Lab Weekly - 05/03/2025
Video podcasts' impact on the creator economy; Plus, the latest news about Meta AI, Roblox, ChatGPT, and more must-know stories and stats
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Video Podcasts are Crashing the Creator Party
How video podcasts become the new power play for digital creators, what it means for brands, and where it goes next
In case you missed it…
Four Macro Trends Impacting the Future of Mobility
A convergence of macro forces — shifting consumer behaviors, auto trade policies, and rapid advances in self-driving technology — is starting to upend long-held assumptions about car ownership
How “A Minecraft Movie” Hit Box Office Gold
Decoding how the latest video game adaptation broke out and became a huge hit by riding on memes, deeply engaging its fan base, while also appealing to broader audiences
Decoding the AI Revolution of UGC
UGC-driven influencer marketing facing a moment of reckoning, thanks to the explosion of generative AI-powered creative tools
Meta Launches The Meta AI App [The Verge]
Meta is expanding its AI ambitions with a standalone Meta AI app, launched at its LlamaCon event on Tuesday. (Technically, it’s a rebranded Meta View app, the companion app for Meta’s AI glasses.) Like the ChatGPT app, the Meta AI app offers voice and text interaction, image generation, and web access—but with a social twist: it features a Discover feed where users can optionally share their AI prompts and outputs with friends. This makes AI-generated content part of the social conversation, potentially amplifying viral AI memes.
Meta’s approach signals an effort to reframe the AI assistant as more than just a utility—it becomes part of a user’s social identity and digital expression. By integrating features like the Discover feed and drawing on years of user data from its social platforms, Meta is positioned to offer a more personalized and socially embedded AI experience than its competitors, especially for younger users accustomed to sharing and remixing content.
At the same time, this strategy raises important considerations around data privacy and the implications of making AI interactions visible or performative. Whether users embrace this more public, social layer of AI use remains to be seen, but Meta’s approach reflects a broader industry shift toward blending personalization, utility, and social elements in AI-powered products.
Related: The Meta AI app could get a paid tier, Zuckerberg said, for people who want more functionality. [The Verge]; OpenAI’s reportedly exploring its own ai-based social network [The Verge]
Chime Partners With e.l.f. Beauty To Launch Financial Literacy Game On Roblox [eMarketer]
Chime has partnered with e.l.f. Beauty to launch a financial literacy game on Roblox, building on the beauty brand’s success with a previous Roblox activation “e.l.f. UP!” that garnered over 22 million visits, per eMarketer. By embedding financial education in a playful, gamified experience, Chime is making personal finance more accessible while forging early connections with Gen Z and Gen Alpha—audiences increasingly spending time in popular gaming platforms like Roblox.
Just this week, the popular online game reported a larger-than-expected 26% jump in daily active users, to a total of 97.8 million in Q1 2025, Bloomberg reports. That’s about 7.2 billion hours of monthly engagement (about 43% of Netflix’s engagement), as media analyst Matthew Ball pointed out. The partnership not only boosts brand visibility through association with a popular beauty brand, but also represents a forward-thinking strategy to cultivate long-term customer loyalty before younger users even enter the formal banking system.
Related: Chipotle brings trading card mania to Roblox with new experience [Marketing Dive]; Cinépolis Cinemas enters the Minecraft universe with virtual theatre adventure [Marketing Interactive]
OpenAI Adds Shopping Features To ChatGPT Search [Engadget]
OpenAI has launched a new shopping feature in ChatGPT Search that lets all users—free, paid, and even logged-out—browse and compare products in categories like fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics. At the moment, these recommendations are presented as organic, not ads, and are drawn from publishers like WIRED in addition to user recommendations on Reddit. It's unclear how big a part the company expects affiliate revenue to play in reaching that goal, though CEO Sam Altman recently floated the idea of affiliate fees adding to the company’s revenue in an interview with tech writer Ben Thompson.
According to OpenAI, search has become one of its most popular and fastest growing features, with over 1 billion web searches performed just in the past week. For brands, this presents both an opportunity and a challenge—visibility in chatbot answers may depend less on conventional SEO tricks and more on genuinely compelling reviews and content across trusted sources. As OpenAI experiments with affiliate partnerships, publishers and brands will need to rethink how they structure product reviews and attribution in an AI-native ecosystem that’s more personalized than indexed.
Related: YouTube is testing a new AI Overviews carousel in its search results [Search Engine Land]; Google begins showing AdSense ads in conversations with AI chatbots [Bloomberg]
Situational Awareness:
Visa and Mastercard unveil AI-powered shopping [TechCrunch]
Visa and Mastercard are joining the wave of “agentic commerce” by enabling AI-powered shopping experiences that allow intelligent agents to make purchases on behalf of consumers, guided by user preferences and spending limits. PayPal, Amazon, OpenAI, and Google have also been testing AI agents designed to assist with product discovery and purchasing—further blurring the line between "one-click purchase" and "autopilot checkout."
Duolingo launches 148 courses created with AI after sharing plans to replace contractors with AI [TechCrunch]
While the company frames AI as essential to fulfilling its mission of broad access to education, many users are voicing concern over degraded content quality and the ethical implications. Sure, going “AI-first” might boost scale, but if quality drops and workers get replaced by algorithms, even the cutest green owl can start to feel like an AI dystopia in disguise. But then again, Duolingo might be feeling some pressure from Google’s new AI tools that can help users learn new languages with personalized lessons.
7-Eleven teams with Live Nation for nostalgic music festival activations [Marketing Dive]
By embedding itself in live music culture, the convenience store chain aims to tap into nostalgia and strengthen its connection with Millennial and Gen Z consumers, chasing cultural relevance where they actually hang out—IRL. This move taps into the broader retro revival trend, as consumers seek out offline togetherness as emotional havens from digital burnout.
Threads has now grown to over 350 million monthly active users, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Wednesday, TechCrunch reports. Meanwhile, Meta also shared that WhatsApp now has more than three billion monthly active users.
Around 50% of US adults say AI will have a negative impact on news over the next 20 years; 10% say a positive effect; 59% say AI will lead to fewer journalists, per a new report by Pew Research Center. The survey also asked about how AI performs in today’s news and information environment. About four-in-ten U.S. adults (41%) say AI would do a worse job writing a news story than human journalists.
Amazon has emerged as a force in digital advertising, trailing only Meta and Google in the U.S. Revenue in the company’s online ad business rose 19% to $13.92 billion in the latest quarter, the company said in its earnings report, CNBC reports.
1.5 million people in the US in 2024 are full-time digital creators, a more than sevenfold increase since 2020, a new study by IAB and Harvard Business School found, Axios reports.
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 Chelsea Freitas, our VP of Strategy, at chelsea@ipglab.com.
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