AI, Accountability & Ads: Coinbase, Netflix, OpenAI, + Cannes Lions

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Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Meme team podcast where we dissect the marketing strategies behind breakout cultural moments. I'm your host Sonia Pachez. And today we're talking about
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whether AI is actually the reason why companies are laying off employees, how ads are changing in Netflix and open AI.
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Whether actually I guess everything's about AI because the cans line AI category is another thing. My guest today is he and Shaw who built crazy egg kiss metrics and Nira.
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He's one of the most consistent thinkers on their internet about what actually endures in businesses, including his most recent piece, the founders who got stories telling rights. Welcome, he.
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Thanks for having me. I'm ready to yet.
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Awesome. So for topic, we want to dive into all the companies that are laying off employees and using AI as one of the reasons for it.
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We saw Brian Armstrong of Coinbase announced 14% layoffs, so about 700 jobs, but there was also a bunch of other companies, PayPal, FreshWorks, CloudFair was another big one, Bill and Upwork.
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Brian Armstrong in a long tweet, basically announcing two reasons why they're laying off folks, one being the down crypto market, which, you know, no surprise, right, but then the other one being that AI is changing the way that their employees are working.
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So they're basically seeing their non technical people start shipping code. He also said that they're going to start narrowing the levels of people. A lot of the managers are going to be doing work as well. So it's going to be like, instead of their managing a whole bunch of people.
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They're going to be continuing to manage those people, but also will have to be doing some I see work on top of that. So we've seen this, you know, before we saw Jack Dorsey at block also layoff a bunch of people and say that is AI sales force has also said that.
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And I think the biggest thing here is just we're starting to get a lot more pushback from people in the industry saying that it's not really the AI that's like, you know, causing all these layoffs because it doesn't work that well in order to be able to replace those jobs and then be like.
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We're seeing the after effects of the over hiring that happened during the COVID era and, you know, Zerp area. I'm also starting to see this being like the last vestiges of companies being able to blame AI.
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Because of the pushback. So I think a lot more companies are going to start either being a lot more truthful about why they're laying people off.
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Or just, you know, ignoring it and not making it as big of a thing by saying that AI is the reason. So he didn't I'm sure you've seen all these announcements for love to know your thoughts on like what you're seeing.
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And what you what you think is going to happen going forward everyone loves a good story until it's not a good story anymore. So like I think this is a good story for them. Yeah, but it's not a great story like it was maybe for.
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I'm trying to think of who did it first, but like if I were to really trace this back. It wasn't because of AI, but like, Elon did it first after buying Twitter and what it really was was a realization that the company was bloated and had too many people.
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And so I think this is more of a latent realization by a bunch of these folks that like their companies are bloated and have too many people at this point.
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Saying AI at least gives you the chance of not having to admit that you're wrong or you were wrong about how many people you hired over a 10 year period, which is quite a long time to hire a lot of people.
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And how many inefficiencies actually exist in the company. That's really the bottom line. And then now we have a lot of stories out about, oh, the AI costs are going up. So that's another reason. So I think that's the next story I'm seeing, which is, oh, the AI costs are so high. We have to let go of some humans and I really don't think it has to do with like AI replacing jobs. I think it's just another way to justify.
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The swing in direction from hiring to de-accelerating hiring, if not just basically doing massive cuts, and there is a factor. If you think about it, that I think is coming as well that I'll add and I'm curious what you think about this, if someone that uses AI is truly more efficient.
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Maybe that's not across every department today, but there are plenty of departments where that's actually a thing. So there are double your triple or even maybe 10X as efficient.
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One, what does that say about the efficiency of most people in an organization, which goes back to the earlier point. But I think the deeper thing on my mind about this is just like, yeah, of course you want to hire people who are more efficient and are using the tools that have that are available to them more productively.
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I don't think we're going in any other direction, whether you sit on one side or another side of it, technology only goes in one direction.
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Definitely one thing that I saw was the way that Armstrong mentioned in his tweet saying that they're going to be looking at that going forward like people's AI usage.
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And I think that that's a way that a lot of most tech companies are going to start deciding whether or not to keep people is whether they're actually using AI because it shows two things for me.
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One is that, oh, shit, your paying attention to what's happening in the market. And the other one is that like you actually care about keeping your job regardless of, you know, like whether you think there's like room for improvement. And I think there's, you know,
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this huge narrative that a lot of, you know, PM roles or marketing roles are just like cushy jobs that you're getting paid like an excess amount because it's a tech job.
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But you're not actually doing much on a day to day basis, right? I mean, that narrative was coming through from COVID, right? When you had like PM showing off that they're, you know, at the pool hanging out, right?
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And so I've seen like a lot of, you know, tech CEOs wanting to trim the fat because they're like, why are we paying all these people?
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To go hang out on our dime, you know, and I think AI is like one of those things that where we can just say, if you use AI, clearly you care about this company, clearly you care about your job and keeping it.
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And if you don't and you're not taking that initiative to actually move forward with it, then like, why should we keep you?
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So I think it's going to become one of those things like if you want to keep your tech job, you need to learn some form of AI and like figure out how to use it for your role.
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Because if you don't, it's just going to make it very easy for tech companies to be like, well, cool, you don't care. Why should we care to keep their tech companies for a reason, right?
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They're supposed to use the latest tech. If you work in tech, you're supposed to be up to speed on tech. You might not love tech, but you you should be up to speed on it because you work at a company that is building these tools.
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So I really love that point. I think that's, I think that's a really big point for who we're seeing doing the layoffs right now.
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To your earlier point of, hey, then AI is not quite there yet. You had something quite there.
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Yeah. I mean, well, we saw that happened the same week as Coinbase laying off all these people was that Coinbase had a huge outage of, you know, their platform.
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Come to find out that it wasn't actually Coinbase or the engineers, you have to happen to do with AWS and their servers kind of, you know, fixing out on
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Coinbase, but the number one thing that the narrative kind of went towards was like, well, see, you get rid of your humans and that same week, everything kind of like shuts down. And I think that's another thing that's happening here where
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if you're going to use AI as an excuse to lay people off, then people are then going to see anything bad that happens to your company as being caused by AI.
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So it's like a double edged sword now where it's like, you're not just going to get the benefits of saying, oh, yeah, AI is making us more efficient because the other narrative that's coming up with AI is that it's not good enough to actually replace workers.
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And people are shipping out buggy code that's taking down websites and taking down, you know, platforms. This isn't the first time we've seen this right like we've seen other companies also a breakdown. And then we're starting to see a lot of
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you know, vibe coders come out and like, you know, say on Twitter that like, oh, I vibe code this thing and I try to bring in a, you know, real engineer to come check it. And they're like, there's nothing I can do like it's so
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crazy what you've built some airsats, you know, coding that like there's nothing that to be saved here. You're just going to have to keep it, you know, messed up until like crazy. I know.
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You have to kind of pick a side that like if you are going to use this as an excuse or a reason you're also going to have to face the detractors of AI and all those people that are losing their jobs right to say like, well, if you kept some of these people, maybe it wouldn't have broken down.
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That's right. Yeah. I mean, that's clearly going to be an issue and we're going to have to ultimately deal with it. Yeah.
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So a couple of lessons here are that you can't claim that AI transformation is going to redo your, your organization and your operations, if you can't actually back it up right. It's kind of funny that happened in the same week as opposed to sometimes it happens like, you know, a month later and then you can kind of say, well, they're still kind of fixing things, but this was just like a one to punch of, you know, the narrative kind of taking over and people then blaming AI for, you know, this being.
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The reason, as opposed to, you know, just the infrastructure in general wasn't there, but that's something that founders are going to have to keep in mind every time that they try to use AI as a way that they're becoming more efficient and then another one is that when you use the AI efficiency story proactively.
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Sometimes the market is going to like force your hand Derek Thompson spoke about this where it's a few things that can be true at once, which is that yes, AI is going to change the way that we work and that layoffs are probably necessary to, you know, kind of bring that efficiency, but it doesn't mean that like companies necessarily know what point they're out right now, especially if their employees aren't actually using AI to become more efficient.
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So I feel like companies need to figure out what their employees are using AI for and then head towards those efficiencies as opposed to just kind of, you know, getting rid of a bunch of people and then having to backtrack like we saw with block, right, they have to go back and hire a bunch of the people that they laid off because they realize, oh, wow, we actually do need you.
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And then that's also a bad luck because I mean those employees like the loyalty, you know, where is that going to be going forward?
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I mean, I think what you just said at the end is really the big lesson, which is like you want to really think about the second and third order effects of what you're doing and try to really account for those otherwise you're going to probably like cause some unforeseen circumstances happening are coming.
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So yeah, what I wanted to talk about based on kind of what's been on my mind recently is actually it was a set of essays that I wrote that are around founders and storytelling.
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A few of these have been a little controversial. Other ones are kind of really aligned with I think how I mean all of them are aligned with how marketers think I think there's a lot of folks that are either not practicing marketers that really don't really understand what it takes these days to cut through the noise.
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It's their story. They don't necessarily need to come up with it, but they need to be the ones who can speak to it. If it's their story versus delegating the entire process to somebody else and then it becomes a made up story.
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So love to hear your thoughts about it and kind of dig into it.
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Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the examples that you gave right Mark Benioff Brian Chesky and Jeff Bezos all have done that in one way or another.
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So yeah, just why are those the examples you chose? What do you think that they did well? What are they missing now that say, you know, Jeff Bezos isn't really involved in Amazon anymore.
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And we just saw, you know, Brian Chesky on TVPN this week, you know, talking about, you know, the story and like where they are with like AI.
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And then, you know, Mark Benioff is kind of in and out as it pleases him, but yeah.
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But let's hear more about why those are your prime examples of what you see working.
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Yeah, what works is when you can cut through the noise and talk about things in such a way where they become memorable to people.
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And that's usually, you know, everyone's got something interesting. They might just not know what that is.
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So there's so many stories about Amazon because that's probably the hardest one to explain today.
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But like, I remember the stories because I grew up in a time when those stories were like lore, right?
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Like two pizza teens, what's from Amazon, they use the doors in the office as desks.
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And they are famous for, you know, being really frugal like that.
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But if you think about their business, it matches what business they're in, being in a very low margin business and kind of owning up to that and knowing that everybody wants things cheaper and faster.
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Right. The way I think about it is if you meet someone or hear about their company and something is memorable enough where it sticks, like that's the important piece.
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And the more it's related to company, the company to better.
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So with Amazon, like I had to explain the entire thing from how they started to the business and why it is the way it is and they operate the way they do or they think about certain things that way.
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I think with Brian Chesky, it's just like such a cute story of how it started and how all the hardship and like people generally know about it just because they've told a story over and over again, but also like it really resonates.
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You know, you're in a city you don't know hotels are expensive and impersonal, you know, blah blah blah, right?
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And then even realizing that they need to take good pictures of the places that people can understand what they look like on what they're going to experience.
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And then I think with Mark Benioff, it's like a classic.
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He had an enemy.
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He actually worked at the enemies and not that enemy's company, but he knew then you but like, you know, he worked on these things. He worked in the category.
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And so he had an enemy and like he just owned the fact that they had an enemy and the enemy was essentially this really expensive, bloated way of doing things.
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If you start thinking about it, that probably starts to sound really familiar to like the place we're at in the world today.
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And what transformation can happen when you can because like at that time, he was really playing on this idea that we were barely post servers and racks and data centers.
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And that's how we deployed software to software being deployed in the cloud via browser.
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So I think that was like with AI, we're in a similar place where those transition that transitions happening and there's so many relevant stories you can tell just based on that transition happening.
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So I think this is the bigger point that I would make, which is like, you're trying to take if you're a marketer or you're someone who's like playing around with this, like, so to speak, we all play around with it because we play around with words.
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We're in this function or think about this stuff a lot or execute on it, like you're really trying to figure out how does the narrative fit in the world.
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And yes, there's people that are not founders, I can help founders do that. But ultimately, it's the founder's story you're using.
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And it's authentic genuine piece of their lore or their business or what have you that you can really pull that from.
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So I think that's kind of like a good example of what I mean. And one last thing I'll say about it is generally the most relevant audience for this is actually your team before it is.
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Yeah, certainly. I mean, like how you're hiring people and how you're finding people and getting them bought in on the vision for the company.
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That's one of the things that like I work, you know, closely with founders on is like, how do we get to the insight of like why you're building why you're what you're building and why you actually care about it.
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You know, I feel like oftentimes the founders just kind of like, let's talk about the product. Let's talk about the features and, you know, get lost in those details and not realize that like what's, you know, more enticing and more.
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Like what helps the narrative and your positioning and all that is figuring out why you care, you know, and then why your team is the team to build this thing.
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And I feel like most founders, you know, have that right where it's like if you think about why you actually care about what you're building and then the insight that you saw for the problem that you saw and the solution that you found.
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That is like the story that gets people bought in because then you can go and like talk about that to, you know, your, your, your users, right, like with Brian Tuske right as they're the ones that, you know, get rented out there, you know, a bed in their apartment.
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And then they realize, well, we can do this across, you know, other major cities. So they found the problem and then started speaking to that. And then yeah, I think, you know, the insight about, you know, needing the photographer, right, like,
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realizing that this was, you needed to get the trust of both the people that were going to stay there, but then also the people that you, you were asking to host, right, because it's like, how do we help them actually know what they're supposed to do.
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And so they hired out, you know, the photographers to come and do that to get like good high quality film to post, you know, photos of, of the rooms.
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And everything kind of just grew from there. And I feel like they've kind of kept that law going. And then the next products that kind of came, right, when they started doing experiences, it was like part of the story of like, well, what else can you do that still fits the brand story that we've been telling and grow from there.
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And I think for like Amazon, the ones that stick out were like how customer focused they were, that everything kind of came back to like making sure that the customer was happy because it was such a, you know, small margin business that like they needed customers to keep coming back.
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And so that I feel like that still like remains here. So it's like, how can you as a founder or as the marketer that's helping the founder figure out what those storylines are that you think people will care.
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And definitely I think, you know, in being able to convey that message to the people that you're hiring to get them excited is one way to see if the message is actually working.
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And then, you know, how do you build out from there with like your first initial customers and telling them the story of like what's working, what's not working. And then, you know, continuing to change the message as it kind of grows.
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I also say that I don't think that the story has to remain the same. I think it can continue expanding the more that like you need to either find like a different, you know, target customer like say you already have one target customer and then you want another one.
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Well, what about the product that you're building and your insight would appeal to that customer that you aren't using with the other one.
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And same as you're growing for, you know, as you're like hiring more and more people.
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So I did want to ask you what you you mentioned that companies without a clear story accumulate drag. What are you seeing that is actually the point that's breaking when you know founders are doing this.
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It's just when everyone in the company has a different story. That means they have a different understanding of what the company is supposed to be doing. And I think it's as simple as that. And you know, the easy tests are like, you know, I wrote a bunch about this. But it's like tell someone to tell the story in two sentences. And if everyone has a different way of describing it.
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That means, you know, everyone has a different way of describing it. Then if everyone describes it incorrectly, but similarly, you have a different problem. Yeah. Right. And so, and so there, it isn't like a one size fits all everyone should say the same thing. No, everyone should say the right thing.
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Yeah. What is the right thing who decides the founders decide what the right.
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They decide that they don't decide. I don't know. And if there is never no founders, a CEO decides because someone the book stops at someone.
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And that someone has to own the narrative, the story exactly what the company is focused on. So yeah, it's that simple. And then you get all this drag. And that drag is everyone's it's in everyone's minds.
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Because they're saying they're thinking about it differently. And if every one of the companies thinking about the business differently, then you have a problem.
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Because then everyone's going to go in different directions inevitably because they're not thinking about the company in a consistent reliable way that aligns with the people who are essentially responsible for running the company.
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Because companies are still a hierarchical thing. I don't think that's going to change any time to see.
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There's always going to be the one person at the top, right?
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Brian, I'm sorry. I'm going to stay at the top, right? I think so. I think that's how this is going to work. I think so.
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Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say that one of the most glaring examples or like ways to figure out if the messaging is different is to go talk to your sales people and figure out how they're pitching your company to your target audience.
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Right. I've done this exercise with a couple of companies. Yeah.
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And the founders are like, whoa, that's not at all.
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That's what we're selling. It's like, yeah, that's what you're selling.
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Yeah. So it's like, you need to go. This needs to be a company wide exercise and not just like the founders do it.
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And then you tell it, you know, it's like, no, you need to get people bought in and like figure out like, why is it that the sales people are pitching your company in this way?
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Is there something in the way that they're pitching it that that is resonating? It's great when like they're actually converting because then you can talk to the customer and be like, oh, okay.
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So clearly something is working here in the messaging, but been with companies where the message is not working. It's not converting. And then you find out it's because the way that the sales people are talking about the product or feature is not the way that they are.
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Is not the way that the product actually functions, right? And I think that that definitely comes from the top. This is one of the huge reasons why like founders.
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And like, preferably the CEO are involved with marketing and sales like from early early days and are jumping in on some sales calls and like, you know, marketing calls to make sure that the message and like the narrative that you've created is actually making its way to your ICP.
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Because sometimes it's not like you're talking about it internally, but if it's not finding its way externally, then you have a bigger problem that you need to sort out.
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So the way that you prescribe the fix is, I mean, it sounds simple, which is to write it down, test it out loud, refine, repeat. Why do you think that more founders aren't actually taking the time to do this, even though it sounds simple.
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They don't know what the company should be doing in the first place that takes a lot of effort. The funniest part about it is it doesn't get easier. It gets harder.
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You know, how often do people say, oh, we don't know who who uses our product or we don't know who to solve for it. We know who uses our product. We don't know who to solve for it.
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It's like, okay, well, that's something where you need to gain conviction and have an opinion before you deserve to have an opinion, maybe.
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Right. And then push in a direction and do that consciously knowing that you might be wrong. I think that's just a tough task.
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And if a company gets through it once and hits product market fit, that doesn't mean they can do it again.
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Yeah, I'd say that finding that ever elusive product market fit, I feel like holds up a lot of founders because they're like, well, until we find product market fit, maybe you don't need a narrative.
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Whereas like, it's easier for you to find the product market fit if you have a narrative or a story that you're telling the customers and you're seeing whether or not they react to it positively or not.
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But I guess yeah, if you are trying to find product market fit or there are ways that you suggest founders go about doing this.
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Yeah, I mean, if you're if you're if you're pre product market fit, you could say whatever and do whatever and it kind of doesn't matter because like you don't even have a thing yet, but you still need a cohesive idea of the experiments and how you're running it.
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Now if you're post product market fit, you have users.
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Go ask them why they like your thing go figure out how to talk to them in a way where you're not sitting there biasing them and send you just like.
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You just keep you know, it's the usual five wise and things like that we hear about but don't always do very well, but it's like go ask them five wise like like if they say, hey, I really love your product.
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Why do you love my product? Well, you know, it saves me a ton of time. Well, how does it save you a ton of time? Oh, it saves you a ton of time like that.
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And just get to the root cause until you feel like, oh, I know what? And if you know why, then that is what forms your story like, you know, for one of my products, crazy egg, we invented like back in the day. Now this is 2005. So many years ago, how to basically visually see where people click on a website.
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And it turns out that the business we were in was the business of improving people's websites like our job was to help them improve their website.
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Even today, that still remains. It's still the job. All the technologies change and we could probably do a better job with AI, we will. And so when you thought about that, you're like, oh, okay.
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They do that. They help people improve their websites. But you know the number one use case for heat maps, even today. And we have a lot of other features now, but is basically the simple thing, which is it helps people justify why they want to do what they want to do.
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If you're a designer and you want to move that CTA somewhere where it's going to get more clicks. How do you prove that that's the right move because, you know, maybe the CEO loves where the button is and what it says.
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Well, you're like, look at the heat map. We want people to click here, right? Yep. No one's clicking there. Maybe we should do something about that and get them to click on it, right? Okay, well, check out my design. I'm going to try that. Is that cool? Like, so that was actually in to this day is still the number one thing. Now with AI, obviously, there's all kinds of other things.
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These heat maps can do that humans today tend to do so. That's just a really good example of just like taking a kernel of what we hear. And the whole idea from that kernel. I can work backward and forward and say, hey, look, our whole idea is improving the website. There are people in a company that need this need this help to help improve the websites are responsible for.
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Yeah, I think that's a very instructive way of showing that like you're still keeping the through line, even as you continue to change, but the number one thing that that positioning that you found from the early days still remains true. And I think you can change the story around that.
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But some founders kind of get caught up in either having the perfect positioning that's like not working or losing what they thought was good positioning.
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So is there ever a right time to change the story or is the goal just to find it once and stick to it?
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I think the story evolves, right? We found one where we it's still durable.
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Our job is to improve your website. Okay, over time, we added AP testing and recordings and all these other ways that help you improve your website.
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Now, we're still going to help you improve your website, but I hear like you can make websites with the prompt, right?
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I'm so okay, great. So we're going to help you make websites with the prompt. Yeah, probably because that's where the world's going.
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And you know, we should help do that in the right way. But really, it's going to be help improve your website with the prompt.
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Right? Like something like that. That's not the line, but that's like where the world is today. But that's just a tool.
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The job is still the same as I want to get more from my website. People are coming to my website. I want more of them to do the things that, you know, they came there to do plus the things I want them to do.
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That hasn't changed. So yeah, I think when you find something durable, it's like that, but you should always evolve the story.
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I mean, ideally it's something you find early on that's durable because then that helps shape what your identity is going forward.
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I think that's the advantage of that.
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The big lessons there are just thinking about how to test whether your company is telling a consistent story or not. And that's really simple.
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Love your idea of talking to salespeople, but like just talk to people in your company and ask them to describe what's up, you know, and like kind of go from there. I think that's that's been what I have found to be most effective.
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Yeah, definitely. I think sometimes founders shy away from talking to customers after a little bit. They just assume that it'll make its way up.
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But I think it's super useful for founders to, you know, get in the weeds and talk to customers, talk to salespeople, marketing people, just everybody in the company and figure out like what that story is, that narrative is that they're telling not only themselves about what they're actually building as a company.
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But then the product that is getting in front of customers and from there you figure out, wait, does this actually make sense? Is this actually what I want to build because that also help you with the product road map going forward because now you're like, okay, we are aligned on what we're building.
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Here are the next steps that, you know, make sense.
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And I found even sometimes that figuring out the messaging helps founders figure out the product road map because now they're more aligned on like what we're actually building and what the goal is for consumers.
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My next topic is how to reverse a brand promise. I want to talk through two examples, Netflix and OpenAI. Netflix is succeeding, I'd say.
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If you remember back to Netflix, like their original promise was, you know, you get the DVDs sent to the, you know, sent to your house. And then when they switched over to digital, the streaming platform, you know, the promise was simple, you pay monthly and you skip the ads.
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It's going to be so different from TV because you don't have commercials to deal with, right? And then in late 2022, they changed it by launching an ad supported tier under pressure from their slowing growth.
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There's huge backlash to that. But as of Q1 of 2026, it accounts for about 60% of new signups and their own track for three billion and ad revenue this year doubled from 1.5 billion last year.
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So how did they not blow up their brand? They never touched their premium tier. They are charging more and more for it, of course, but you get the exact same thing, right? It's still add free. You don't have to deal with any anything new.
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They kept the ad load for the ad-paying ones extremely low. So it's about four minutes per hour. So that's about a quarter of what it is for traditional TV. Netflix, VP of advertising and Nicole Pandres said, we're not going to deliver an ad just because we get paid in that moment.
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So it shows that they are still thinking about the amount of ads that they're putting in front of people. And honestly, I think if they can keep it below what Hulu does and what all the other ones do, you'll at least have that comparison of like, well, we're not as bad as that, right?
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Another thing is that they didn't auto enroll anyone unlike Amazon, which silently moved prime video users into ad supported plan in 2024 Netflix made the switch voluntary. So it made people feel as if they're making the choice.
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Do I want to continue paying for the premium tier with no ads or do I want to keep the more affordable option for more people. So they positioned it as people who could afford Netflix and then for the folks that didn't want to take that additional burden on.
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And then lastly, it's working because the product still feels premium premium, right? They're still doing a lot to, you know, come out with new shows, both premium TV and reality TV. I feel like reality TV has, you know, kind of taken on more of the content.
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And probably the lower end content that people are willing to watch with ads. So the advertisers are getting a return of $60 CPN versus 10 to 15 on social. So they've protected the environment both for their users, but also for advertisers by making it more attractive for them to target Netflix users.
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Now, OpenAI, part of the problem there is how adamant Sam Altman was about not having ads in OpenAI. And so now that they've switched and sell people's data, there's the backlash, right?
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And we saw it more specifically when the Anthropic came out with the Super Bowl ads saying that they would never do ads. So it really just paired them up against their rival.
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Claude has bringing over those people that are willing to pay for like enterprise pricing for their model versus OpenAI. So hidden or any thoughts you have here on Netflix or OpenAI and kind of where you see ad revenue heading.
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You know, it's funny. The companies that are the largest when it comes to ads are basically meta in Google. And I think meta might have surpassed Google's revenue and ads recently, if I'm not mistaken, I saw something while like that or some at some metric, but don't quote me.
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The big thing in my head is these companies, if they're going to do advertising well, they're going to have to personalize advertising.
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That's it. And I think Netflix has some of the best personalization data, like as one shot, which is like what you consume that implies a lot of things about you, demographics wise, and that's tried and true how like brands buy.
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So I think they have a edge, right, TV ads, Netflix ads, you can squint and say, okay, time of day type of thing got it. You could probably try and do a lot of things about the person and Netflix.
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I'm sure buys data and all that stuff. I would assume for their targeting, not that I know if they do or not, but most companies do.
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I mean, it would make sense just right based on, especially if they want to make ads be more personalized to people, they have to have additional data.
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So I think the key for open AI is going to be what kind of data that's not some made up metric or social like Facebook tried, which I know,
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open AI does not have as an angle, but they tried social for so long, it didn't seem to work.
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And then they went back to basics of targeting and saying, just target on things you want to target on advertisers and we'll give you the audience, right?
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And that's kind of the bend the play for Google them and it's just based on data. So what is the data file wheel for open AI when it comes to that sort of targeting information and context that advertisers are looking for.
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So that's one kind of way to think about it. I think that's the tried and true. And then the other way, which all these companies tend to try.
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But usually it doesn't work is try to do something cute and different.
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But the companies, the ad companies are like, no, I'm just trying to target these people already know it's a mix of channels. It's not like they're going to put a add on your service and they're just going to convert all of a sudden because like 100% convert doesn't work like that.
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So then it's an advertising mix and that makes needs to pay powered by something. So, you know, if I were them and I'd be thinking hard about this, I would actually try some more basic things around retargeting and things like that.
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So that you're just bringing in pixels from other places potentially or doing that sort of model and then just retargeting people and using that as the hack that that would be the kind of thing that.
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If and when they introduce things like that, I'd be super interested in kind of how they're thinking about it because I think I think you kind of need a wedge to some extent of something that just works really well and retargeting is kind of.
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They have a lot of impressions they can run if they just decided to figure out how to do retargeting well.
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Yeah, one of the things that's super interesting about Netflix is I think they have so many more avenues doing that like cute weird ad that you're talking about right.
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They just announced I think a week or two ago we talked about it here about how for one of their shows the Kate Hudson, you know, sports show.
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They're including five brands in there as like product placement inside the show.
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I thought that that was like a neat way for them to kind of think about like, okay, we know that people don't necessarily want to watch ads and we can't do that for our premium users.
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What other way can we get brands inside content that might not be as obvious.
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And this is one of the solutions right especially for a show that revolves around sports right we mentioned this as well for the F1 movie right they went out and got sponsors for the car right so like companies were able to put their their ads on the car that you know was racing inside the inside the movie.
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And so they made money off of that right so you know we've seen that before with product placement in like Marvel movies James Bond movies right so the fact that it now it's like shifting on down to TV shows make sense.
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Netflix is growing their podcast network right ringer bar stool all those and bringing those in house so that's like another avenue there of like how they'll be able to promote more more brands inside shows that aren't as obvious.
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Whereas like open AI I don't feel like has those avenues quite yet especially if they're not keeping the memory like I mean I'm sure they have it but so far they're they're you know making it seem as if each of the chats are different.
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You might not get that crossover that you know you speak about you know how you want to travel to like you know this thing here and then for them to bring it over into like another chat so are they going to make each individual chat have brands that sponsor those chats depending on what you're talking about or are they going to start like you know mixing and matching depending on like what you're doing on their platform that would be something to keep an eye out for one thing I did want to bring up here is someone posted on Twitter.
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About a Princeton research paper that showed that when you're inside chat GPT on Claude Grock and Gemini the top answers that you get for your question are going to be sponsored ads that are coming from the companies that are sponsoring chat GPT versus like if you're in cloud you'll get the sponsored results for those companies so how much of this is going to be.
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You know we're giving you the best you know answer which is kind of what you would expect from AI right now versus like we're going to get to a point that like we're just going to have you know a bunch of sponsored ads competing against each other that might not actually be the best product and that I feel is like.
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Like going to be the biggest thing that people are going to be complaining about because people want the best they don't want what people the ad is like paying you for right and right now you know when you do Google search like you know most people just kind of avoid the first you know five to seven listings because they know that those are like paid ad and go down to where.
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You're getting like results from actual people, but I mean of course the they're going to the chats are going to be bringing up the sponsored content because like that's where they're going to be making the revenue from.
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So we'll see where that goes but open AI did open up like the ad network last week so i'm sure a bunch of companies are going to start trying to like you know jump on and try to see if they could be one of the first companies to start getting you know sponsored placements.
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Because you know much like Facebook and you know Google when they were first doing you know search the companies that were first.
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You know still get a lot of lift to this day unless you're paying like a lot for like you know the keywords to compete against them the biggest things there are that Netflix adding ads doesn't make you trust stranger things more or less it's just kept separate.
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From their actual product which is why I think it's far more effective because people have that separation like I was still going to watch stranger things like fine you know you're giving me ads like here just like regular TV that makes sense for me.
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We'll see what happens with you know the sponsored brands inside the shows, but I think if Netflix you know keeps it to like being very relevant to the show it'll make a lot of sense.
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The big difference here with open AI is that they're reversing their utility promise like their main point was we're going to help you find the best result for what you're asking for.
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And when ads start coming in the way of that then it's no longer you know being useful for people anymore if you guys are brands that are looking for you know ways to buy ads like I would suggest trying Netflix like it could be cool to be in a show or something.
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That's totally true yeah so the one that caught my eye recently was the can lions announcement and so for everyone that doesn't know can lions is basically an international festival of creativity is what they call it but it's like the biggest award show for creativity and all that kind of stuff.
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And they are introducing an aircraft subcategory across design digital craft film craft industry craft and creative data so it's like quite a quite a subcategory inside of a bunch of these categories that all seem you know.
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Very relevant for what AI could kind of transform or do and I think the most interesting part of what they said to me was that the rule was that the work must be something that couldn't exist without AI.
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And so for me that like really hits on this idea that like we're moving into a much more progressive world when it comes to AI and how even these highly creative sort of people and sort of genres that are out there are sort of starting to.
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Segment it out and say that like hey there is a category that's related to AI in this way that's almost extreme AI and I think that like I wouldn't have thought that this would happen so quickly.
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Because of course you can use AI and they probably do for all the rest of it but it's not made with AI and with this whole idea that it couldn't have been possible without AI so I find that super cool because a lot of the work tasks that I see as well.
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The ones that are awesome right now are the ones that feel like it wouldn't be possible without AI.
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The things I think was a huge reason for that is how much of the marketing revolved around the director and the cinematographers talking about how they built out the actual world and how they built out the actual shots for the film right and showed that like there was no AI involved it was all just like human creativity.
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I think that you know people really want to see that the human human imagination.
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And then we've also seen you know with like commercials right there was like huge backlash with Coca Cola and McDonald's using AI for their commercials during the holidays and we've seen like a turn towards.
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Like animation and claimation right like barber did their brand their partnership with Wallace and Gromit so I feel like there is this like bifurcation happening between like the brands that want to be associated with like luxury and hand craft you know human made things.
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And companies where you can have you know AI and AI slop you know be a thing and it just doesn't matter as much now where it's interesting is you know cans is like the biggest creativity you know festival out there so let's know it for like what it does for the movies each year but they also have this you know other other side words like they're giving out awards for like the most creative you know XYZ right.
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And so I like that they are separating it out between like this only that the human made versus there's the AI stuff as well.
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I think it would have pissed off a lot more people if they had allowed AI to be entered into like the human craft because then it just doesn't seem fair.
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But it does make me question what like what and like how many are going to be entered into like the AI side and who's going to be like the first to like actively say yes we did this with AI and like you know say allowed and say it proud right because there's so much backlash happening to the companies that are using AI in a way that people feel is not good.
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But yeah we'd love to know what you think about that in terms of like obviously we both work in tech we both use AI.
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I think it's just going to get separated out to start at least the extreme cases of it and so that people can actually submit in these categories and we can see what AI can do.
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So I think it's a in general like I said it a little bit earlier but like we're going in one direction.
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How do we get good with that there's going to be a bunch of transitions along the way and rules I guess but the end of the day if AI can do it and the humans accepted or like it.
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Great we don't then that's on us to like do something say something try to change those rules I think we're just in a murky place where.
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If AI was like this thing and all of a sudden it's here and we're good and it's going to slowly progress and get better I think it's fine to think of it as making it restrictive or whatever but the rules keep changing.
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Because it kind of keeps getting different and better and it's definitely gotten better and so what do you do.
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If you're going to try to limit it or restrict it or not give people a place to express themselves with AI and that's really what this is to me it's like if there's a AI craft sub category okay.
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They're really just trying to help people express themselves with AI isn't that what it boils down to and that's a new form of a new tool for self expression.
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Yeah yeah that's why yeah I think the right decision was to separate it so that way it's competing like versus like right it's like you have the human made stuff and then you have the AI stuff yeah.
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I do like that part of the focus here is you have to really denote where you've used it so kind of the way it has been now it's like people have just been quietly using it and not wanting to say anything and hoping that nobody discovers it.
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But one thing that's also very interesting is somebody else posted this week on Twitter I don't know if you saw but that they've been running most of the articles that have been put on on Twitter and about 71% of them have been written by AI.
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And part of me is like wow like so but are people actually reading them you know because I think there's a difference between like okay you're gonna get a book published with like you know one of the four majors and you don't want AI to be used there.
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But if it's just like an article on on Twitter does it really matter if it is AI right and then we're seeing that with you know Spotify also having like AI artists and like YouTube also having you know AI podcast right like one of the rising categories right now or AI podcast you know and it's like on the one hand it's like whoa like people want to watch like an AI like podcast or like listen to it like what does that even mean you know.
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But on the flip side it's like well if you are a human creator here's how you can also separate yourself right like here's how you can you know build out something that like makes it easier for you to create what you want to create.
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And that's like a thing where it's like if we do want to say that AI is a tool then you have to let people use it as a tool and then like see what comes from it I think like the elite institutions right like the we've talked about this here where you know there was a.
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Movie critic that used AI to write his movie review and now he's been like ousted you know and it's like okay those those companies those institutions are allowed to do that to keep that integrity of you know the art that they're putting out but then other ones are going to start accepting you know AI as in some way or another and I think it's up to you know the companies and the institutions to decide that.
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But it should be more of a human or like like a social norm and not like regulations that get imposed so we'll see so that that's i'm happening in June so i'll try to give an update here about like what happens with those categories and like who wins and kind of i didn't see much backlash to this which is surprising.
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But I wonder if it's kind of just going under the radar and then once it actually happens in June whether people are going to you know have that backlash i mean the lessons on this one they're going to be a little skewed towards what I think a marketer and what I think about marketing but.
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This is going to be a weird lesson but it's like you take the users or the people your audience in this case it's this sort of festivals audience let's say and some version of the audience in this case it's some of the creators want to do something crazy and you go figure out how to service those people because that minority might be either vocal or grow.
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And usually the funny thing about minorities of things in general when you look at like percentage wise across something they usually tend to grow and so I think that's really interesting what they're doing in a solution they have to that kind of problem so I would say if you're a marketer and especially with AI there's going to be some people that are crazy with whatever you're marketing when it comes to your audience and the AI and so how do you find a way to get those crazy people to do it in a good corner until it's maybe not a corner until.
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You can figure out how to get more people kind of thinking like that if that's a good thing if it's not a good thing I mean you'll find out pretty quickly yeah yeah yeah I think that the marketing lesson for me is to figure out like where it's okay to use AI and where it's not right we're seeing the rise in ads like on Instagram that's you know tell you below like this was photographed by this person all this makeup there was no AI used figure out like where your brand stands on that like our.
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Is our audience okay with us using AI or not and then what aspect what aspects of AI they're okay with right and then also if you are going to use AI like do try some way to like elevate it I would assume especially at the level of cans that they are going to try to get like really creative with it and not just like half asset I've seen yeah like we've seen a lot of.
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Just like really shitty AI art so like that like matches everything else that's like happening out there and that's where it's like people are I feel are are right to turn against that because it's like well if you're just going to act like every other brand like why would I buy you versus the other brands you know so kind of figure out like how to elevate it for your brand and make it make sense for what you're doing and not just use AI just to use it but yeah.
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Be interested to see like if it even compares to like human art you know exactly yeah that's that's yeah it's going to be a really interesting new kind of right yeah okay so take away for the whole episode most of it is AI is here to stay it's just kind of figuring out.
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How and when you're going to use it you know with the first topic using I feel like too many companies I've been using it as a as an excuse and kind of saying it in order to kind of lessen.
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You know how harsh it is that what they're doing and instead of making it seem as if it's a positive thing just you know relying on its like negativity to you know make themselves feel better you know and I think that that's adding to the AI like narrative that AI is bad and it's not surprising that when bad things then happen people feel like it's a
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karmic you know response to the laying off of people right I do think that like tech has to move in the direction of like speaking to more of that tech optimism we talked about this last week where you know Sam Altman open AI and meta have all kind of started changing the way that they're talking about AI that it's not just going to come and you know take over
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people's jobs but it's going to be a tool that people can use but then you have you know companies like corn based and cloud fair say and that will we're laying off people because of AI.
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So it's a very tricky position to be but I think we do need to kind of start moving in the direction of talking about the positive things to AI and not using it just as an excuse for things that you know don't make sense.
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Okay cool well thank you for joining me this week, Keaton where can people find you.
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Awesome and then you can follow me at sony bushes everywhere and the podcast at mean team pod on YouTube and then mean team podcast on Spotify and TikTok thank you bye.