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  • McDonald's Data-Driven Epiphany 🤔🗯️ WPP Launches Production Studio 🚀 Cannes Lions Highlights 🦁

McDonald's Data-Driven Epiphany 🤔🗯️ WPP Launches Production Studio 🚀 Cannes Lions Highlights 🦁

Also: TikTok Trend Report 2024

June 28, 2024

Happy Friday Marketing Engineers!

If you’re new, welcome aboard 👋. If you're a seasoned Engineer, thanks for sticking around! Coming up today: AI's $600 Billion question, getting AI to model your unique brand voice, everything you need to know about email subdomains, and more.

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🗞 Marketing News

Brands like Walmart and McDonald's are successfully integrating creativity with commerce, driven by technology and evolving consumer behaviors, breaking down traditional silos. McDonald's data-driven marketing approach, which emphasizes understanding their audience and transparent measurement, has led to substantial sales growth, demonstrating the power of aligning marketing efforts with business goals. {m}

The platform offers six key AI-powered benefits, including streamlined 3D product model creation, high-quality visual content production, multilingual copy generation, customization of channel-ready assets, personalized communications through data integration, and real-time performance enhancements. Addressing the challenges of producing brand-compliant content at scale, Production Studio combines advanced AI with human creativity and includes governance guardrails to ensure brand safety, ethical transparency, and legal compliance.

Various panels and showcases, discussing both AI's potential and challenges, including concerns about job displacement and the quality of AI-generated content. Brand safety and the critical state of news media were also major topics, with Elon Musk addressing his controversial comments and the need for advertisers to support credible journalism to protect democracy. Also, the festival emphasized the growing influence of sports, particularly women's sports, with discussions on increasing viewership and attracting advertisers ahead of major events like the upcoming Olympics.

TikTok's three main macro trend forces—Curiosity Peaked, Storytelling Unhinged, and Bridging the Trust Gap—and three new bonus trends: From Hi to Audi-Lo, TikTok on the Block, and Brandship. Examples of brand and creator success stories include Hulu using sound creatively to engage users, Joe & The Juice fostering real-time interactions with customers, and Kiehl's demonstrating their commitment to sustainability through reusable packaging.

🤖 AI

The widening revenue gap in the AI industry has grown from an estimated $125 billion annually to $500 billion due to escalating costs and investments in AI infrastructure. While the GPU supply shortage has subsided and stockpiles are growing, market dynamics continue to drive significant investment, especially with the upcoming Nvidia B100 chip. Despite challenges such as rapid technology depreciation and limited pricing power, AI is expected to create substantial economic value, rewarding companies that deliver real end-user benefits amidst market volatility.

ESM3 is an advanced language model for biology that can reason over the sequence, structure, and function of proteins, trained on billions of proteins with significant computational power. It has achieved remarkable feats, such as simulating 500 million years of evolution to create a novel green fluorescent protein (esmGFP), demonstrating its capability to generate new proteins and solve complex design tasks. EvolutionaryScale, the company behind ESM3, is committed to responsible development, transparency, and open science, releasing code and model weights to collaborate with the scientific community and maximize the positive impact of their research.

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Records, are suing for copyright infringement, alleging they used copyrighted works without consent to train AI models. These lawsuits underscore the ongoing tension between the music industry and AI companies, as artists and labels fear AI-generated music could infringe on copyrighted works and reduce their revenue, reflecting broader concerns in other creative fields like book publishing.

🧠 Hacks & Tactics

A cyclical process encompassing stages of research, writing, testing, and iteration, advocating for ongoing improvement rather than one-off efforts. Actionable steps for implementation, researching ideal customers, collecting feedback, and adapting copy accordingly.

Tokens can be a powerful coordination tool that enables the creation of valuable networks. Successful crypto projects can attract attention and capital, which can convert into valuable products for users, and ultimately challenge traditional institutions, but this sort of rollout must be done carefully, responsibly, and with proper planning, capitalization, and liquidity.

First, clearly define your voice by analyzing existing content and using tools to describe your brand's tone and style. Next, establish clear objectives for each piece of content, such as driving sales or increasing engagement, to guide the creation process and measure success. Finally, provide the AI with comprehensive insights about your brand and examples of high-performing content to ensure the generated content aligns with your desired style and tone.

⚙️ Machine Shop

The skills, practices and tools future-looking B2B organizations need to innovate and drive growth. Check out this 99 page report from LinkedIn and Ipsos.

Focus on topical backlinks and brand authority, as Google's algorithm favors contextually relevant links and robust user engagement. The NavBoost system and various engagement metrics emphasize the need for SEOs to create content that resonates with users and provides a seamless user experience. Also, the discrepancies between Google's public statements and actual practices call for SEOs to adopt holistic strategies and for Google to improve transparency and accountability in its ranking processes.

A detailed process covering defining incentives, creating landing pages, sourcing affiliates, promoting the program effectively, and more. There are key considerations and best practices to ensure program success, such as understanding product suitability, selecting the right affiliates, and tracking relevant KPIs for continuous improvement. Affiliate referral programs can be crucial for B2B SaaS growth.

AI applications in marketing, including chatbots, personalized recommendations, AI-driven customer service, and their role across the customer journey. A phased approach framework for implementing AI in marketing, and how to address challenges such as data quality and privacy concerns.

Using subdomains helps isolate sender reputations, essential for maintaining email deliverability since issues in one area—like spam complaints or volume spikes—won’t affect others. Also, an outline of best practices for setting up and managing email subdomains, including implementation of authentication protocols, strategic linking, and warming up new subdomains to establish a trustworthy sender reputation.

🔮 The Future

Make a swift transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to maintain data access and measurement capabilities.Businesses must export their historical data before this date to avoid losing it and set up GA4 properties while migrating Google Ads links and conversions. This transition to GA4, designed to be more privacy-focused and adaptable, has received mixed reactions from search marketers.

PillBot is a swallowable robotic pill equipped with cameras, sensors, and wireless communication, currently in clinical trials with a goal of FDA approval and commercial launch by early 2026. The PillBot, measuring 13mm by 30mm, offers a non-invasive alternative to traditional endoscopy by transmitting high-resolution video and being maneuvered through the gut, potentially transforming diagnostic practices in gastroenterology. Despite funding challenges exacerbated by the Theranos scandal, Endiatx envisions the PillBot evolving into an AI-powered, autonomous device capable of performing diagnostic and surgical procedures, aiming to revolutionize healthcare with its innovative technology.

"Metis" will operate similarly to ChatGPT, with enhanced capabilities. Utilizing a technique called "retrieval-augmented generation" (RAG), Metis aims to function as an AI agent capable of automating complex tasks and integrating with smart home systems. Powered by Amazon's new internal AI model Olympus and involving the Alexa team, the project has mixed reception, with CEO Andy Jassy showing strong interest while others are skeptical about its late entry into the AI race, aiming for a launch around September.

{m} Inspiration

Identify and reframe common negative beliefs, such as tying happiness to external achievements, feeling trapped by a fixed identity, and making excuses about time constraints, etc. Embrace imperfection and ambiguity as inherent parts of the creative process. Take ownership and responsibility for one's creative journey and be proactive, overcome limiting beliefs, and take consistent steps toward personal and professional growth.

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