Robots: they’re so hot right now—from CES reveals to M3GAN’s debut to the “AI revolution.”

With the release of software like DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT in the last year, many have wondered how AI could impact roles and processes in marketing. For now, experts told us that AI seems to work best as a supplement (as opposed to a replacement) when it comes to creative jobs, and agencies seem eager to integrate the new technology into their workflows in 2023.

Putting the AI in campAIgn

Ahead of last month’s 2023 Color of the Year reveal, Pantone partnered with ad agency Huge to create a campaign for “Viva Magenta.” Using the AI software Midjourney, Diego Nicolau, executive creative director at Huge, told us his team was able to create hundreds of images that came to be known as the “Magentaverse.”

• While this was Huge’s first client campaign built using AI, Nicolau said the agency was prepared for it. “We’re constantly trying and testing with our own internal projects so when a client or a real business opportunity comes to us, we accumulate enough experience to be able to say, ‘Okay, we can go there.’”
• Huge has an AI community of about 80 employees who are specifically focused on AI, including how to develop design prompts for AI like Midjourney in order to create a specific image—something that Nicolau said they have “mastered.”
• He said the creatives working on the Pantone campaign were able to find such specific prompts that the only tweak needed in the Magentaverse images was adding the Viva Magenta color.

Big picture: Pantone isn’t the only brand out there interested in AI: Spirits brand Martini and Nestlé’s La Laitière brand have both released AI-generated campaigns in recent months. Since releasing the campaign with Pantone, Nicolau said there has been “a lot of curiosity from [other] clients to understand how they can use AI.”

Keep reading here.—KH

Though terms like bid requests, CPCs, and server-side ad insertion may appear technical and intimidating, ad tech isn’t quite as opaque as you might think—that is, of course, if you know where to look.

A platform called Sincera, started last year by two product managers-turned-founders, is aiming to bring clarity (and hard data) to technology that can often feel like a digital knot of spaghetti noodles, rather than the sophisticated, shiny tools the ad-tech industry claims have been perfected.

“If you’re willing to dive into the details, if you’re willing to get yourself a little bit muddy, you can look and see what’s happening,” Ian Meyers, who worked at customer data platform LiveRamp before starting Sincera, explained to Marketing Brew.

The details: Essentially, Sincera operates web crawlers (sort of like browsing robots) that can interact with the code underpinning the internet, piecing together a detailed view of the digital advertising ecosystem.

• What does the New York Times’s tech stack look like? It’s there.
• What percentage of sites crawled by Sincera are using the latest version of Prebid? There ya go.

Most of its clients are using the tech to help find “competitive gaps” between themselves and their competition, Sincera co-founder Mike O’Sullivan said, explaining that an SSP could ask for a list of sites that competitors are active on, but it isn’t, for instance, essentially creating potential leads for new business.

If a company wanted to know how much ad inventory is on a given publisher’s site, Sincera could provide data on ad density, which could be valuable to tech companies focused on attention-based metrics, O’Sullivan said. Or, Meyers explained, someone in the industry might want to know how many other companies have adopted a new piece of tech, like Google’s FLEDGE proposal, before investing time and energy figuring it out on their own.

Continue reading here.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Mic check: How to leverage sounds on TikTok (plus, how brands navigate using music on TikTok).

Talk shop: Here are six ways that SEO professionals have incorporated ChatGPT into their work.

Starting line: Tips for setting up new social profiles for a business.

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Cheers to Dry January—non-alcoholic if you’re participating. This year, fewer adults are taking part compared to the share who said they would last year, according to new data from Morning Consult.

Not this time: If you read our Tuesday Trivia this week, you know that this year, 15% of adults over the age of 21 surveyed said they planned to participate in Dry January this year, a four-percentage-point drop from last year.

• In 2021, 13% of that cohort said they would take part.
• Millennials were the most enthusiastic participants this year (19%), but they also had the biggest drop in participation from last year (down eight points from 27%).
• Retention is high, Emily Moquin, a Morning Consult food and beverage analyst, wrote, with 72% of previous Dry January participants saying they would do it again this year.

Cutting corners: We don’t want to accuse anyone of cheating, but let’s just say not everyone is doing Dry January to the fullest extent.

• This year, 70% of participants said they don’t plan to drink at all, up from 52% last year.
• Another 19% said they’re participating by only drinking a few days, and 11% said they’ll drink more frequently than that but less than they normally would. It’s the thought that counts.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• At CES, pre-upfront talks are clouded by marketing budget uncertainties
• Lessons in podcast advertising from Athletic Greens, Uncommon Goods, and Cariuma
• For its first Super Bowl ad, FanDuel is getting Rob Gronkowski back on the field, but not as a tight end