Good News, Bot News — Google Testing AI Tool That Writes News Stories

Google has its own game-changing AI tool in store, and they’re showing it off directly to the publishers. That’s the word at least from The New York Times, one of a number of news organizations to whom Google reportedly pitched an AI product capable of taking in current-event data and generating news stories. The article’s anonymous sources said The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal’s owner News Corp were amongst the organizations who saw demonstrations of the tool, known internally as Genesis.

 

Five Reasons Threads Could Still Go The Distance

One week later, Threads’ engagement is down — but the prize is still there for the taking.

 

Twitter Begins Its Transition To ‘X’ After Changing Its Iconic Bird Logo

Unlike when Dogecoin’s Shiba Inu briefly replaced it, it seems Twitter’s longstanding bird logo is genuinely having its last curtain call. Elon Musk and Twitter (or should we say X?) CEO Linda Yaccarino announced that the company was rebranding as “X” and projected the new emblem onto the company’s San Francisco headquarters. 

 

Study: Digital Marketing Works Better

A new survey by a British trade publication shows that 86.7% of brand-side marketers believe that digital channels are an effective tool for building brands, compared to 80.1% who think the same of offline media. The poll, based on interviews with 1,300 marketers, challenges the belief that digital is more effective for boosting short-term results. More than a third (38.3%) of B2B marketers say digital is “very effective” at building brands, compared with 34.9% of B2C marketers who believe the same.

Let Them Talk: The Best AI Tools For All Publishing Departments

After a quarter-century in publishing, I can very easily imagine how these conflicted in-house conversations about ChatGPT and AI tools have been going. 

But because I have the added benefit of years focused on technological tools that help publishers, you’ll have to forgive me for being nothing but ecstatic about the potential here. 

I truly believe this language-model technology and AI as a whole will be as essential a resource as any reference book or software package a publisher currently relies on. Once you spend time learning its limitations and preparing for its promise, it’s easy to see how revolutionary this tool can be for each and every publishing department. The commitment to AI’s independent strengths will ultimately be as essential as the separation of church and state.

In this blog, I wanted to highlight both the larger and smaller revolutions that AI can bring to the daily to-do lists of publishing teams. 

 

California Bill Requiring Big Tech To Pay For News Placed On Hold Until 2024

A California bill that would force tech companies such as Facebook and Google to pay publishers for news content has been put on hold in the Legislature until 2024. The California Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, sponsored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), would direct digital advertising giants to pay news outlets a “journalism usage fee” when they sell advertising alongside news content. The bill would require publishers to invest 70% of those funds in preserving journalism jobs in California.

 

Global Study Finds Ads With Lower Carbon Emissions Are Tied To Higher Attention And Engagement

The study analyzed over one billion impressions across 55 countries through live campaign tracking and further stress-tested findings by using AI-based, predictive eye tracking on approximately 350 display ads that appeared on 100 U.S. websites. The resulting analysis proved that a spot that was in view for 10 seconds produced 64 percent less carbon emissions than a spot with a five-second, in-view time. This correlation between in-view time and carbon emissions is likely related to total ad load on each page, as the more ads that load, the greater the emissions generated. 

 

Marketing Meter: Brands Have Trouble Measuring ROI Across Channels

Most marketers expect their budgets to increase this year. Sixty-four percent say they anticipate budget increases, according to Nielsen’s 2023 Annual Marketing Report, a study released Tuesday. But will they know if they are getting what they’re paying for? Only 54% are confident they can measure ROI across digital channels, although not necessarily for individual ones.

Programmatic Advertising ‘Rife with Waste’ … But Also Potential Billions in Efficiency Gains

The Magazine Manager blog has covered the basics to bringing programmatic advertising to your sales teams. What we haven’t done is break down how programmatic advertising plays out in the wider $88 billion global market. The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is taking a shot, releasing what it’s calling a “first look” of a larger study on open web programmatic advertising and analyzing 21 participating advertisers and their $123 million in ad spend and 35.5 billion impressions between September 2022 and January 2023.

Unfortunately, the findings aren’t all rosy.

South Carolina Newspapers Evolve A New Paradigm To Survive

In South Carolina in 2020, ten local newspapers folded their print editions, and those that remain are often shoestring operations. But some papers are bucking the trend, either by hiring staff, or collaborating with other papers to expand their coverage and investigate corruption in local governments. And readers are supporting them for providing news they can’t get anywhere else.

A.I. To Top Tech Spending At Many Companies: CNBC Survey

Companies across the economy say artificial intelligence will be their top spending priority over the next year, according to the latest CNBC Technology Executive Council survey.

Global Ad Market Keeps Growing Thanks To Counter-Cyclical Verticals And Retail Media

The summer update of MAGNA’s “Global Ad Forecast” predicts media owners advertising revenues will reach $842 billion this year, +4.6% growth vs. 2022 ($805bn).

 

Did Google Violate Its Own Terms and Mislead Advertisers?

Existing where we are at the intersections of publishing, technology, advertising, and marketing, we’ve consulted and linked to a fair share of Google blog entries and explainer articles.

Hard to remember a time when that text was a defensive one.

Thanks to a relatively bombshell Wall Street Journal article that highlights an extensive Adalytics.io report about advertisers potentially being misled for years by Google and its video-ad placements, Google has been caught on its backfoot. And while Google is quick to categorize them as “extremely inaccurate claims,” that these violations may have affected government agencies, Fortune 500 companies, publishers, and small businesses alike will surely capture more attention as numbers continue to be crunched, scrutinized, and questioned.

 

How Live Blogging Serves As A Critical Communications Tool For Newsrooms

Technologies such as live blogs have emerged as a critical communications tool to cover the world’s most pressing events — from the novel coronavirus pandemic to the war in Ukraine and even global elections. Live blogs have the toolkit journalists need to keep consumers updated on the latest events in an engaging, digestible, and authentic format. 

 

Perspectives from the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2023–2027

For the entertainment and media industries, 2022 marked an important inflection point. Total global entertainment and media (E&M) revenue rose 5.4% in 2022, to US$2.32 trillion. That represents a sharp deceleration from the 10.6% growth rate in 2021, when economies and industries globally were starting to rebound from the upheaval caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

U.S. Ad Index Expands For First Time In 11 Months In May

The U.S. Ad Market Tracker rose 2.5% in May — the first expansion in 11 months. The expansion compares with the year-ago period that was only up modestly and is the best May since Standard Media Index began tracking it. The growth is the first material sign that the U.S. ad marketplace is pulling out of a recession that began in July 2022, based on the SMI data, which is derived from a pool of actual ad spending processed by the major agency holding companies and independent media services agencies.