TECHNOLOGY

Artificial marketing

“Marketing Brew is the home of provocative ideas, fresh thinking, provocative insights, and interesting perspectives on what they think about marketing, media and advertising. This publication gives you a way to digest their news, quick takes and new offerings in the field.”

This description of our newsletter was written by artificial intelligence. Pretty close, right?

Given only our name and a brief description—“a newsletter about marketing, media and advertising”—a tool called Copy.ai was able to spit out that paragraph.

The tool is part of a wave of smart content-churning machines that use the power of artificial intelligence to steal writing jobs make life easier for whomever’s crunching copy. 

HAL meets Stan Freberg

Copy.ai and other AI-enabled copywriting companies like Jarvis and Copysmith are built-upon OpenAI’s GPT-3. 

• According to the smart folks over at Emerging Tech Brew, GPT-3 is kind of a big deal. Trained on roughly a trillion words to predict—but not understand—text, it's widely considered to be among the most advanced language models in existence.
• “Large language models are powerful machine learning algorithms with one key job description: identifying large-scale patterns in text. The models use those patterns to ‘parrot’ human-like language. And they quietly underpin services like Google Search—used by billions of people worldwide—and predictive text software, such as Grammarly,” writes Emerging Tech Brew’s Hayden Field.

Of course, if you’re a marketer, who cares? You just need content. And lots of it. That’s where these tools come in handy. They can help write everything from Instagram captions to product descriptions to blog posts. 

“We want to humanize AI. We want to help you start from something, and not a blank slate,” Copysmith CEO Shegun Otulana told Marketing Brew. 

There’s an assumption that machines could take jobs away from writers, but Otulana doesn’t see it quite that way. “There’s an aspect of writing that isn’t easily replaced. A computer can’t tap into the human interactions you express in a story, the emotional aspects of a story you tease out. A computer can’t live the life of a human.”

But if you're a writer who specializes in, say, product descriptions for e-commerce sites—or other types of copy that aren't exactly trying to forge a human connection—AI might pose more of a threat, he said.

Quantity over quality: For copywriters who need to bang out posts on multiple platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, there’s a volume benefit to these programs, since the AI provides various options for each post. Sure, you might not actually need dozens of call-to-action phrases, but any professional could whittle those down to five good ones and tweak them if needed.

“We try to give you the first draft,” Chris Lu, cofounder and chief technology officer of Copy.ai, told us. “Content creation is a treadmill. You’ve got to make a lot of it, it has to be relevant, and it has to be on brand.”

Click here to see the Facebook posts Copy.ai wrote for a made-up brand called Ryan’s Lemonade.—RB

PARTNERSHIPS

Like a beer candle in the wind...

From that questionable “Scents of Normality” collection at the start of the pandemic to Babe Wine’s NFL scented candles, branded candles (brandles?) have been all the rage for a while now. So it’s no surprise that Budweiser said “Hold my beer” to double down on a partnership with home fragrance brand Homesick. 

Last week, the two debuted their limited edition Backyard BBQ scented candle, which smells like the last dregs of a hot vaxxed summer (probably)—and like a smoky grill, of course.   

• The news comes just a few short months after Miller Lite debuted a dive bar-scented brandle.
• Homesick General Manager Lauren Lamagna told Marketing Brew that the brands are promoting the candle across their social channels, as well as via email, SMS, organic social, and influencer marketing efforts.

So what’s with the brandles? Budweiser head of marketing Marisa Siegel told us the collab gives people a "unique sensory experience" that taps into nostalgia.

“Candles, in particular, are a fun way for us to insert the Bud brand directly into consumers’ homes,” Siegel said. And, because scent is proven to trigger memories, this candle could conjure up mems of drinking a Bud and BBQing with friends. “Through this partnership with Homesick, we could literally bring to life these memories through our unique scent,” she added.

Zoom out: The global candle market has been going . Valued at $7.15 billion in 2020, it’s projected to hit $13.38 billion by 2028, per Verified Market Research.—PB

SPONSORED BY PARCELLAB

“Stop Ghosting Us”—Consumers

Falling in love with a brand sometimes feels like a bad romance. It can go a little like this: 

1. You show interest in a brand 
2. They sweet talk you with personalized and compelling offers
3. You finally place an order 
4. You never hear from them again 

Thankfully, parcelLab is here to help you rewrite your strategy to make sure it has a happy ending with their new DTC guide, “Is Post-Purchase Experience Broken in Retail?” In the guide you’ll discover how you could have a better experience once you’ve handed over your money and are waiting for your goodies to arrive. 

That last one is key—according to Forrester, 70% of people say they want better communication post-purchase.

So get parcelLab’s DTC guide here and learn how to turn customers into lifelong fans. 

P.S. Like what you see in the guide? Make sure to sign up for OX Fest '21 to up your post-purchase game even more through Operations Experience Management.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Downvoting programmatic

Reddit announced last week that in Q2, it earned $100 million in quarterly ad revenue for the first time. It’s a milestone (and a year over year jump of 192%), but if you saw what other platforms posted, then you know that’s small potatoes compared to, say, Facebook’s $28+ billion.

• CEO Steve Huffman is well aware. Last week, he told The New York Times that Reddit has “grown up in the shadow of Facebook and Google, and pretty much every dollar we make we’ve had to fight for.” 

ELI5: Despite the huge disparity, Reddit is finding its footing in an increasingly privacy-focused ad landscape. The site told Ad Age that in April, it nixed programmatic ads entirely in favor of native ads.

• The change may go hand in hand with Reddit’s recently minted in-house creative agency that’s meant to help brands tailor campaigns to the site. 
• The switch to native-only is a glimpse into how companies are adapting to a post-cookie world. FWIW, Twitter and Facebook (Instagram included) also only sell ads through their own platforms, as opposed to open exchanges.

Reddit has been fighting a reputation for being a Wild West of content moderation. It partnered with Omnicom Media Group earlier this year to give the company’s agencies access to tools that can help marketers advertise more effectively on the site. That followed moves Reddit has made aimed at giving advertisers brand safety controls; in September, it created “inventory types” to let marketers have more choice around where their ads appear.

To the moon: Alongside its ad revenue milestone, Reddit said it’s raising up to $700 million in an upcoming private funding round, for a valuation of $10+ billion.—ZS

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Ben’s Original rolled out its first campaign since its rename, and the push is supposedly one of Mars Food’s largest campaigns ever. 
• YouTube says people watched seven times more Olympic Games content this year on the platform compared to Rio 2016.
• Ford and GM are in a legal battle over use of the term “cruise” for hands-free driving systems.
• Twitter is once again pausing its account verification program after accidentally verifying some fake accounts. 

SPONSORED BY ASANA

Breaking up is hard to do. The workplace silo situation is a tale as old as time. But just like we did with floppy disks, it’s time to officially call it quits. Put simply, we deserve better. And so does your work. See why we’re officially ending the worst relationship of our lives in our breakup letter to silos. 

FRENCH PRESS

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

Google: The only company whose product with a plus sign in it failed wrote up these 15 tips to help you get the most out of Google Trends. 

LinkedIn: An insider spills the deets on the platform’s content trends and creator tools.

Emojis: The case for using them in your content.

Cookie’s crumbling: Come 2022, you’ll need first-party data to power your ads. Sailthru sees you, and hears you, and has put together a guide to help you understand the true value of first-party data. Read it here.*

AD ANTIQUES

Vintage Ad Browser

SNL’s Mr. Bill shilling for Ramada in the early aughts. 

ICYMI

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

• July's DTC air conditioning units are unavailable, but the company is still marketing them
• Nielsen puts accreditation on pause as spat with broadcasters continues
• Sephora sponsors The Cut’s beauty section to highlight Black makeup artists, hair stylists, and founders