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Creative Unproduction

Ad agencies are among the early adopters of generative AI for work. 

The big sell is the expense reduction when creative production and strategy is shifted at least in part to AI. Ideas, characters, background elements, colors and all sorts of things can be tested without being reshot (or shot at all).

But, and this is a big but, generative AI has major drawbacks. For one, while AI is great for the testing phase and to generate, like, a thousand ideas at once for a human to narrow down and sharpen, it isn’t ready for primetime. Which is to say, for consumer-facing production.

Aside from small errors (machine-generated creative, like from DALL-E, is often betrayed by its inability to depict human hands), the AI is liable to repurpose imagery or art from around the web, potentially violating IP laws. 

“When it starts to generate things that are visible to our clients, that are visible to consumers, that’s when you start getting into some tricky legal things,” Omnicom CTO Paolo Yuvineco tells The Wall Street Journal. 

Up For Sale

Amazon is testing a product page feature to display the number of recent purchases of that item. 

The sales numbers round to the nearest hundred, thousand, ten thousand or max out at “100,000+.” And sales are listed as being measured over the past week or month.

The sales number functions as a ranking signal, akin to how a bookstore might have a title’s position on the Times’ Best Sellers list, writes Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of the ecommerce market research firm Marketplace Pulse. Although the idea is poached from identical features on Chinese ecommerce marketplaces like Temu and AliExpress. 

The data can also yield interesting tidbits, like that Amazon sold 600 Peloton bikes in the past month. 

The public sales data isn’t available by API. But it’s not for Amazon sellers, Kaziukėnas notes. It’s for shoppers. 

The likely net effect would strengthen incumbent sellers, in particular, and overall sales if shoppers are more confident buying from an unknown seller. 

It is just a test, though. “Amazon hosts many of those at any given time, and some never make it past the testing phase.”

Clearing The Lot

Car dealerships are a powerhouse of the old media economy – big on billboards, radio and local cable TV. 

But salespeople at local dealerships are among the enthusiastic supporters of TikTok’s ability to sell big-ticket items on the power of peer recommendations. They can livestream from cars and get organic distribution on TikTok without spending a dime. No rando individual Instagram account could pick up serious distribution without a paid media boost.

TikTok’s problem is it doesn’t see the ad revenue or a piece of the sales commission. 

In the past, a big purchase decision like a car would have meant consulting Consumer Reports or other info resources, Yunilda Esquivel, director of strategy at Laundry Service agency, tells Digiday. With TikTok search becoming more popular, an advertiser could hone right in on searches for test drives and vehicle research. “Not unsurprisingly, TikTok is a search engine for Gen Z consumers – how to do things, where to find things, especially when it comes to things like travel and discovering new brands,” she says.

But Wait, There’s More!

WPP is nearing a deal to acquire influencer marketing specialist The Goat Agency. [Insider]

The FTC: The hidden impacts of pixel tracking. [blog]

Shields: TV wanted to be just like digital. Unfortunately, the ad business got its wish. [blog]

Twitter has been down-ranking the corporate accounts of other social nets, including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. [Platformer]

Meta’s paid verification program goes live in the US. [engadget]