Lab Weekly - 02/17/2023
Analyzing the adoption curve of AI-powered search; plus, the latest must-know news and stats
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The AI Search Era Is Upon Us
Naturally, for brand marketers, the burning question is how long the adoption curve will be — do we still have enough time left to figure it out before AI search hits mainstream and upend how brands use paid search channels to drive lead generation and conversion? Well, let’s take a look at some of the key factors determining the length of the adoption curve.
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BuzzFeed Launches Personalized Quizzes Powered By OpenAI [TechCrunch]
BuzzFeed's launch of Infinity Quizzes is an interesting development for the application of generative AI technology in media. The listicle-friendly, clickbait-heavy publisher seems to be a good fit for this type of content format experimentation as well. (ChatGPT agrees as well, albeit in a much nicer manner — see screencap below.)
At the moment, the AI-powered quizzes don’t seem that impressive. Instead, the quizzes that Buzzfeed has published so far mostly play out like a mad-libs game, with the AI putting together a personalized result based on your input to the perimeter set by the quiz. Still, it is quite fascinating to consider what the future of the creative industry and the attention economy would look like if this type of AI-assisted, hyper-personalized content co-creation starts to mature and becomes more compelling.
Would most people be willing to put in the upfront investment of time and effort to write out the necessary prompts in order for AI to generate the type of hyper-personalized content? Or would most people still prefer the lean-back experiences enabled by the likes of TikTok and Instagram today? If anything, it seems to me that this experience of engaging with AI-created content is behaviorally closer to playing video games than the type of passive content consumption that dominates our current era of endlessly scrolling social feeds.
Related: CNET is quietly publishing entire articles generated by AI [Futurism]; ChatGPT getting banned by schools [Engadget]; Croatian restaurant offers one pot menu cooked by robotic chef [Reuters]
Instagram To Shut Down Live Shopping Features In March [TechCrunch]
Instagram is giving up on live commerce, for now, as the company announced that, starting on March 16, users will no longer be able to tag products while livestreaming, a feature that has been available to U.S. businesses and creators since 2020. Given that Meta also shut down the live shopping initiatives on Facebook in October after it failed to gain traction, and even TikTok is reportedly scaling back its live commerce plans in the U.S. and Europe (although there have been some contradictory reports that suggest the opposite lately), it seems fair to say social commerce is going through its first recession since it took off. The number of Gen Zers interested in influencers has dropped 12% since 2020, and the number who take note of what influencers wear has fallen 16% since then, per GWI data cited by a recent Axios report.
Related: TikTok abandons ecommerce expansion in Europe and US [Financial Times]; TikTok has been working on shopping features while Instagram does the exact opposite [9to5Mac]
TikTok Is Launching A Live Trivia Contest [The Verge]
Before you say “HQ Trivia,” it may be interesting to note that this is a limited, five-day special event sponsored by Lionsgate to promote its upcoming film John Wick: Chapter 4. TikTok is offering a $500,000 cash prize pool that’s split between winners who can answer the most trivia questions in categories like lifestyle, beauty, sports, and, of course, questions about the John Wick franchise too. Of course, if this campaign turns out to be successful, we can certainly expect TikTok to develop this type of live streamed interactive events as a regular occurrence.
Of course, this is also related to TikTok’s scaled-back ambition in live commerce mentioned in the previous news item. In a roundabout way, if this live quiz show with cash prizes can incentivize users to watch live video on TikTok, then perhaps there would be some hope for the push for shoppable live video features after all. The latest reports suggest that TikTok is quietly testing an in-app checkout feature in the U.S., with apparel brands Pacsun, Revolve, and Willow Boutique seem to be among the pilot partners.
Related: Discord arrives on PS5 for beta testers today [The Verge]; Amazon rolls out TikTok-like shopping feature [Marketing Dive]
Physical store openings exceeded closings on an annual basis last year for the first time since 2016, Axios reports based on data from Coresight Research. Retailers are on pace to open even more stores this year than last, at a rate of 3 to 1.
The Super Bowl delivered its usual massive audience on Sunday. Variety reports that Fox’s broadcast of the big game averaged 113 million viewers across all platforms. That’s a slight 1% improvement over Super Bowl LVI a year ago and a six-year high for the game.
AI safety and research firm Anthropic is hiring a "Prompt Engineer and Librarian" to get desired results from generative AI platforms a la ChatGPT. The pay? $250,000 to $335,000 a year, according to the company’s job posting. Not too shabby, eh.
If you find our insights valuable and would like to have a deeper conversation on technology and media innovations, or need to sound smarter in a client meeting or a pitch, please feel free to reach out to our Group Director Josh Mallalieu!
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