Marketverse #2
Race Car for your brain
January 20, 2023
One of the distinctive characteristics of humans is the ability to create and use tools. We’re accustomed to thinking of tools as physical objects, e.g. hammers. In the last few decades, though, we’ve mostly generated value through thinking tools. We started with slide rules and calculators and went through computers, spreadsheets, design software, social media, and now AI assistants. It’s worthwhile to remember that every tool changes the world around us, our bodies and minds. If you’ve ever used a screwdriver for a while, you know that it can give you blisters and hand pain if you don’t know how to use it properly. Now imagine what kind of repetitive stress injury can be dealt to humans if they’ll use thinking tools in the wrong way. Steve Jobs said that the computer is a bicycle of the mind. AI is a Red Bull F1 of the mind,and crashing it at high speed will be much more painful than falling off the bicycle. Not everybody is Max Verstappen.
Simon Paroszkiewicz, Human Intelligence on Demand
You should talk about 🗣️
🇺🇸 Microsoft bets on AI
Microsoft announced that it is launching the Azure OpenAI service, which will allow businesses to integrate tools like DALL-E, ChatGPT, and Codex into cloud apps. Enterprises and developers may use AI tools in their own apps and workloads. The release of Azure OpenAI comes just days after rumors surfaced that Microsoft was trying to better integrate ChatGPT and other OpenAI tools into its products and services. The tech giant is allegedly getting ready to take on Google with the incorporation of ChatGPT into Bing search results and is apparently considering incorporating some language AI technology into its Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook programs.
You should know about 🔖
🇬🇧 Getty Images sues Stability AI
Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, which created the AI art tool Stable Diffusion, for alleged copyright infringement. According to the company, millions of photos from its website were "illegally" scraped by Stability AI. AI tools like Stable Diffusion rely on human-created images for training data, which businesses routinely collect off the internet, often without the creators' knowledge or consent. Getty Images' move marks a substantial uptick in the ongoing legal conflicts between generative AI companies and content producers.
🇬🇧 Is full pay transparency possible?
In the UK, pay transparency has reportedly reached a six-year low. According to reports, only 60% of job postings in 2022 specified the proposed income, down from 64% in 2021. Employers argue that complete transparency may make it more difficult to modify an employee's pay in light of their experience, accomplishments, or increased workload. Full transparency, according to them, may also prevent high-performing employees from progressing up the pay scale.
🇺🇸 No meetings = better productivity?
What happens when a company cancels all meetings? The results might be surprising. TechSmith Corp. experimented with no meetings for a month, relying exclusively on asynchronous communication, and observed an improvement in employees’ productivity. The company's "workers who strongly agreed they felt productive in their work following the experiment" increased by 15%. What’s also interesting, the impression of meeting importance increased by 8% after the experiment, indicating that employees were more mindful of synchronous time following the experiment.
🇨🇳 Didi gets back to business
Didi, a major ride-hailing company, returned to the market after having its app suspended in China for 18 months. Chinese authorities demanded to remove Didi from the nation's app stores in July 2021, citing the fact that the company was "illegally collecting customer data." Didi had a public debut in New York earlier in the same month. The company raised a sizable $4 billion from the initial sale, but the celebration was short-lived as the incident soon became the source of its dispute with Beijing.
🌏 Business remains the most trusted institution
Edelman has just released the 23rd edition of its annual Trust Barometer. The company surveyed respondents on their level of trust in businesses, government, nonprofits, and the media. What are the most interesting outcomes? Business is (again) the most trusted institution, with an 11-point advantage over the government and a 12-point advantage over the media. More than half of respondents want firms to do more to address climate change, economic inequality, and energy shortages, and more than 70% want CEOs to take a stand on social problems such as income inequality or discrimination. Over 32,000 people from 28 countries completed surveys for Edelman's latest report. The full report is available here.
🇪🇺 CEE ad market gets bigger
The United Kingdom is Europe's top-performing ad market, growing by 9.2% in 2022, according to the World Advertising Research Center and Advertising Association. But marketers are increasingly eyeing the CEE region. Dentsu's 2023 ad spend predictions show that Central and Eastern Europe (excluding Russia) will expand by an impressive 31.1%, while Western Europe's market will grow by 2.1%.
🌏 Golden age for performance marketers
Companies looking to hire CMOs and other marketing executives are increasingly selecting professionals with performance marketing experience. Industry leaders frequently discuss whether brand and performance marketing should be separate disciplines led by different persons. Some businesses appoint executives who supervise performance, report to the CMO, and hold titles such as chief digital and analytics officer or senior vice president of marketing. Others choose to mix the two jobs or perhaps eliminate the CMO position entirely. This trend will make it difficult for top executives whose careers have been focused on more traditional, brand-based marketing to find work.
🇮🇹 Benetton digitizes 1,200 stores
The Italian company has decided to digitize its stores around the globe to ensure a seamless and secure omnichannel shopping experience for its customers.The centralization of data management is at the center of the project, with an eye toward security, compliance, operational efficiency, and knowledge of the customer journey map. The project started in 2019 with four pilot stores, which became 29 in 2020.
🇬🇧 A bit different MCDonald’s ad
In an unprecedented move for the company, McDonald's has started an advertising campaign titled “Raise Your Arches”that doesn't feature images of its restaurant or even served food. Instead, the advertisement shown in the UK & Ireland is based on the idea that a request to grab a burger is so ubiquitous that it can be expressed with a simple wiggle of the eyebrow.
Fancy a McDonald's? #RaiseYourArches
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