Edition #493
What diffusion models have to do with advertising (and what are they?) Google AI Mode & managing expectations.
I’d kept hearing about diffusion as it relates to AI, and didn’t actually know what it meant.
So this week I took a gander, in essence a diffusion model, builds an understanding of how diffuse something this, so that you can work it back to a high fidelity result. How it works is by taking (say a picture) and adding random information, step by step, till the picture isn’t recognisable anymore.
Building this model, then means AI can review any output, and predict how much random information it has in it, and work it back to a high fidelity end result.
Put another way, by establishing how messy it is, it can tidy it up. And the model provides a path to that.
Smart huh.
As it relates to media, diffusion models could also be used here, to evaluate all the elements of a campaign, and provide predictions on how to improve the end results.
Loads of stories this week to digest, one thing from Google IO that stood out to me is, they are just so hungry to win this AI disruption, they’re iterating so fast – that they probably don’t even know what to guide Creators & Publishers to do, because they haven’t figured it out yet. Do watch the Search part of the keynote.
The takeaway from that is to continue to be nimble and open minded, because this isn’t the new status quo, yet.
Notable stories this week
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri on the ‘paradigm shift’ from posting in public to sharing in private.
- Can LinkedIn become a B2B streaming hub?
- ‘Substack isn’t cool,’ gatekeepers are, and other strong opinions from tastemaker Chris Black.
- Get ready for more ads in Google’s AI search answers.
- Netflix to launch ads that blend in with the show. Netflix to launch ads that blend in with the show.
- ChatGPT referral traffic to publishers sites has nearly doubled this year.
- Spotify responds to backlash over public podcast play counts.
- Analyst believes Google AI mode will (soon) replace traditional search.
- Google begins rolling out Discover on desktop.
- Microsoft’s plan to fix the web: letting every website run AI search for cheap.
- The Onion has opened a creative agency.
- Chicago Sun-Times prints summer fading list full of fake books.
- Microsoft shuttering Xandr Invest suggests Big Tech is shrinking from the open web.
- Google’s move toward attention metrics could be a viewability killer.
- Google is putting agentic tools in Ads and Analytics.
- Applovin the 3rd highest ad spend platform in ecommerce.
- Will AI empower the PR industry or create endless seas of spam?
- Google and Amazon flex their AI-powered ad tech and creative suites.
- Netflix picks up worldwide streaming rights for Sesame Street.
- New media company “ATM” launches to give executives control of their coverage.
- The Athletic is solidly profitable.
- How Kara Swisher scaled even higher.
- [Long read] Why Apple still hasn’t cracked AI.
Deals/M&A
- Publicis acquires Captiv8.
- GrowthX, AI workflows for content raises $12m.
- Marketecture acquires AI Marketers Guild & Serial Marketers.
Campaign of the week
- Visit Williamsburg with National Geographic. Classic bread & butter work, reach an audience who want to travel, give them a reason to consider your destination.
View all 2024 best campaigns.
Smartest commentary
- “Queries within AI Mode tend to be twice as long as traditional searches and more exploratory in nature. This “opens up these new opportunities to discover brands where advertisers might not necessarily have been in the conversation before.” –Dan Taylor.
Datapoints of note
- Netflix’s ad-supported tier currently reaches more than 94 million monthly active user profiles, which she equated to roughly 170 million monthly active viewers altogether. Those viewers, she said, are also paying attention to the ads as much as they are to the content and are still just as engaged three hours into a watch session.
- Shorts revenue “is in a number of countries, including the U.S., the revenue per watch hour…is now equal to what it is for traditional in stream on YouTube and in fact, in some places, it’s ahead.”
- Ad subscribers spend 41 hours per month on Netflix on average.
- 74% of new webpages contain AI-generated text
- A recently published paper uses Meta’s long-running 0.5% holdout group of users who don’t see ads to determine whether ads impact users’ valuation for Facebook. While the group that saw ads used Facebook 10% less, both groups valued the product at roughly the same amount of money ($31.95 for no-ads vs. $31.04 for ads).
- ChatGPT sees weaker momentum among older users than Meta AI, Gemini.
- Perplexity does 450m searches/month, ChatGPT 11.5b and Google >414b.
- Google’s Gemini AI app has 400m monthly active users.
- Perplexity made $20k in ad revenue in the fourth quarter.
Events
- Media breakfast coming up in June, let me know if you want to join.
View all 2024 datapoints of note.
That’s it for this week.
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