Cat McGinn and Tim Burrowes write:
Market mix modelling on the AI agenda
Another session for humain | human creativity x AI was revealed this week, with local marketers discussing how they are already using the emerging technology in media planning and buying, generating insights from data and optimisation in real-time.
“Decisions at speed - AI for market mix modelling” will see Melody Townsend, GM of Retail Marketing for BOQ Group, and Liam Loan-Lack, head of APAC marketing for CMC Markets, discuss how they are using the marketing investment analytics platform Mutinex. They will be joined on the panel by Mutinex co-founder Henry Innis.
Meta gears up for advertisers
Meta introduced what it’s calling an AI Sandbox for advertisers. The tools will allow brands to customize ads for different audiences and formats. It uses AI to generate alternative copy, background image creation, and image cropping features for Facebook and Instagram ads.
The service will expand to all self-serve advertisers from July. The move highlights the growing adoption of generative AI in media and marketing, as ad tech startups like Omneky and Movio leverage similar technologies to create ads and marketing videos.
SynesthesiAI
Meta also released a new AI model, ImageBind. It differs from other generative AI in that it can use and retrieve different types of media content, creating new possibilities for media production. ImageBind can enhance a video recording by combining it with an AI generated audio clip, or segment and identify objects in an image based on audio to create animations. The creators believe that introducing new modalities will enable even richer human-centric AI models. There is still much to uncover about multimodal learning, but ImageBind is a step towards evaluating them and showing novel applications in image generation and retrieval.
Google catches up
Google made several significant strides forward in the AI wars, releasing its AI large language model Bard to all users, and announced a plethora of new features during its I/O conference.
Adobe's image generative AI, Firefly, is joining forces with Google's chatbot, Bard, to enhancing its capabilities with an emphasis on what it terms “commercially safe” production. Users will be able to generate images with Firefly and modify them using Adobe Express, gaining access to templates, fonts, stock images, and more. The partnership means brands can use generative AI for content production with fewer copyright concerns about the legal grey area represented by platforms like Midjourney, Stability and DALL-E et al.
EU focuses on copyright in AI
The EU released its AI guidelines. The mandate introduces obligations for providers of generative models to disclose copyrighted content used in training AI. The implications for AI use in media and marketing could be significant, impacting data handling, ad targeting, and customer interaction with AI.
News Corp on ‘degenerative AI’
News Corp’s global boss Robert Thomson flagged how AI is going to change the company, telling the company’s quarterly investor call yesterday:
“It's not only going to have an impact on content, it will clearly have a profound impact on the management of the business, whether customer service or billing or whatever.
“The one contradiction of any business is that the more you customize, the harder and more expensive it is to scale. And that contradiction can be overcome with AI.”
Earlier in the same call, Thomson said:
“We see three areas in which our content will be used by generative AI creators, whose products will be enhanced by our IP, for which we should be compensated: Firstly, our content will inevitably be used, as has already exploited, to train AI engines; secondly, specific examples of our content will be surfaced in response to users’ AI queries; and, thirdly and crucially, our content will certainly be aggregated and synthesized, and those answers monetized by other parties - we expect our fair share of that monetization. Generative AI cannot be degenerative AI.”
12 July 2023
NSW Teachers Federation Auditorium, Surry Hills
Early Bird Expires 17 May 2023