Two dogs podcasting on a mountaintop?

OpenAI recently released beta versions of Sora, and the quality is astounding. So, is Sora a threat or an opportunity? Does it enhance or denigrate creativity?

The output is far more advanced than other text-to-video solutions. Sora’s output is photorealistic and reflects a persistence of detail and style and a pretty accurate comprehension of the physical laws of motion- huge advancements. And it’s creating considerable consternation among the creative community.

Bernard Marr, a technology futurist, says, ”Text-to-video capabilities hold immense potential across diverse fields such as education, where they can create immersive learning materials; marketing, for generating engaging content; and entertainment, for rapid prototyping and storytelling.”

As with many of the questions around GAI, there are two sides to the argument. As Asa Hikers stated in his AdAge article, “Many see AI tools like Sora as a boon to the industry and a multiplier for creativity. On the other side, practitioners—many of whom work within the creative process—feel frustrated by what they view as a compromise of artistry for the fast and cheap tricks of a trendy technology. “

Brands need to be wary. Sora’s advancements heighten the concerns around the development of all GAI tech. The ability of AI models to translate textual descriptions into full-fledged videos amplifies the need for rigorous ethical guardrails and safeguards against misuse. Deep fakes, misinformation, and the ability to create social unrest are very real issues as people are less and less able to distinguish what is real from what is fake. Legal issues around copyright infringement, likeness theft, and mirroring will likely increase.

The truth is that conceptual creativity, originality, and ideation for brands are still critical differentiators and are things AI cannot take away. 

GAI is an augmentative tool and should be embraced by the creative community, or risk getting left behind. 

But know that the need for original ideas and creativity that align with brand strategy is not going away. After all, someone has to engineer the prompts.

Bill Bernbach defined an industry.

He knew that the business of building great companies is a business of great ideas. So did Liquid Death.

The undeniable power of creativity is something that feels ignored these days with marketers and agencies immersed in data and analytics.

Bernbach’s quote has never been more relevant—a necessary reminder of a truth lost on so many, especially in a world of parity offerings where differentiation appears elusive.

We’ve forgotten about human nature, that relationships, even business relationships, are built on emotion. We make emotional decisions and connect with things and ideas that move with us. Creativity is the conduit for that emotional connection.

But that was not lost on Mike Cessario, founder of Liquid Death. I mean, seriously, who enters a market dominated by major conglomerates to sell a wholly undifferentiated product? Water. Ok, flavored water.

There is nothing special about Liquid Death. Its main ingredient is water and carbon dioxide. And some flavoring. It’s got no magical ingredient. It is, without a doubt, a parity product in a category full of parity products backed by big players with a ton of money to outspend them.

But Cessario was not selling water. He was selling a brand. An idea. A beautifully crafted, creative, engaging idea that created its differentiation. And its demand.

And it is brilliant. If you doubt the power of creativity to drive differentiation, engagement, and loyalty, consider these numbers. In 2019, Liquid Death reported sales of $2.8M. The company's revenue saw a dramatic increase to $45M in 2021, further jumping to $130M in sales by 2022. The brand's valuation reflects its successful market strategy and growth, reaching a $700M valuation in recent years. This valuation is supported by the brand's ability to raise significant funding, totaling over $189M across eight rounds, further emphasizing investor confidence in Liquid Death's business model and market potential​.

Make no mistake: the intangible power of creativity in branding is a driver of significant and tangible financial value.

Today we honor the memory of MLK. The dream lives on.

When alignment is out of whack, things don’t work.

Alignment. It’s a word that isn’t used enough when talking about building high-value and high-performing companies.

When alignment is out of whack, things don’t work. Without alignment, confusion reigns. The compound benefits of consistency are lost.

Getting there begins with aligning stakeholder objects, a company’s IP, assets, offerings, or services with defined opportunities in the market and the market’s or category’s competitive dynamic. Where and how can you dominate? Achieving alignment requires a sustainable strategic positioning – the foundation for how a brand lives, breathes, and scales.

Positioning articulates the core of a brand's reason for being and informs everything else.

Solid positioning is grounded in a rational and emotional understanding of the target audience, clarity of the brand's market context, a core point of difference or value proposition, and support or proof of that value prop, all woven into a compelling, ownable, memorable, and single-minded positioning.

Once established, positioning can be seamlessly extended across strategies, tactics, and creative executions with the knowledge that all the company’s attributes and key messages are being consistently reinforced in the minds of all constituents, in every employee experience, every customer experience, and all communications and activations. 

It then all comes together. Everyone marching to the same drummer. If your brand attributes are consistently reinforced across all touchpoints, this is how you will be remembered. And it’s good to control the narrative. 

Positioning provides the path for a consistent brand experience. It is the foundation for alignment. It is how equity is built. It’s how to build value. It’s how long-term sustainable success happens. 

If all these elements in your brand/company are not aligned, best reset. 

Alignment. 

A good word to know.

Truth or lies?

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has said he is “worried that these LLMs will be used for large-scale disinformation.” In an age of deepfakes, bots, digital twins, and replicas, we are increasingly being denied a clear and confident understanding of the truth. It’s being fueled by technological change accelerating at an unprecedented rate with new tools that make the truth ever more elusive. Moreover, the impact of this change has ramifications that are yet to be fully understood.  

Rapid disinformation attacks—i.e., attacks in which disinformation is unleashed quickly and broadly to create an immediate disruptive effect—are one of the most significant challenges we face today. We’ve seen the impact of disinformation in past presidential elections and the blind spread of widely disproved conspiracy theories.

The ability to spread disinformation is getting easier and dramatically more effective. Generative AI (GAI) now offers the ability to target. Past campaigns were run by foreign actors who often had little cultural or English language fluency. Natural language processing has eliminated that problem opening the door for foreign actors.

With GAI tools, anyone can run disinformation content campaigns finely tuned and highly believable by profiling individuals and groups and replicating their vernacular, personalities, tone, and manner. This new tech can be woven into bots and deepfake videos and images of real people producing content that appears legitimate, relatable, and highly credible. All this makes disinformation infinitely more sharable and dangerous. 

Scarier still, GAI supports the ability to target specific individuals with personalized disinformation, indistinguishable from the real deal. People will not know whether what they are being served is legitimate or not. The general population is light on fact-checking and believing what they want to believe.

GAI is making it much easier to produce disinformation at scale with speed and efficiency and with a level of realism never before seen. Get ready. This crap will be free-flowing this coming election.

Truth? Lies? It’s going to be hard to tell. Are you ready?

Welcome to the explosion of AI-generated content farms.

And that waste will likely increase exponentially by exploiting programmatic ad placement on AI-generated sites. Generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process that can be scaled almost infinitely and in a fraction of the time resulting in what NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news websites.”

Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through programmatic advertising. Algorithms place ads on various websites according to complex calculations that optimize the number of eyeballs an ad might attract from the company’s target audience. As a result, big brands pay for ad placements on websites they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight. Welcome to the farm. 

NewsGuard recently uncovered nearly 50 junk websites publishing content entirely created by generative AI. It describes the articles as "low quality" and “clickbait," certainly not brand-friendly environments. And certainly not delivering quality eyeballs, and maybe no eyeballs at all.

Many of the sites are simply designed to generate money by showing advertising and affiliate links to readers. Others may have a more nefarious purpose, such as spreading disinformation, conspiracy theories, or propaganda. 

NewsGuard goes on to say, “Developers are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers. Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. This practice threatens to hasten the arrival of a glitchy, spammy internet that is overrun by AI-generated content, as well as wasting massive amounts of ad money.”

As this problem becomes more widespread, advertisers will likely demand more transparency from ad networks and publishers. They will need to be able to track where their ad dollars are going and ensure that they are well-spent on high-quality content.

Even so, reliability with programmatic advertising is an old problem that has never been solved, and AI is simply throwing fuel on the fire. 

Good luck with that.

Zume Pizza is a cautionary tale, albeit a day late and a dollar short.

Because what they are calling a “Startup Mass Extinction Event” is already happening.  

They were going to make pizza with robots in moving trucks. Who needs to spin dough in the air anyway? 

It was the brainchild of Alex Garden, and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son (the man who gave $3 billion in venture capital to Adam Neumann at WeWork) was hooked. Zume raised $445M from Softbank and other investors, including Yahoo’s Jerry Tang and Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr, personally. 

By 2019 it was valued at, wait for it… $2.25B! For real. 

Well, the rest of the story seems, in hindsight, predictable. Using robots to make pizzas in trucks while driving around is a dubious ambition, and it proved fatal. An incongruous pivot to producing sustainable packaging is equally hard to grasp

The point here is that what the startup environment is experiencing is like the effects of climate change – dry, unforgiving, and starting to burn. 

Capital is tight, interest rates are high, and the tolerance for lack of cash flow and profitability has evaporated.

It’s been called the potentially worse collapse of the startup space since 2008, and it’s already here. According to research by January Ventures, 81% of early-stage startups stated they only have less than 12 months of runway left. Leading venture capital players are predicting a “mass extinction event” for early- and mid-stage startups that will make the global financial collapse in 2008 “look quaint” by comparison.

The gloomy prediction for the state of the startup sector aligns with a massive drop in global venture financing throughout 2022. According to GlobalData, the value of global VC dropped by 36% in 2022. In 2021, the value of global VC deals was $512.7B compared with $293.8B in 2020.

Analyzing M&A and VC Activity in Q4 2022, GlobalData revealed that VC activity had dropped for a fourth straight quarter in the final quarter of 2022. Global economic slowdown, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, high inflation rates, rapidly rising interest rates, soaring energy prices, the looming threat of a global recession, and supply chain disruption are cited as reasons behind negative investor sentiment.

"The Mass Extinction Event for startups is underway," said Tom Loverro, general partner at IVP.

Buckle up.

This is a hard time to be a major consumer brand hoping not to offend diverse audiences.

And it hasn’t been pretty. But there are lessons for brands.

Consumer voices have never been louder. Anheuser-Busch, Target, Kohl’s, and North Face have all felt the vitriol of this latest push from the right, labeling them as “woke capitalists.” They urged boycotts. Bud Light took the heat after it partnered with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, while North Face received backlash for an ad featuring drag queen Pattie Gonia. Target and Kohl’s were criticized for Pride-themed clothing.

Brands that have survived this kind of backlash (think Nike and Colin Kaepernick) maintain their brand values and never give in. The lesson here - don’t capitulate. Brayden King, a professor of management, noted that a company's stock might fall, but once the issue falls out of the daily news cycle, the stock generally recovers.  

People move on.

While Bud Light has seen an impact from a boycott, the loss represents less than 1% of global sales. However, its stock did take a hit.

Target has carried Pride Month apparel for years, but the backlash was intense this year. The retailer moved product in some stores to other areas or removed it altogether, citing concerns for worker safety. The risk is alienating another significant and vocal constituent. Both sides are now pissed off. 

This whole “woke” thing has gotten out of hand. Brands don’t know which way to turn for fear of insulting someone. Go Woke, Go Broke is trending. Even Disney’s Lightyear movie, the Toy Story spin-off, failed at the box office, not meeting expectations presumably because the LGTBQIA+ themes turned off families.   

Brands today cannot please all the people all the time, so don't try to. The lesson here? Don’t try to be woke or not woke. Just be who you are. 

Engage in a considered process to clearly define your brand, its values, what it stands for, and what it believes. Be transparent about it. Stay true to those brand values and purpose. Be consistent. Then don’t waver. Don’t ever waver.

No matter what.

Maybe there’s too much doom and gloom around AI.

Fear is never productive. Yes, paradigms will shift, and jobs will be lost and redefined, but opportunity will abound. Gartner expects the AI market to be $297B as soon as 2027.

And Ive's numbers are considered an underestimate by some. For example, McKinsey predicts that AI could potentially contribute $13 trillion to the global economy by 2030. 

At Fortune’s MPW conference last week, Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood said AI will cause widespread but positive “disruption” in many industries over the coming years. And Goldman Sachs’ senior strategist Ben Snider said last week that he expects A.I. to boost corporate profits by 30% over the next decade as productivity soars. These are staggering numbers that will benefit the global economy.

One door closes, and another door opens. An adage that is so true in tech. And never more true now. According to a report by Gartner, AI will create 2.3 million jobs by 2020 while eliminating 1.8 million jobs.

What does that mean? It means that we need to adapt to the disruption. Learn to collaborate with these new tools.  

These tools can elevate humanity, expand our creativity, introduce new paradigms, and create new jobs and entire industries.

Yes, there needs to be oversight, transparency, and regulation. If our approach is to consider AI as a friend, not the enemy, and we embrace the potential while applying the proper guardrails, the future is bright.  

What’s hard to grasp is that this nascent industry has yet to find its legs. It is just the beginning. What’s to come is only limited by our imaginations. 

For creative people, yes, roles and industries will shift, but human creativity will continue to reign supreme. The answer is to embrace the change as a partner in creativity, as a way to unlock the imagination, and to make new things in new ways. 

After all, we are the creators. We are the directors. 

Embrace the possibilities.

Want to know what consistent focus on your brand and brand values gives you?

Dominance. Wealth. Brand love. Brand fame. Did I say wealth? CEOs need to balance near-term performance with building long-term equity, a mindset that seems lost on many. Every shareholder should demand it or get a new CEO. 

It takes being faithful to a well-defined brand position for the brand’s lifetime. And fulfilling that vision across every product, service, and customer touch point. Strong brands can survive and have financial value long after a business dies.

It takes staying with it, regardless of market condition. It takes being true to the brand. Always.

Want a telegraphic demonstration of the benefits of a strong brand? If these Apple numbers don’t do it, I don’t know what will. 

That kind of brand strength, consistently reinforced by excellent products and superior customer service, has allowed Apple to charge significantly more than its competitors, seamlessly cross-sell products and services, and in fact, encourage customers to embrace and be loyal to an entire ecosystem.

And, importantly, to launch new channels of revenue. Apple services revenue topped $79.4B in 2022 and exceeded $20B in Q1 of 2023.  

This kind of brand power drives loyalty and long-term sustainability. Yes, this is Apple, but all the dynamics hold true for all brands, regardless of size, stage, or category.

Strong brand build wealth. They drive more revenue, and they sell for more.

The requirements? Adopt this thinking as a way of doing business. From day one.

Make it your philosophy. Be consistent. Invest. Maintain. Imbue this in your employees and every constituent. Your brand is your most important asset.

Want to know how to get that done in your company? Hit us up, we can help.

AI replacing programmers?

There’s much talk of late about generative AI replacing jobs. And for some, like programmers, the fear is palpable. Amazon built its own AI coding assistant, CodeWhisperer. Google is encouraging its developers to use the new coding features in Bard.

Seems a little like interviewing and training your replacement. 

Not cool.

Given the tech industry's rush to deploy AI, it's easy to envision a future where programmers are not needed. 

It’s fair to say AI effectively is the beginning of the end for coding as we know it. The other side of that argument is the effective collaboration between developers and AI. According to Zachary Tatlockm, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, “It's unclear if there's any cap on the amount of software that humanity wants or needs. One way to think about it is that for the past 50 years, we have been massively underproducing. We haven't been meeting software demand.”

So maybe this partnership with AI has potential. But for coders, the nature of the job is likely changed forever. Sure, codes still need human verification, but for the bulk of the work? AI’s got it covered already. 

And as AI gets smarter, it begs the question, when does AI get so good at coding that there's nothing left for a human programmer to do? 

For the time being, it is more likely that AI will continue to augment human capabilities in various fields, such as healthcare, finance, and transportation, rather than completely replace humans. In some cases, AI may even create new job opportunities and industries. I mean, the ATM didn’t replace tellers…

Still, many people across many industries are asking the same question, “How do I get good at the tasks that are less likely to be replaced by a machine?”

Where will High-Level Machine Intelligence take us?

The frightening thing to many is the anticipation and impact of High-Level Machine Intelligence (HLMI) on humanity. Add to this the exponential growth happening in the AI space right now, evidencing change so rapid, and it’s clear to see we’re not in control. In fact, with many of the latest capabilities in LLMs (large language models), engineers have no idea how some outcomes actually happen. What’s clear is that many use cares are already surpassing human capability. 

In AI Impacts’ The 2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI, published in August of 2022, we learned what the experts think. One of the most compelling statistics was that 50% of AI researchers believe there is a 10% or greater chance that humans will go extinct from our inability to control AI.

This is a horrifying thought. AI is accelerating at such a pace, and business is racing to insert it into every facet of our lives without guardrails or regulation; we simply can not control it. It's just moving too fast. Eventually, many believe, it will control itself. Here are other key findings from the survey:

The aggregate forecast time to a 50% chance of HLMI was 37 years, or 2059. Many feel that the exponential growth in GAI capability we are seeing now will deliver HLMI far sooner. For example, this timeline is about eight years shorter in the six years since 2016, when the aggregate prediction put a 50% probability at 2061, or 45 years out.

The median respondent believes the probability that the long-run effect of advanced AI on humanity will be “extremely bad (e.g., human extinction)” is 5%. Many respondents were substantially more concerned: 48% of respondents gave at least a 10% chance of an extremely bad outcome. But some were much less concerned: 25% put it at 0%.

The median respondent also believes machine intelligence will probably (60%) be “vastly better than humans at all professions” within 30 years of HLMI, and the rate of global technological improvement will probably (80%) dramatically increase (e.g., by a factor of ten) as a result of machine intelligence within 30 years of HLMI.

Undoubtedly, there is much good in AI, and now we’re asking, “Will the bad outweigh the good?”

Seriously, how do we even wrap our heads around all this?

Will GAI be your bicycle?

It’s an interesting metaphor. And particularly apropos, in light of the recent debate around generative AI. Is it a tool that will propel us forward or become a threat to mankind? Friend or foe?

It all depends on your point of view.

Jobs was responding to a study reported in Scientific American back in 1981 that measured the efficiency of locomotion of all species. Humans did not fare well. But when the same tests were done with humans riding a bicycle, humans dominated. The concept resonated with Jobs, and he related it to computers, calling them “the bicycle of the mind.” He saw the computer as a tool that would make us faster, better, and smarter.

When the computer first proliferated, people were also worried. In his book “The Human Use of Human Beings,” published in 1950, the mathematician and computer pioneer Norbert Wiener expressed his concerns about the potential dangers of automation and the possibility of machines becoming so intelligent that they would threaten human existence.

So far, that hasn’t come to be.

Suffice it to say that the arguments around GAI are polarized, if not explosive. Some experts and thinkers continue to express concern that the development of advanced AI could pose a significant threat to humanity. They argue that as machines become more intelligent and capable, they could surpass human control and potentially cause harm. 

Others argue that the likelihood of this scenario is overstated and that the development of advanced AI could bring significant benefits to society. They point out that AI has the potential to solve many complex problems and improve our lives in countless ways.

Are we threatened by AI or welcoming it as a tool to advance our productivity and creativity? While there are undoubtedly nefarious uses for GAI, it most certainly will be transformative in many positive ways. And for most, it will be an augmentative technology. 

For now, it is a tool to be embraced, learned, and leveraged. Will it be your bicycle?

You may not lose your job to AI, but you might lose your job to someone using AI.

Has the metaverse lost its shine?

For Meta, the metaverse has been a veritable money pit. The Meta Reality Lab, MRL, reported losses of $13.7 billion and $10.2 billion in 2022 and 2021, respectively. Pundits call their dive head-first into the metaverse “an ill-timed passion project” and their rebranding a vanity project. Meta lost 70% of its value in 2022, one of the worst performers in the S&P 500.

Glad Facebook rebranded to Meta so they could focus on AI… For the moment, the metaverse is not so shiny, with investment shifting into AI at the “metaverse company.” The shiny new object is the Generative AI, and as Zuck made clear in Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call, it is the new priority.  

This shift in focus mirrors global funding. AI is the new darling. Through March 16 of last year, companies that played in the metaverse or web3 space had raised nearly $2B in funding. So far this year, metaverse and web3 companies have raised $586.7M. When you look at fundraising for generative AI companies, they’ve inverted: Through March 16, 2022, that space saw $612.8M in funding. This year, it’s up to $2.3B. A complete reversal in investment priority.

With so many resources now focused on AI, the company is positioning itself to become even more of a leader in the space. And if Zuckerberg wants to increase the focus on generative AI, he has the resources to do it.  

And while on the back burner, the metaverse is not dead. There are many use cases where AI can and will impact Meta’s platforms and solutions, and eventually both VR and AR. In the words of Zuck, “Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”

So we’ll see. From a branding perspective, there are arguments for and against the decision to rebrand to Meta. Chasing shiny objects without long-term balance and perspective sometimes invites dubious decisions. 

How will this shake out? What do you think?

The banking crisis of 2008 took a while to unfold.

In Washington Mutual’s case, customers withdrew $16.7B over ten days. It took only hours, fueled by an instantaneous and real-time Twitter panic that spread among SVB’s customers.

To get a sense of the scale of this run, the bank failures that just hit the U.S. financial system of about $319B are on a very similar scale to those recorded in 2008, of about $373B. The most significant difference was that the run resulted from only two bank failures: Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. This compares to 2008’s run when 25 commercial banks failed.

The government’s bailout is generating much debate. While depositors are being insured, investors aren’t. Shareholders of the banks will take a serious hit. And the government has said there will be no bailouts like in 2008. But it begs the question if there is a run on more banks, what about the 15 major US banks that hold well over $1 trillion in uninsured deposits? 

It’s good to remember that both SVB and Signature had fewer customers with considerable balances putting them in a precarious position that many traditional banks do not have. Between the two banks, around 90% of their deposits were uninsured.

My grandmother, who lived through the depression, put savings in three or four banks in case of a run and kept cash in books, under that mattress, and in peanut butter jars. That generation always felt a complete lack of trust in the banking system.

What about these days? Is trust eroding again?

Tech’s shiny objects.

The metaverse, self-driving cars, Web3, and crypto & NFTs have all had their moment in the sun. And each has seen its winters (the metaverse is entering one now). But generative AI is different. It’s here to stay, and its power and fallibility are seeding fears. 

“Humanity does not have anything to protect it from the potential risks of artificial intelligence,” said Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype. And Elon Musk put it this way, “For an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.”  

AI has stirred discussion around evolution, not biological evolution, evolution where survival of the fittest is a battle between humans and AI. I think I saw that movie, but the real thing might actually be coming.

What’s common among the tech elite that talk about human evolution and the birth of our robot AI replacements is a sense of inevitability. The notion that humanity is on a path of self-destruction regardless, and the development of a “species” that can outlast humans is inevitable and, some argue, necessary.

There is no agreed-upon timeline for when humanity might fall. What’s clear is this shiny new object has the power and potential for chaos like no tech we’ve seen before. 

Yes, there are significant opportunities for positive use cases, but do they outweigh the potential for maleficence? 

The core issue here is that AI, specifically ChatGPT, is currently wildly inaccurate, extremely vulnerable to manipulation, and prone to misinformation seamlessly blending truth and fiction and, in some cases, providing false source links. Still, companies, governments, and people are adopting AI solutions every day, assuming the content generated to be the truth. 

Schmidt adds, “Bad actors can use generative AI tools to create and target misinformation, leading to violence. My industry has taken the position that this stuff is good, so we'll just give it to everyone. I don't think that's true anymore -- it's too powerful.”

Some say it should be destroyed... what do you think?

She’s only an average gymnast but excels at what the boys want.

And thus, what brands want: eyeballs. And she’s in the money with the NCAA’s new rules on Name, Image, and Likeness (NLI). But there is something that feels fundamentally in conflict, but it’s the way of the world now in amateur college athletics.

Meet Olivia Dunne, who has more followers than Derek Jeter on Instagram and more than Beyonce on TikTok. Dunne has worked with Vuori, American Eagle Outfitters, and a plant-based supplement company called PlantFuel. An autographed trading card with her likeness retails for $89.

Beginning in July 2021, new rules allow college athletes to sign name, image, and likeness deals. This turned on a generation of stars who grew up on social media to cultivate online personas that can be bigger than their profiles as athletes.  

Not everyone likes it. “This is a step back,” Tara VanDerveer, the Stanford women’s basketball coach, told the New York Times about some of the sexy social media content being created by female college athletes. 

But hey, if brands can exploit it, they will exploit it. 

According to data from Opendorse, College athletes earned an estimated $917 million in the first year of Name Image and Likeness (NIL) payments, which began in July 2021.

Three-quarters of NCAA athletes have interacted in some NIL activity since NIL deals began. By May 31, 2022, the average NCAA Division 1 athlete had received $3,711 through NIL, while some big-name players scored high six-figure deals.

Football and men’s basketball account for nearly 67% of NIL compensation (Opendorse), while male athletes lead NIL activities (62.7%) and receive 93% of donor compensation. When eliminating football, the biggest revenue driver in the market, women lead NIL activities by a slim margin.

The whole concept is a polarizing issue. Are the NIL rules for student-athletes right or wrong? Or just a sign of the times?

You tell me.

This shit scares me.

You must read the full Bing A.I. chat published in the NYT a few days ago. It’s beyond crazy.

Bing has always been second-rate, but things just might be changing. With its $10B investment in OpenAI and its ChatGPT, and Musk’s disowning of the Company, its mind-blowing technology is now in the hands of Microsoft.

The chat (link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html?) begins to unwrap just how impactful this tech can be. The first question, of course, is sentience, its ability to come across as feeling and human. The illusion is powerful.

The overwhelming part of this is the sheer scope of use cases, both for good and evil, that becomes blatantly obvious.

When you consider a tech industry that has grown out of the art of calculated behavioral addiction and manipulation, the algorithmic spreading of untruths, the complete loss of discovery, and the inability to determine real from not real, this new unregulated tech feels more than ominous. Yes, the positive use cases are huge as well, no doubt, but it just doesn’t feel like the positive will dominate. Maybe it’s just the world we live in today.

Check out the Times article linked above, read the exchange with the Chatbot, and tell me it doesn’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand. 

Especially considering we are at the earliest stages of this technology.

Man…

It’s been a blood bath.

FTX, BlockFI, Three Arrows, Voyager Digital, and Celsius all collapsed in 2022. In addition, the crypto exchange, Coinbase, the largest direct listing in history, took an 86.31% market cap hit in 2022. Mainly due to low signups and a crash in trading volume, the stock was also impacted by the terraUSD/luna crash in May and the spectacular FTX implosion in November. Even golden boy Tom Brady got sucked in and took a serious hit.

And it wasn’t just Coinbase taking a hit. MicroStrategy, the world’s largest corporate holder of bitcoin, is down 70.61%, and Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest publicly traded crypto mining firms, fell 89%. Silvergate Capital, a California-based bank that caters almost exclusively to crypto companies, is also down 89%. Coingecko reported that 951 cryptocurrencies were declared dead or failed coins in 2022. With 8000 coins listed in 2021, 40% have failed or were deactivated.

While those who are deep into crypto believe it will bounce back (they speak of a 4-year cycle). But for the general population, it’s a different story. For many, crypto is seen as a scam that got exposed. Confidence and trust have taken a beating, negatively haloing every crypto-related brand. And that’s part of the problem. To build back momentum, it needs the masses to believe and play.  

Crypto needs oversight and regulation to earn back confidence, and it needs it soon. 

Is this an existential problem for crypto? Will this crypto winter see a Spring thaw?

Maybe so, maybe not. 

Just don’t bet the ranch.

Virtual shopping and the metaverse are reshaping the retail experience.

The retail marketplace has never been so fragmented, and the focus is shifting to AI and Web3. Accenture reports that 30% of consumers plan to shop in the metaverse this holiday. And more than 67% of retail executives are experimenting with the metaverse and virtual worlds to accelerate their businesses and engage with consumers where they want to be. What was once “brick-and-mortar or e-tail” is now brick-and-mortar and e-tail and virtual shopping and the metaverse. Be everywhere all the time.  

Bloomingdales has been dabbling for some time now. For their 150th anniversary, they launched their virtual store designed by Emporia that went live during Fashion Week this year. The next step is dropping it into the metaverse, or metaverses, since it’s not yet one place. Bloomingdales doesn’t see it as a change but rather an extension of the retail experience they have thrived at for decades. Regardless, they are still throwing tons of money at something that is far from showing a positive ROI. Good for the brand, though. 

As Standish put it, the hope is that “consumers move freely and seamlessly across both digital and non-digital channels at every point in the buying journey.” She goes on to say, “Ambitious retail enterprises will shape new physical and digital experiences, virtual and physical worlds co-populated by people and AI, industries made possible by new computing capabilities.”

The truth is that brands are still experimenting. The spend needs to be considered an investment in future engagement given that the metaverse is still in its infancy and yet to be widely adopted. But it’s coming.

In a short time, the metaverse and Web3 have assumed a prominent role in many brands’ strategic thinking. Goldman Sachs predicts the whole virtual e-tail, web3, metaverse shopping thing is an $8 trillion opportunity, though only indicated by the heavy investment pouring into the space. The jury is still out.

It’s probably only a matter of time. We’ll see.