🎤 Follow: LinkedIn • TikTok • FB Page/Group ------------------------------------🎒UPGRADE YOUR SKILLS• Inside Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales• Foxwell Slack Group and Courses Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate Producer: Steph Gunn. Ad Coordination: RedCircle. Production Coordinator: Sarah Guild. Theme Composer: Mark Blevis. Music rights: Source AudioSome links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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It's Monday, November 21st. Today, reduced engagement, serious brand safety issues, why
one brand spending millions on Twitter ads finally bailed out. Also, who's liable when
marketing AI makes a mistake? Snapchat struggles to attract influencers, Amazon's getting creepier,
and in case you think your day is bad, just be glad you're not the social media manager
at KFC. I'm Steph
Gunn filling in for Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing.
While big advertisers bailing out of Twitter have garnered headlines, one interesting blog post now
gives us an interesting inside look at the specific reasons media buyers are uncomfortable.
Yesterday on the anonymous website Blind, one media buyer posted
about why they paused their $750,000 per month Twitter ad campaigns. They said they're a director
at a medium-sized B2B tech company with a team that spends roughly $80 million annually on
advertising, adding that Twitter had accounted for about a tenth of their media mix. Apparently,
they tried to hang in there and kept their campaigns live for two weeks after the takeover, in the belief that efficiency
would improve with fewer advertisers. But the director says they've since found they were wrong.
Here's what they found, quoting from the post.
Performance fell significantly. CPMs didn't drop, but our engagement went way down.
Maybe it's a shift in users on the platform.
Maybe it's ad serving related.
Serious brand safety issues.
Our organic social and customer service teams got dozens of screenshots of our ads next to awful content.
Replies to our posts with hardcore anti-Semitism and adult spam remained up for days, even when flagged. Our entire account team
turned over multiple times in two weeks. We had multiple people supporting our account and they
all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an account
manager last week, but they quit and we don't have a new one yet. And finally, the ads user interface is very buggy and
two-factor authentication broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found
all our paused creatives from the past six years had been reactivated.
Campaign changes don't save. These things cost us real money.
Marketers are closely watching a lawsuit which could shake up the burgeoning copywriting ai space
a lawsuit filed earlier this month targets github copilot a tool that automatically writes working
code when a programmer begins typing however some coders notice that copilot occasionally
reproduces code snippets that are taken from the millions of lines available in public code repositories. The suit argues that GitHub is infringing copyright because it does not include
attribution when Copilot reproduces open source code covered by a license requiring it. Coders
have, of course, always studied, learned from, and copied each other's codes. However, not everyone
agrees that AI should do the same. Legal experts
suggest this lawsuit may affect the broader trend of generative AI tools, like the kind marketers
have begun to rely on. The algorithms used in AI programs to create headlines, marketing copy,
photographs, and illustrations are all trained on existing work by humans. And this could affect the big players too,
like Meta, which has prioritized a more automated approach to ad creative. There are big,
unanswered questions in this. Who is liable if Meta's adbots write marketing copy that was
largely inspired by another brand's work? The advertiser? Meta? Anybody? GitHub's CEO noted
that Copilot now comes with a feature that prevents copying existing code.
However, whether this provides adequate legal protection remains to be seen.
Even with such legal issues in the air, marketers continue to invest in AI technology
like natural language processing and data-driven personalization.
A new study
from Digiday published today looks at how brands have changed how they use artificial intelligence
in marketing and customer service. Apparently, marketers mainly use NLP in the form of chatbots
to streamline service responses and increase sales. Other forms of NLP like social listening
continue to be popular among marketers who need to track brand mentions
to make business and product decisions. The big use of AI, though, has been in data-driven
personalization. More than two-thirds of respondents reported that it is a top priority this year.
As for AI developing creative, so far the focus has been on targeting individual users for a
hyper-personalized experience.
The top consumer data points marketers use to fuel data-driven personalization continue
to be things like site behavior, location, and search history.
Finally, marketers who do not currently use data-driven personalization are evenly divided
on whether to invest in it in the future, with half of respondents saying they will
and the other half saying it is not relevant to their business.
AI influences more than marketing tasks, of course. It's even being used as a kind of
HR nanny system at the world's largest e-commerce platform, Amazon. The Verge reports today about
the impact being felt by an offshore
workforce training Amazon's warehouse monitoring algorithms. Reports say warehouse workers
stocking Black Friday deals are monitored by three cameras pointed at them. Amazon then pays
workers in India and Costa Rica to watch hours of endless warehouse video streams for just hundreds of dollars a month.
Video reviewers said their primary role was stock management,
but they can also record errors made by their colleagues.
2X employees noted that reviewers could raise stow etiquette issues
if they saw someone breaking Amazon's rules on camera.
The AI camera system also monitors the stowers' movements,
and if they're underperforming,
a video is sent to someone thousands of miles away whose input helps to improve Amazon's
machine learning tools. Ultimately, says Amazon, this work improves the computer vision system,
which learns from their responses and becomes more accurate. According to the report,
reviewers have to analyze up to 8,000 videos a day,
with their output ranked against that of their colleagues. Several workers reported their health
deteriorated as they faced extreme pressure to meet a metric of 99% accuracy. Amazon denied a
number of the allegations in the Verge's story, saying the piece paints a misleading picture
and that it does not represent
the vast majority of its team. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay
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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. Like many other platforms, Snapchat has been
trying desperately to lure creators to the platform, hoping that would drive increased
traffic. But it doesn't seem to be working.
Why? A piece up on Digiday today suggests it largely comes down to money.
One creator explained that while Snapchat was never a priority for him,
he did value its daily $1 million Spotlight creator pot in the early days.
But just nine months after launching,
creators were leaving Snapchat after payments
dried up and the $1 million per day pot decreased to millions per week, which eventually became
millions per year. Money, however, is not the only challenge creators face. Some are still
struggling to feel part of the Snapchat family. For example, another influencer spoken to for the study
believes the company can still improve its relationships between reps and creators.
It was easy to get lost in the mix and difficult to build one-on-one relationships.
Finally, discoverability remains a challenge. While TikTok's algorithm has been praised for
its ability to surface compelling videos, identifying content that
would do well on Snapchat is a much more difficult task. On other platforms, one creator explained he
has a general idea of how each video will perform, which makes creating sponsored content easier.
His videos' views typically average in the hundreds of thousands, but on Snapchat,
it's not uncommon to get only a thousand views.
Here's yet another example of how not reviewing your brand's content before it goes out can be
disastrous. KFC has apologized for pushing out a promotional notification on its app,
telling German customers to treat yourself on Kristallnacht. If you're not familiar with
Kristallnacht, it's far from festive. Instead, it references the attacks in 1938 that killed 90
people and destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and synagogues. It's regarded by many historians as
the beginning of the Holocaust. So what happened? KFC said they were using an automated content creation process
that relied on a calendar that included national observances. And nobody apparently reviewed what
a very basic AI bot wrote and published. KFC has apologized and said it will review its procedures. I've worked for this podcast for over a year now so I feel like this is a safe enough place to
admit that I am a Swifty and I was part of the 7 billion people that tried to get Taylor Swift
tickets last week so I waited for five hours when the tour was first announced to register for the presale.
That wasn't even to get tickets.
And what happened?
I got waitlisted.
So I was not able to get tickets.
And if you did get them last week, one, I hate you.
Two, do you need a plus one?
Thanks for listening.
I'm Steph Gunn.
Todd's back from vacation tomorrow.
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