Today in Digital Marketing - There Is No Instagram. Only Zuul.

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, December 13th. Today, why pay an influencer when you can create your own? One country will require disclosures on all AI creative. Chrome's delay means ad blockers can stay, for now. Instagram wants to pick up where Twitter left off. And one of the coolest podcast thingies I've seen in a while. I'm Todd Maffin. Here's what you missed today in digital marketing. Seems like every day now there's a new chat AI or text-to-image AI.

Starting point is 00:00:31 This morning, another platform launched, which could enable individually rendered custom marketing videos at scale. It's called DID and will create a spokesperson saying, well, whatever you want it to say. I've seen these before, and they've always had two problems. The voice is clearly synthetic. And while the mouths on these avatars move, they don't match the words. This new one has solved the second, but not the first.

Starting point is 00:00:55 It actually did a pretty good job of mouthing the words I'd put in. I uploaded the video to my Mastodon account. If you want to see it, link in the show notes. The platform is actually a combination of some popular AI that's been making the rounds. GPT-3 plus Stable Diffusion. GPT-3 is text AI, which can write copy if you don't have your own. Then Stable Diffusion does the creation of the virtual spokesperson. You can also have it say things in different styles like cheerful, customer service and friendly. There's also terrified and shouting, if that's more your brand's voice. Of course, as we enter the generative AI era,

Starting point is 00:01:29 many brands are still hesitant to use the tech due to several unknowns. DID's current mitigation practices include filtering for swear words and racist remarks, the ability to identify recognizable images of famous people to avoid copyright violations, text moderation, and they put a digital watermark on the system's output. You can play around with the platform for free

Starting point is 00:01:50 at d-id.com. Here's another reason companies like DID are enforcing mitigation practices. China is cracking down on what people can and can't do with generative AI tools. The fantastically named Cyberspace Administration of China recently passed regulations on this AI, the most notable being that AI-generated content must be distinguished now from human-generated content with a clear mark. Also, you can't use generative AI to endanger national security or, this is interesting, damage the image of the country. And AI platforms are now required to verify users using phone numbers or IDs. Users in violation of these regulations will face punishment,

Starting point is 00:02:39 and platforms are asked to keep records of illegal behavior and report it to the authorities. The regulation applies to AI platforms that operate in China and will take effect in the new year on January 10th. Bad news for advertisers. Google has once again delayed the Chrome Manifest version 3 rollout. The company was supposed to kill Chrome's current extension system called Manifest version 3 rollout. The company was supposed to kill Chrome's current extension system called Manifest 2 in January and introduce its new extension system, version 3. The new system creates more restrictions on filtering extensions that block ads or work to preserve

Starting point is 00:03:17 the user's privacy. So Google today announced it is pausing the version 2 phase-out changes. According to the original plan, Chrome beta versions would start disabling version 2 in the new year, with the Chrome Web Store outright banning version 2 extensions in January of 2024. Now, as for the new timeline, well, there is no timeline. Everything now is listed as postponed or under review.

Starting point is 00:03:41 The company said it would provide an updated phase-out plan and schedule by next March. What do Instagram users want? To focus on pictures again. What do Instagram users get? Another Be Real. And maybe a little bit of Twitter. Meta announced today it has started testing Candid Stories. It's a new feature within Instagram Stories that is, yeah, you know, pretty much a BeReal clone. Like BeReal, Candid will prompt users once a day to share an unfiltered photo. The feature also snaps a photo with the device's front and rear-facing cameras at the same time. Unlike BeReal, though, users can enhance their content with text or

Starting point is 00:04:22 squiggles and can opt out of the daily alert. But Be Real isn't the only platform Zuckerberg has been inspired by lately. Instagram is also launching Notes today, which lets brands and users create a 60-character text post in Instagram's inbox. According to the New York Times, Meta has suggested the feature could help them compete with Twitter. Notes have been in testing for months, but this represents a wider rollout. Finally, Instagram is also testing group profiles, a new type of profile that lets members share posts and stories with each other rather than with all their followers. Likewise, the app is also testing collaborative collections, which lets multiple users share posts in the same space in the app. While we continue to feel the chill of the economic slowdown, digital ad spending is expected to reach $567 billion this year. That's up from $522 billion last year. In its latest

Starting point is 00:05:22 report, Insider Intelligence ranked major digital ad companies based on global revenue, with results indicating the sector is forecast to reach $696 billion by 2024, despite the cooling we've seen over the last few years. According to the report, the top five major digital ad selling companies in 2022 are Google, which is still king and earns the most from advertising, followed by Meta in second place. Amazon came in fourth and TikTok owner ByteDance took fifth place. Yes, I left out third. Can you guess? It's the Chinese owned e-commerce site Alibaba. 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 00:06:11 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. which automatically creates a copy of your most recently posted video and stores it in drafts. This will make it easier to update your clips with edits or changes, since you'll already have a version of the uploaded clip in your drafts, rather than having to start from scratch. Posted drafts will be available for three days after posting,

Starting point is 00:06:58 so if there are any changes that you need to make, you can update and republish. The second update is a solution for when you accidentally refresh your feed and lose that video you were searching for. The platform is currently testing a new undo refresh option. Twitter continues to insist it has prioritized trust and safety for its users and advertisers. Meanwhile, yesterday, Elon Musk dissolved

Starting point is 00:07:26 Twitter's Trust and Safety Council minutes before they were due to meet. The council is, well, was a group of advocates and organizations that work in fields like public safety, media literacy, and online community building. Around the same time yesterday, as council members learned of their dismissal, the former director of Trust and safety at the company was fleeing his home and going into hiding after death threats arrived. Thanks to a Musk tweet falsely claiming that the former director supports the sexualization of children. This morning, The New York Times reported that Twitter has not paid rent for any of its global offices for weeks and is refusing to pay a bill for private flights taken by Musk. Quoting the Times, Twitter's leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, unquote.

Starting point is 00:08:17 And finally, some Mastodon users yesterday were reporting that their tweets were being blocked or removed for merely mentioning the competing platform. So, you know, just another day at Elon's Playtoy. Finally, and this is not an ad, by the way, I found a really cool thing this morning on Product Hunt. You know those article bookmark sites like Read Later and Pocket? Over the years, they've added a smattering of audio. Pocket, for instance, will read out articles if you want. But this new service creates your own custom podcast feed for articles you send to it. They have browser extensions, so you basically click the browser button,

Starting point is 00:08:57 and the next time your podcast app checks your custom feed, you will have that article ready to listen to. I've tried it. It works amazingly well. It has a horrible name, Adaurus, and an even worse domain name, but here it is, ad-auris.com. They have a very generous 21-day free trial that does not require a credit card, and an annual subscription is only 20 bucks attention manufacturers of smoke detectors will you please please for the love of god put some kind of time detecting software into it so that it knows that it is in the middle of the night when it decides to go off.

Starting point is 00:09:46 It's happened a couple of months ago, but last night's was even worse because it wasn't just a straight up alarm. It was that I'm out of battery chirp, which if you know it is really loud, just goes chirp. And then it shuts off for like three minutes and you can't sleep through that because just as you're falling asleep, chirp, you know. My wife and I are both really, really light sleepers. Then when I finally got up there and changed the batteries, our cat noticed that we were awake. This is 3.30 in the morning, by the way. Our cat noticed that we were awake and was like, hey, what's up, bitches? Is it food time already? So as soon as this podcast is shipped out,

Starting point is 00:10:26 I'm going to the store buying a whole bunch of 9-volt batteries and doing all the things. See you tomorrow. This is a false alarm. This is a false alarm.

Today in Digital Marketing - There Is No Instagram. Only Zuul.

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