Who needs voice talent when you have AI? At least, thatās Appleās opinion. Itās started rolling out AI-narrated audiobooks, which is inevitable but will likely lead to some legal drama in the near term.
Itās no longer hypothetical, Meta has to pay a hefty fine on top of reinventing their ad targeting model in the EU. (Itās not the final word yet, plenty of appeals and back-and-forth are coming.)
How should you think about YouTube Shorts in terms of your content strategy? The buzzword bingo answer: discovery. The classic marketing answer: a promotional strategy. Many creators are finding that their Shorts help drive new viewers to their channel / main videos by exposing their material to a new (to them) audience. (Study of one: I can confirm this after a recent YT comedy binge that started on Shorts.) via one of Van Neistatās peer discussions.
Dell is following Apple as it attempts to decouple from Chinese manufacturing dependencies.
Meta is rolling out yet another new metric: additional attributed conversions. Best I can tell, it's a sales tool for using the Conversions API since it "is a metric that helps you understand how much your business benefits from using the Conversions API alongside the Meta Pixel." Use this as an algorithm optimization tool, not an analytics one.
Bye, bye similar audiences. Google is ditching them in favor of āautomated solutionsā (death date August 2023). It looks like the replacements are features that already exist. The cynic in me thinks this is Google admitting they never really worked well, but either way: the cookiepocalypse strikes again.
Nearly all customers read reviews when shopping online. ā96% of customers look for negative reviews specificallyā and ā49% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family members.ā If you use reviews for your brand, there are lots more stats like these at that link.
Twitter, a company desperate for (ad) revenue (Elon isnāt supporting those loan payments on subscription fees anytime soon), has laid off the data science team working on ad optimization. My favorite line from the post: āTwitter eliminated its press relations team and could not be reached for comment.ā
Pinterest is joining the data clean room trend (for select ad partners). Clean rooms allow advertisers to upload their first-party data for targeting without actually sharing any of it with the ad platform. The fallout from the cookiepocalypse continues.
$73 billion worth of investment was announced in EV battery production projects in the US last year, and this is just the beginning. This should signal that weāre on the cusp of an EV revolution, and Iām not talking about market share. Investment at this level and dedication should lead to more breakthroughs and developments in the underlying tech. Battery technology is one of the fields Iām most interested in watching in the coming years.