A brief round up of the many platform AI announcements, as well as the implications of TikTok expanding its partnership with Ticketmaster, and a look at Reddit’s latest updates.
Generative AI Round-up
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to follow the multiple announcements coming from platforms around their Generative AI integrations. Indeed, numerous platforms have been working on their AI game this week, a few highlights as follows:
Meta is adding AI-generated post prompts and images – while I don’t expect this to replace the current approach at bigger brands, this is likely to go towards reducing the need for smaller firms for external social support. Meta also announced that its latest AI package will make speech translation expressive, factoring in whispers for example.
ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, is working on a platform which would enable users to create custom AI chatbots.
Microsoft has been talking about its new Deep Search offering, which uses GPT-4 to interpret and expand user queries for more accurate and relevant search results. This type of approach is likely to be copied by other platforms in time. My own view on what this means for marketers remains the same – monitor, and make sure your SEO is on-point, because its increasingly likely that your copy will form the basis of the answers being given to users searching via Generative AI.
TikTok Expands Ticketing Feature
Having initially launched in the US last year, TikTok is expanding its Ticketmaster integration to 20 other markets, including the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and many (well, 16) others. While this direct news doesn’t have direct implications for many of the people reading this, what it is a sign of is the increasing growth and expectation from users that they’ll be able to do everything in one app.
For years, apps such as WeChat have been mythologised in the West as platforms where you can pretty much do anything. It feels that as time goes on and with the increasing adoption of social shopping, that we may start to have the same expectations as well.
Reddit Recap & New Ad Placements
Following last week’s much heralded slight changes in colour scheme and font, Reddit had some actual news this week. Firstly, it’s added new elements to its reply stream ad placements, with more flexibility around using images and carousels. I find that Reddit ads are oddly underused by some brands, although I suspect that the previous lack of flexibility with images was part of the problem.
It does however offer high potential for very specific and cost-effective interest-based targeting – sure, there has been some negativity, but I personally find it to be a similar level to Twitter pre-Musk.
Otherwise, Reddit released its 2023 Recap. Apparently in 2023 there was a notable increase in Subreddits devoted to serious, intellectual discussions; the hope here is that this might help a more cerebral type of marketer. I think it’s certainly worth dipping your toe in, but maybe reserve the larger budgets for when you’ve seen some ROI.
Further Reading
Threads is launching in the EU. If you haven’t already thought about where the platform can fit in to your marketing mix, early 2024 poses a good time. My own view is that it isn’t Twitter – we need to see what it becomes before over-committing.
A US-centric study has indicated that brands will place increasing trust and spend with content creators in 2024.
A Spanish media association filed a 550 million euro lawsuit against Meta, citing unfair advantages in the advertising industry. More one to watch with curiosity than expecting anything impactful at this stage.