48. Rome is Burning, Part II
It began with Klarna's radical AI Creative $avings in May. We now have the details.
Greetings. In light of last week’s devastating weather events I held back on sending this edition. I hope all is well with you all. -pmb
1. Klarna Details
It begins with attitude. And rolling hard with purpose.
We first presented the Klarna AI implementation discussed here. The executive summary is/was:
Klarna, the AI-powered global payments network and shopping assistant, in a daring move that defies convention, has slashed its sales and marketing expenditure by a staggering 11% in Q1 2024. Yet, this noteworthy cost-cutting measure belies an audacious strategy - a masterful leveraging of artificial intelligence to unleash a torrent of campaigns and marketing collateral updates.
Now, detailed in Ad Age September 25, 2024, Klarna offers a peek behind the AI curtain by way of a conversation with Klarna’s CMO Sandstrom.
“The culture here at Klarna is to move extremely fast and adopt AI as much as you can, but not recklessly,” he said. “That is the culture here internally, and if you don’t like that, I don’t think this is a great place to work right now.”
The availability of AI tools is surprisingly not the major part of the implementation. Attitude and expectations are large parts of the strategy.
Sandstrom has encouraged employees to use generative AI by setting deadlines that would be near impossible to meet without the technology.
“I would tell a team, ‘I want to see 10 mock-ups or sketches of this campaign, but you don’t have any budget,’” he said. “So either they learn how to draw, or they learn how to use AI.”
This focused approach helped turn a net loss to a net profit this year of 27% over the first two quarters. This along with a hiring freeze and attrition will reduce headcount.
That said, Sandstrom wanted to clarify they are not looking to replace staff with AI. He sees the technology as a way of “supercharging” their creatives and account directors with “super powers” while reducing or eliminating mundane and boring tasks.
Sandstrom stated you cannot replace people who know the brand, specific product attributes and data points. What AI offers is amplification of the concepts versus creative concepting. AI can help fill the many channels with executions of said creative ideas.
For more, check out the Ad Age article here
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2. What’s new lately?
Scene Stealer: Text-to-video platform Pika launched Pika 1.5
Text-to-video platform Pika launched Pika 1.5, with more realistic movement, cinematic shots, lip-syncing, and custom special effects.
Unreal Pikaffects
Go beyond what you could capture with a camera. Explode, melt, crush, or inflate anything your heart desires.
Big Screen Shots
Use the kinds of cinematic shots that will make you look like you know what you’re doing, like Bullet Time, Vertigo, Dolly Left, Crane Down, and more.
New Moves
Make the stars of your scenes even more lifelike— from running, to skateboarding, to flying, and beyond.
Check it out at Pika.art
3. A Doomed Digital Landscape
Source: Digiday 9/27/24 - How Agencies Adapt as Bots Evolve
In the grim twilight of the digital age, a chilling reality looms: the relentless rise of the bot hordes. While these synthetic entities may constitute a mere fraction of an app's user base, their insidious influence over content creation is far greater than we dared imagine.
Media agencies, once bastions of human ingenuity, now face a haunting specter: the specter of bot-generated content. Yet, even as this digital plague spreads, platforms and advertisers remain alarmingly complacent. Only when the alarm bells ring with a deafening intensity will this crisis be acknowledged.
From Digiday - Simply put, bots are essentially programs used to perform repetitive tasks, which can range from posting spam comments to clicking links. On social platforms, this can result in fake accounts that post frequently, or bots that manipulate information in conversations — both of which are potentially harmful for any associated brand content.
In response, media firms and agencies scramble to deploy artificial intelligence, a feeble shield against the bot onslaught. They devise broader social strategies, desperate to safeguard their brands amidst a digital apocalypse.
We can only watch helplessly as the bots proliferate. Whether brands truly care about the authenticity of their engagement remains a haunting question.
“We simply need to try to keep an eye on it," laments Drew Himmelreich, a haunted figure in the digital wilderness (senior analyst at digital agency Barbarian). “It remains an open question to what degree brands actually want to know what percent of their engagement is authentic … Our clients tend to focus on more standard performance metrics and haven’t expressed an appetite to allocate additional resources toward trying to quantify or contextualize the role of bots or inauthentic activity.”
In plain speak, it would appear clients are too preoccupied with superficial performance metrics to delve into the abyss of bot-infested content.
A recent study by Similarweb, a digital data and insights marketing platform, paints a bleak picture: bots churn out a staggering 20.8% to 29.2% of all content posted on Twitter in the United States. These digital demons, a mere 5% of the platform's monetizable daily active users, wield an extraordinary power over content creation. Studies estimate that bots produce a staggering 1.57 times more content than their human counterparts.
"I’d say what all that bot-generated content really endangers is the engaging experience advertisers want to be part of," warns David F. Carr, a prophet of doom in the digital realm (senior insights manager at Similarweb). "If Twitter users sense that too many of the accounts they interact with are robotic rather than genuine … they’re likely to use Twitter less or engage with a lot more skepticism."
And Twitter/X/Musk is shitty enough as is without the bot trash.
Similarweb reminds us that this digital plague is not confined to Twitter alone. Meta's Facebook, too, grapples with the relentless tide of bot-generated content.
The digital apocalypse is upon us, and there seems to be no escape.
There’s plenty more to read at Digiday 9/27/24 - How Agencies Adapt as Bots Evolve (no paywall)
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