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  • Ads For Google AI Overviews 📢 Netflix Plans To In-House Ad Tech 🏠 Microsoft Build 2024 👷‍♀️

Ads For Google AI Overviews 📢 Netflix Plans To In-House Ad Tech 🏠 Microsoft Build 2024 👷‍♀️

Also: How Sell-Side Curation Is Reshaping The Post-Cookie Supply Chain

May 24, 2024

Happy Friday Marketing Engineers! And Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

If you’re new, welcome aboard 👋. If you're a seasoned Engineer, thanks for sticking around! Coming up today: Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul, AI editors to help polish your prose, and how to design world class marketing emails.

Is there something else you’d like to see here? Got a hot tip? Hit reply and let us know what you think. 🧠 Or smash a button on our feedback poll at the bottom!

🚀 Adam

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🗞 Marketing News

Google is introducing search and shopping ads within AI-generated summaries for users in the US. Advertisers who already run specific campaigns through Google will automatically be eligible to have their ads appear in these AI Overviews. There is concern this addition might clutter the user experience, potentially defeating the purpose of providing a quick summary.

Sell-side curation is gaining prominence as third-party cookies are phased out, involving the matching of buyers' first-party data with publishers' first-party audience data to create private marketplaces (PMPs). This shift is altering the roles and control within the ad tech ecosystem, with supply-side platforms (SSPs) taking on a more significant role in audience targeting and curation, reducing the control of demand-side platforms (DSPs). While sell-side curation offers advantages such as faster audience matching and greater flexibility with alternative identifiers, it also presents challenges for DSPs, leading to intensified competition between SSPs and DSPs in the programmatic advertising supply chain.

Netflix’s ad-supported plan has grown to 40 million global monthly active users, with over 40% of new signups choosing this plan in markets where ads are available. To enhance its advertising offerings, Netflix is introducing new programmatic partners (The Trade Desk, Google’s Display & Video 360, and Magnite), planning to launch an in-house ad tech platform, and adding measurement partners like Affinity Solutions and iSpotTV to help advertisers measure their campaign impacts.

OpenAI has entered into a multi-year agreement, providing access to the archives and current articles of major News Corp publications, including The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, for AI training and content purposes. This agreement is part of a series of licensing deals OpenAI has made with several major media companies, such as The Associated Press and the Financial Times. OpenAI will gain extensive access to valuable content for improving its AI models for just an estimated $250 million over 5 years.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

An upgrade aims to make Alexa more competitive with advanced AI-powered chatbots from companies like Google and OpenAI, which have significantly improved their capabilities for two-way conversations and real-time language translation. The Alexa team, now facing increased internal pressure and competition, is focused on making Alexa relevant and competitive in the evolving AI landscape.

OpenAI will gain real-time access to Reddit’s Data API, allowing it to improve AI tools like ChatGPT with up-to-date and relevant content from Reddit’s communities. This partnership aims to introduce AI-powered features to Reddit, such as personalized content recommendations and advanced moderation tools, positioning Reddit to better compete with platforms like TikTok and Facebook for advertising revenue while addressing user privacy and data protection through Reddit’s Public Content Policy.

SoftBank Corp, a Japanese telecom provider, is developing AI-enabled software to soften the tone of irate customer voices before they reach call center workers, aiming to reduce stress by converting harsh tones into calm conversational ones. Despite Japan's high standards of customer service, harassment of service industry staff has been increasing, prompting the government to consider legislation for better worker protection. A survey by UA Zensen revealed that around half of the 33,000 respondents experienced customer harassment, including verbal abuse and intimidation, with over 100 seeking psychiatric help as a result.

Microsoft introduced Copilot+ PCs and expanded its AI tools, enabling developers to build their own copilots and highlighting the widespread adoption of GitHub Copilot. Advancements in AI include Real-Time Intelligence within Microsoft Fabric, new multimodal models like GPT-4o and Phi-3-vision, and collaborations with Khan Academy, alongside new AI-optimized virtual machines. Also, Microsoft expanded Copilot's capabilities with Team Copilot for Microsoft 365 and the new Copilot Studio, allowing for more autonomous and proactive AI agents.

🧠 Hacks & Tactics

Lex, Deepl Write, and WordTune assist writers by providing editing suggestions, improving clarity, and offering contextual additions. Lex identifies cliches and passive voice while suggesting alternative phrasings, Deepl Write offers multiple editing suggestions and excels in translation, and WordTune strengthens writing with contextual additions such as examples and analogies. Also, Stylebot provides non-AI wording guidance based on a journalist-written style guide, offering quick answers to language, grammar, and style queries through platforms like Slack, Chrome, and Teams.

This browser extension is designed to enhance your browsing experience by removing AI-generated overviews from Google search results. Recognizing that not all users appreciate the AI-powered summaries and insights which can clutter search results, this extension offers a clean, streamlined interface that focuses solely on traditional results.

This website is a curated collection of typefaces that are available under a variety of free licenses somewhere on the interwebs.

⚙️ Machine Shop

Define clear objectives before creating user journeys, emphasizing the necessity of relevance and actionable insights, conduct comprehensive user research, and mix qualitative and quantitative methods to gain a thorough understanding of user experiences. Additionally, recognize and address the unique needs of different user segments through the development of personas, ensuring tailored and effective user journeys.

Actionable advice, from optimizing sender details to enhancing email content and design, aimed at improving engagement and conversion rates. A great Marketing Engineer observes a culture of continuous improvement, experimentation, adaptation, and refining email marketing strategies for long-term success. Meticulous planning is always important. {m}

A comprehensive guide to implementing successful event marketing strategies, covering pre-event planning, promotional tactics, execution, and post-event analysis. Businesses should utilize metrics such as attendee satisfaction and revenue generation to refine their approaches and set benchmarks for future events.

🔮 The Future

We think you should watch. Google is integrating AI into nearly all its products, with a major focus on AI-powered search features like the AI Overviews in Search, which will soon be available worldwide. AI-generated search summaries could drastically alter the internet ecosystem. They could reduce website traffic, impact how content creators monetize their work, and raise concerns among news publishers and web content creators. Sundar Pichai acknowledges the tension between AI's benefits for users and the anxieties of content creators, while discussing balancing innovation with the preservation of the web's ecosystem.

Sixteen major AI companies, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, have agreed to commit to a set of global AI safety standards called the Frontier AI Safety Commitments. These commitments require the companies to publish thresholds for unacceptable risks, outline their mitigation plans, and refrain from developing or deploying models if the risks cannot be kept below their thresholds. This collective commitment marks the first time so many AI companies have united under the same AI safety standards, setting a precedent for global AI safety.

Filip Wielanier discusses the challenges of obtaining and connecting off-chain and on-chain data in Web3 marketing, and how Cookie3's AI-powered data analytics tool addresses these issues by helping projects understand customer behavior and optimize marketing strategies. The advantages of Web3 marketing over Web2, such as direct communication with contributors, decentralization of publishers, and the creation of more engaged communities through value-sharing approaches. Cookie3 aims to create fair value distribution among stakeholders in the Web3 ecosystem, with practical use cases like helping clients reduce marketing costs by targeting more valuable users, demonstrating the effectiveness of their solutions.

Podcast ad revenue increased by just 5% from 2022 to 2023, and reached $1.9 billion, a notable decline from previous years' growth rates. The slowdown is largely attributed to a challenging advertising climate that particularly affected mid-tier companies. Despite this, the IAB predicts a return to double-digit growth in 2024, with an expected 12% increase pushing podcast ad revenue past $2 billion, driven by significant contributions from niche categories and the dominance of comedy podcasts.

{m} Inspiration

We think you should watch. 😬

📓 Learn More

Generative AI For Everyone [4 hour Free Course]

Learn what generative AI is and how it works, its common use cases, and what this technology can and cannot do. How to think through the lifecycle of a generative AI project, from conception to launch, including how to build effective prompts. Also, the potential opportunities and risks that generative AI technologies present to individuals, businesses, and society. Taught by Andrew Ng.

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