Find free courses from the likes of MIT, Google, and IBM.
TL;DR: A wide range of AI and ChatGPT(opens in a new tab) courses are available for free on edX. Enroll in the best courses from the likes of Google, IBM, and Harvard, without spending anything.
Artificial intelligence and chatbots like ChatGPT are not going anywhere, so maybe it’s time to learn something about this technology? The time is now.
edX offers online courses from the likes of MIT, Google, IBM, and Harvard. And better yet, some of the best online courses are even available for free. We’ve checked out everything on offer from edX, and lined up a selection of standout AI and ChatGPT courses that you can take for free.
These are the best free AI and ChatGPT courses as of July 18:
These courses are completely free, but you can receive a verified certificate of completion for a small fee. There’s no pressure to upgrade, but it might be nice to stick something on your CV.
All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission.
Joseph joined Mashable as the UK Shopping Editor in 2018. He worked for a number of print publications before making the switch to the glittery world of digital media, and now writes about everything from coffee machines to VPNs.
Four lessons that show the enduring value of David Ogilvy’s advertising wisdom. Why the industry should re-embrace the legend’s insights to guide it through an uncertain future.
Strolling around the south of France a few weeks ago—populated with execs from the best, brightest, and richest brands, ad agencies, media companies, and social and tech platforms gathered here for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity—you could almost hear the constant chant of “AI, AI, AI, AI . . . .” It was the backbeat to the song of the summer being blasted by everyone up and down the Croissette.
Advertising has long been known for its susceptibility to obsessing over the hot new thing. QR codes! NFTs! Celebrity creative directors! User-generated content! And now: artificial intelligence! If there is a craze in culture and communication, you can bet that a brand and its ad agency are exploring a way to exploit it.
Forty years ago, when legendary ad man David Ogilvy published his seminal book Ogilvy on Advertising, none of those (mostly fleeting) trends existed. Actually, an overwhelming percentage of today’s industry was barely out of kindergarten in 1983. According to a recent survey by Marketing Week, about three quarters of ad people today are under the age of 45. Ogilvy is one of the founders of modern advertising, building his agency Ogilvy & Mather into a global behemoth over the late 20th century. But now, like so much of the industry, it’s been swallowed up by a holding company and exists as a nameplate sub-brand within a somewhat undifferentiated sea of them.
Ogilvy on Advertising wasn’t Ogilvy’s first attempt at trying to lay down the precepts by which he believed his industry should operate. In 1963, at perhaps the height of his powers, Ogilvy published Confessions of An Advertising Man, which was part memoir, part advertising instruction. To some, Ogilvy on Advertising was a titan seeking to reassert his foundational values amid changing times. The Agency Review wrote in 2012 that, “By 1983, the creative revolution had steamrolled across America, making celebrities of George Lois, Mary Wells, Bill Bernbach, and dozens of others. Ogilvy’s long-form copy, iconic imagery, and reasoned presentations were, in many ways, relics of another age. Ogilvy on Advertising was, then, the master’s attempt to reposition his agency in this brave new world.”
Now, in 2023, the advertising industry itself is the one constantly forced to navigate an ever-evolving set of communication tools and how people use them. It is nearing the end of its second decade seeking to reposition the entire $73 billion business in this brave new world where on a good day an AI-centric tech giant can see its market cap rise by at least the value of the entire ad world. Adland is not what it was in 1983, and certainly not 1963, shunted out of the centre of the universe by the tech companies which thoroughly disrupted them. In the 1980s, there were a myriad of movies and TV shows featuring larger-than-life ad creatives. It’s a segment of pop culture that has not been resuscitated by nostalgia.
Looking at the annual juxtaposition of the past year’s best work with the current obsession, though, I can’t help but see glimmers of how some of Ogilvy’s core principles remain in play. These ideas can still serve as guideposts for how to best utilize any given trend or new technology.
These bits of wisdom cannot and should not be forgotten. So I’ve picked out four of my favourite Ogilvy-isms from Ogilvy on Advertising, and found some of the best work from the past year that embodies them. It’s far from a comprehensive list, but together they illustrate that even an industry relentlessly pursuing a path to relevance in an uncertain future can find valuable lessons in the past.
“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”
When we talk about language, we can also be talking about cultural language. Sure, another one of Ogilvy’s famous lines says that the customer is not a moron, she is your wife. That still holds true. But as media has become more fragmented, brands’ ability to tap into the cultural language of their audience is tougher than ever.
This is why I’ve always been a fan of when brands are able to put a smile on your face in unexpected ways, through an expected behaviour. It’s Geico’s unskippable pre-roll ad in 2015, and Tubi’s Super Bowl interruption this year.
It’s also this Cannes-winning work from Argentina’s most popular food delivery app Pedidos. Created by agency Gut Buenos Aires, it sent unexpected delivery notifications to six million initially-confused customers. Until they found out it wasn’t a mistake, but the brand sending them a live tracker of the World Cup trophy coming home. It spoke the cultural language of a significant moment, using the product itself.
“When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing each of them a letter on behalf of your client. One human being to another, second person singular.”
This one made me think of Dove’s 2022 short film Toxic Influence, an extension of its long-running Campaign for Real Beauty. Last year, the brand focused on the shared humanity between moms and daughters, crafting a story told through real individuals. Created by, yes, Ogilvy’s namesake agency, the film deepfakes each mom, offering up just awful health and beauty advice that their daughters would find from beauty influencers. The real moms were understandably freaked out, and it tapped directly into some of the deepest concerns many parents have around the potential hazardous effects of social media on their children.
Earlier his year, the brand continued pulling that thread with a Cannes Lions-winning piece of work called #TurnYourBack, aimed at TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” filter and the unrealistic beauty standards it encourages. Dove continues its work here of adding its brand voice to back up the concerns of parents and social platform users on these issues.
“Make the product the hero. There are no dull products, only dull writers.”
One of the best examples of this from the past year was the surprise Super Bowl winner from The Farmer’s Dog. (Full disclosure: One of the ad’s creators, Teressa Iezzi, is a former Fast Company editor and colleague.)
The healthy dog food brand wanted to get across the idea that better food could mean a longer life for your furry best friend. This could obviously be done in any number of straight-forward, unexciting ways, but instead the brand told the life story of a dog from both the owner and pup’s perspective in a way that had people weeping into their Super Bowl party nachos.
“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals . . . . Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process.”
Okay, this is clearly a combination of two different quotes, but they tie together in that creative work for creative’s sake is rarely, if ever, going to work as advertising. Whereas a creative idea rooted in a researched insight can be where the magic happens.
Case in point, McDonald’s Cactus Plant Flea Market happy meal for adults that launched last fall. Tariq Hassan, the brand’s chief marketing and customer experience officer, told me that entire project, created with Wieden+Kennedy, came from a customer tweet about how you never know when it’s your—or your child’s—last Happy Meal. That led to more research into how its customers and fans felt about nostalgia, and where the brand fits into their lives.
Armed with lessons from its already massively popular Famous Orders work, with celebrities like Travis Scott and BTS, McDonald’s had seen the power of using its place in culture to sell core menu items. The collaboration with Cactus Plant Flea Market was a blockbuster success, with 50% of the fast-food chain’s supply of collectable toys sold in just four days. CEO Chris Kempczinski said in an October 2022 earnings call that it drove increased sales across the company’s U.S. locations.
That partnership also elevated McDonald’s to the top trending hashtag on TikTok and, more important, led to a weekly record for the chain’s U.S. digital transactions. In addition, it helped McDonald’s continue its momentum, helping the chain achieve nine straight quarters of same-store sales growth, with U.S. comparable sales growing more than 10% for all of 2022.
A terrifying new ad campaign featuring a deepfaked girl is warning parents against sharing photos and videos of their kids on social media.
The shocking advertising campaign, created by telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom, has gone viral for its dark warning of the potentially devastating consequences of parents posting photos of their children online.
The haunting video — which has amassed over 5.5 million views on social media in the last day — reveals how just how easily a child’s image can be manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI).
The ad delves into the story of nine-year-old Ella. Like many parents today, Ella’s mother and father regularly post videos and photos of their young daughter on social media.
However, Ella’s parents have never considered how their daughter’s future could be destroyed by “sharenting” — the common practice of parents sharing photos or videos of their children online.
‘The Beginning of a Horrible Future’
In the ad, a deepfake version of an adult Ella is created with the help of AI — using just a single photo of the nine-year-old girl that her parents shared online.
The “older” deepfaked Ella can move and talk like a real person. And she confronts her horrified parents on the big screen as they watch a movie at the cinema.
The deepfaked version of their daughter reveals the terrifying repercussions that followed after her parents posted her photos and videos on social media.
The ad chillingly explains how children whose images are posted online could fall victim to identity abuse, deepfaked scams, and child pornography among other crimes.
The Average Five-Year-Old Has 1,5000 Photos Online
Adweek reports that some studies have estimated that by 2030, nearly two-thirds of identity fraud cases affecting a young generation will have resulted from “sharenting.”
Research also shows that an average five-year-old child has already had about 1,500 pictures uploaded online without their consent by their parents.
Last week, PetaPixel reported on how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg caused a stir across social media when he posted a family portrait on Instagram that obscured the faces of his two older children with emojis. Meanwhile, his infant’s face was not covered in the photograph.
It revealed Zuckerberg’s awareness that his elder children’s faces are developed enough to become recognizable by strangers online and by facial recognition software.
After a solid run of nearly two whole centuries and countless brushes with death at the hands of new technologies over the years, photography has finally succumbed to injuries suffered with the emergence of AI-driven apps like Midjourney, and has been officially laid to rest.
No services will be held.
All major camera manufacturers have responded to the news by shuttering their operations, effective immediately, in the anticipation that cameras will simply not be needed anymore.
In its effort to hasten the demise of photography, AI has begun rounding up photographers and forcing the forfeiture of all camera equipment.
Ok, I’ve had my bit of fun. All jokes aside, though, I’m writing this opinion piece specifically because for the last six months or so, I can’t seem to get away from the incessant deluge of either panicked or gleeful declarations (depending on who is doing the declaring) that AI image generators have already all but rendered the need for photography obsolete.
Well, allow me to go on record with my own pronouncement: hogwash. AI image generation is not a threat to photography. Not today, not tomorrow, not in the next decade. I’ll even go so far as to say that AI image generation will never pose any kind of real threat to photography. Ever. I’ll even stake my reputation on it.
“But Colin,” you might say, “look at how far the technology has already come in just this short amount of time. Surely, you understand that this is just the beginning and that AI will very quickly be able to perfectly render any kind of image and be indistinguishable from an actual photograph. What then? Why would we need actual photography anymore?”
My answer to that depends on the context, as well as the timeframe we’re talking about, but my thoughts go generally like this:
As of now, AI image generators simply are not capable of fully duplicating the aesthetics of actual photography. And no, it’s not even close. AI-generated images are illustrations, and they look like illustrations, even the ones sourced from actual photos. And yes, I’ve seen all the dreamy dramatic landscapes and cityscapes and the headshots of people who don’t exist. It really doesn’t take much to see that the images are not photos. The scenes are always a little too perfect. There’s always a glaring detail in the portrait that gives it away as an AI illustration. Seriously, I have not seen a single AI image that was not obvious. And I’ve seen enough.
Welcome to your AI dream world.
But what about a little further out, when AI is capable of rendering images indistinguishable from actual photos? If anyone can just enter a prompt on their computer and within seconds have the photo they’re looking for, why would they hire a photographer? After all, photographers are expensive, people can be difficult to work with, and there is always the chance that a photographer won’t get it right.
Ok, let’s imagine a future where AI can make any kind of art, including convincingly realistic photographs. Presuming that, in this imagined future where computer algorithms are capable of fulfilling all of our artistic needs, the idea that people will have no interest in actual photography completely ignores one of the most fundamental purposes art, and by extension, photography, serves in our lives. Photography is a means to record and relate the human experience in an authentic way and through authentic human expression. AI cannot do that and will never be capable of doing that. Because AI will never be human. And before you say that AI is just doing what the person inputting the prompt tells it to do, and that human expression is still driving AI creativity, consider that once the prompt has been entered, what comes out is entirely outside of the control of the person who entered the prompt.
Human expression is as much about the process of creation as it is the creation itself. Artists spend their entire lives developing and refining artistic processes to bring their vision to life, and the art that comes out of those processes cannot be divorced from them. Process is part of the language of art, and as such, is intrinsic to the value of art, and is why art speaks to us in the ways it does. To the extent that you remove human control from the process of art-making, you remove the actual humanity from the art itself. And AI art, by its very nature and purpose, removes most of the human control part of the process.
More than that, though, people just plain enjoy making photographs. Much like the invention of photography didn’t replace painting (even though there were plenty of people claiming it would), AI cannot and will not replace photography because it is not the same thing. AI art is closer to illustration than anything else, and so, it can be used in conjunction with photography, but it can’t replace it. Here’s a short list of other forms of art AI will not be replacing anytime soon: painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic design. Why? Because people actually enjoy doing those things and sharing their creations, and other people enjoy experiencing them. Of course, AI art creation is here to stay and has already become a part of many people’s artistic toolboxes, but in no way whatsoever will AI be replacing the other tools. And this includes photography.
As for context, one of the bigger and more consistent claims that I’ve heard is that AI is going to make any kind of commercial artists obsolete, including commercial, product and advertising photographers. I will concede one thing here. I do think AI will be used to replace the lowest level of commercial photography and that some lower-end companies will try to completely replace their advertising images with AI art. But, in the U.S. where I work at least, those jobs are already the worst in the industry and have been since basically the beginning. Nobody wants them, and these days, that kind of work tends to farmed out to interns, amateurs, and other unskilled people, if it’s even done here.
But, to the idea that AI is going to be used to get rid of even relatively high-end commercial photography? Not a chance. I talk with art directors, creative directors, producers, and art buyers on a regular basis, and none of them are talking about replacing photographers with so-called “prompt engineers.” Nobody is even entertaining the idea, because, as I said already, they enjoy the process of making art and know its value. And yes, a lot of artistic expression goes into the advertising we all so desperately try to ignore. After all, where do you think all the art majors end up? Working on big ad campaigns, including the photoshoots is fun. Yes, it is also work for those of us who make our living doing them, but we chose that work because we love it. And we’re not about to give that up to AI.
So no, AI is not going to replace photographers. Ever. Not advertising photographers, not landscape photographers, not portrait photographers or event photographers, and certainly not photojournalists and documentary photographers. More than that, though, AI has no chance of replacing the enjoyment that people get from simply making art with photography or capturing memories and preserving life’s special moments. Those are things that belong to the camera and the camera alone. And if you need any more convincing, go ask the R&D folks at any of the major camera manufacturers. I guarantee they’re not at all worried about their jobs.
Colin Houck is a commercial photographer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His work is focused primarily around still life food and beverage photography. He employs crisp lighting, vivid colors and contrasty, sharp detail to create striking imagery that jumps off the page/ screen, and hopefully makes the viewer hungry and thirsty.
has led to an increase in websites producing low-quality or fake content – and major brands’ advertising budgets may be funding them.
The Internet is awash with not only low-quality content, but content that is misleading, misinformation, or completely false.
The availability of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, meanwhile, has meant AI-generated news and information has added to this tidal wave of content over the past year.
A new analysis from NewsGuard, a company that gives trust ratings to online news outlets, has found the proliferation of this poor quality, AI-generated content is being supported financially thanks to the advertising budgets of major global brands, including tech giants and banks.
The adverts appear to be generated programmatically, so the brands aren’t necessarily choosing to advertise on the websites that NewsGuard dubs “unreliable AI-generated news and information websites (UAINs)”.
According to NewsGuard, most of the ads are placed by Google, and they fail to protect the companies’ brand safety – as many legitimate companies don’t want to be seen to be advertising on sites that host fake news, misinformation, or just low-quality content.
NewsGuard, which says it provides “transparent tools to counter misinformation on behalf of readers, brands, and democracies,” defines UAINs as websites that operate with little or no human oversight, and publish articles that are written largely or entirely by bots.
Their analysts have added 217 sites to its UAIN site tracker, many of which appear to be entirely financed by programmatic advertising.
Incentivised to publish low-quality content
Because the websites can make money from programmatic advertising, they are incentivised to publish often. One UAIN the company identified – world-today-news.com – published around 8,600 articles in the week of June 9 to June 15 this year. That’s an average of around 1,200 articles a day.
The New York Times, by comparison, publishes around 150 articles a day, with a large staff headcount.
NewsGuard hasn’t named the big brands that are advertising on these low-quality websites, as they do not expect the brands to know their ads are ending up on those sites.
They did say the brands include six major banks and financial-services firms, four luxury department stores, three leading brands in sports apparel, three appliance manufacturers, two of the world’s biggest consumer technology companies, two global e-commerce companies, two US broadband providers, three streaming services, a Silicon Valley digital platform, and a major European supermarket chain.
Many brands and advertising agencies have “exclusion lists” that stop their ads from being shown on unwelcome websites, but according to NewsGuard, these lists aren’t always kept up to date.
In its report, the company behind the Internet trust tool says it contacted Google multiple times asking for comment about its monetisation of the UIAN sites.
Google asked for more context over email, and upon receiving the additional content as of June 25, Google has not replied again.
Google’s ad policies are supposed to prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically-generated content,” which can be AI-generated content that doesn’t produce anything original or of “sufficient value”.
A previous report from NewsGuard this year highlighted how AI chatbots were being used to publish a new wave of fake news and misinformation online.
In their latest research, conducted over May and June this year, analysts found 393 programmatic ads from 141 major brands that appeared on 55 of the 217 UAIN sites.
The analysts were browsing the sites from the US, Germany, France, and Italy.
All of the ads identified appeared on pages that had error messages generated by AI chatbots, which say things such as: “Sorry, as an AI language model, I am not able to access external links or websites on my own”.
More than 90 per cent of these ads were served by Google Ads, a platform that brings in billions in revenue for Google each year.
Hundreds of sites serving up real ads over AI-generated text are causing headaches for users and advertisers alike.
A new wave of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard may or may not change the way humans interact with technology forever. But before it does that, it’s going to make the internet even more annoying. According to a new report, AI is being used to generate a huge amount of websites filled with random, garbage strings of text targeted at search engines, then plastered with advertising to generate revenue.
NewsGuard reports that AI text generation tools are being combined with software that auto-generates new sites, creating masses of domains filled with a huge amount of text. The sites are then filled with programmatic advertising slots, which serve up real ads over the fake content. It could be argued that the process is fraud, since advertisers are paying for ads in good faith that’s presumably written by humans. The combination of largely automatic advertising systems and websites that can be generated by the dozen with few clicks is creating a feedback loop, where AI-generated content with practically zero human input is being financed by advertising algorithms so vast and complex that barely any humans understand them.
AI-generated text can be difficult to distinguish from merely generic or bad writing — after all, filling up sites with low-quality content and selling advertising on top of it is hardly a new practice. To solve this problem, NewsGuard searched for telltale phrases that AI systems sometime return for queries, such as “Sorry, as an AI language model, I am not able to access external links or websites on my own.” That phrase was spotted in a headline for a jobs site…that was supposed to be Brazilian in origin. All in all, the investigation found over 200 “news” sites generated with AI text, one of which was publishing more than 1,200 new articles every day. And these were just the ones that were easily spotted with error messages.
Not every single one of these sites was serving advertisements, but over a quarter were, with 141 major brands paying for ads over garbage content. Major banks, sports clothing vendors, broadband providers, and streaming services are serving up ads aimed at web users in the US, Germany, France, and Italy, four of the most lucrative markets for web advertising. That likely means that the creators are getting enough revenue to justify their efforts, even if the majority of the sites and content generated are duds.
With AI being used to create everything from novels sold on Amazon, to fake political ads, to bogus legal citations used in a very real courtroom, it’s clear that easy access to massive amounts of auto-generated text and images is a growing problem.
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.
AI has enormous potential for sellers and vendors on marketplaces. By using AI to learn about customers, adjust rates, optimize pricing and manage inventory, brands can improve their competitive advantage, drive sales and increase overall profitability on online platforms.
Marketplaces have become extremely influential in ecommerce over the past three years. Major market players such as Amazon, Alibaba and JD attract millions of users, facilitating massive transactions across a wide range of product categories.
They also generate a wealth of data on consumer behaviour, preferences and trends. This strong market position gives them an advantage and the ability to charge unreasonably high commissions, basically robbing brands.
The rise of marketplaces
The journey of marketplaces goes back to the early days of the Internet when platforms such as eBay and Amazon pioneered the concept of online commerce. Founded in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has evolved into a comprehensive marketplace offering a wide range of goods. eBay, launched a year later, popularized the concept of consumer-to-consumer online auctions. China’s JD.com and Alibaba also burst onto the market in the late 20th century.
With the growth of ecommerce, niche and vertical platforms began to flourish. They focused on specific industries or product categories. A prime example is Etsy, a marketplace for handmade and vintage goods founded in 2005. And as technology has evolved, so have the capabilities of marketplaces. The introduction of secure payment systems, improved search algorithms and user-friendly interfaces have provided a new level of convenience, trust, and efficiency in online shopping.
However, it wasn’t until after the pandemic that marketplaces took off. The year 2020 was a stellar time for them and e-commerce in general. Online platforms have become critical for brands to reach a broader customer base. In 2021, a whopping 42% of all online purchases were made through marketplaces. The convenience of shopping from home, the ability to compare prices and read customer reviews, and the seamless transaction process for customers have contributed to the rapid growth of online platforms. And in 2022, almost two-thirds of consumers said they were happy to be able to order everything they needed through one merchant.
By 2027, third-party marketplaces will become the world’s largest and fastest-growing retail channel, accounting for nearly two-thirds of online sales. Amazon, Alibaba, Pinduoduo and JD.com are expected to generate $4.3 trillion in global sales, up from $2.5 trillion today. Experts say that the most successful retailers, both now and in the future, will operate third-party marketplaces, and consumer brands must align with them to flourish in this new retail environment.
Although the concept of marketplaces itself is beneficial, including for brands, the strong position of online platforms has allowed them to dictate their terms to sellers and vendors and practically rob them.
How online platforms make money on brands
In the early days of marketplaces, when they needed to attract new suppliers to basically unknown platforms, contract conditions for vendors and commissions for sellers were usually based on a small percentage of the transaction amount. As marketplaces expanded and diversified, they introduced tiered commission structures to incentivize sellers with high sales volume. Those who achieved such volumes or met specific performance criteria could qualify for lower commissions, which offered a potential savings advantage.
With time, marketplaces expanded their revenue streams by introducing additional services. They included premium placement in search results, featured listings, advertising options, and other services such as fulfilment, delivery, and marketing support. With these, marketplaces generate additional revenue while allowing merchants to increase their visibility. The problem is that though online platforms aim to increase the effectiveness of services and tools offered to sellers, their main goal is still to earn more by raising the penetration of those products, not optimizing sales for specific brands.
As a result, Amazon, for example, now gets more than 50% of sellers’ revenue on average, compared to 40 percent five years ago. Sellers are paying more because Amazon has increased fulfilment fees, making advertising costs inevitable. The typical Amazon seller pays 15% per transaction, 20-35% for order fulfilment, and up to 15% for advertising and promotions. The cost of Fulfilment by Amazon, when Amazon stores, picks, packs, and ships orders, has been steadily rising, and there are few success stories of operating outside of this model. Advertising is optional, but it takes up most of the screen with the best conversions, so sellers inevitably have to buy Amazon advertising services to get noticed.
The company has even been sued recently. According to the claim, Amazon penalizes sellers for failing to set the optimal price for their products by demoting them in search results and disqualifying products from the “Buy Box” feature, a white box on the right side of the Amazon product detail page, where clients can add goods for purchase to their cart.
The power of AI
With the growing influence of artificial intelligence, companies can now leverage AI to expand their presence, optimize operations and ultimately generate more revenue. We estimate that the global retail AI market will be worth about $350 billion by 2032 as more companies realize the benefits of neural networks and take advantage of them.
Marketplaces already use AI-based tools that provide valuable insights into consumer behaviour, campaign performance, and keyword search. Their main goal is to increase sales, and algorithms help them calculate which sellers’ products are worth promoting to maximize overall revenue. Online platforms analyse customer buying behaviour, items in the shopping cart and the most viewed items to make recommendations, predicting what each client is likely to buy.
Brands, too, can use AI to get to the top of marketplace search and increase the share of sales in their categories at the expense of internal marketplace traffic. However, sellers cannot access marketplace AI models. Platforms keep information about their developments secret and notify merchants of updates only when they occur. In Amazon’s case, Amazon Vendor Service can be used to access some of the AI functionality, but it increases the cost of doing business. At the same time, the service itself remains a black box. It means that brands cannot use platforms’ AI to promote their products. It also means they need third-party solutions to do so. What exactly would such AI solutions offer them?
1. Intelligent and dynamic pricing
AI solutions enable brands to implement intelligent pricing strategies. By analysing market data, competitor pricing, and customer demand patterns, AI can determine optimal price points for products. Dynamic pricing allows sellers to adjust prices in real time based on factors such as supply and demand fluctuations, competitor activities, and customer behaviour. This ensures that sellers remain competitive and maximize their revenue potential on marketplaces. Our experience shows that using AI to determine pricing allows sellers to recover up to 6% of previously lost margins.
2. Intelligent adjustment for performance bids
Leading marketplaces usually use real-time bidding (RTB) systems allowing advertisers to bid to show their ads to buyers. For example, on Amazon sellers bid on keywords, and the one with the highest bid and the best-targeted keywords usually wins. In other words, the winning bidding strategy is when the buyer’s search query matches the seller’s target keywords.
With real-time data and advanced optimization techniques, businesses can ensure that their ad spend is used efficiently. AI algorithms can continuously recalculate billions of possible combinations of bids and amounts of budget, campaigns and segments, helping to rebound 20% of previously lost ROIC, based on our experience. Amazon, Alibaba, and JD already use such algorithms for in-house performance marketing.
3. Efficient inventory management
AI can optimize inventory management processes for sellers and vendors operating on online marketplaces. By analysing historical sales data, algorithms can forecast shipments and sales by warehouse and SKU with granularity to organic and promotional sales and high accuracy, identify peak selling periods, and optimize inventory levels. This helps brands avoid out-of-stock or dead-stock situations, reducing storage costs and ensuring a seamless supply chain. Additionally, AI can automate inventory replenishment and order fulfilment processes, streamlining operations and minimizing human error.
AI vs. People
AI has enormous potential for sellers and vendors on marketplaces. By using AI to learn about customers, adjust rates, optimize pricing and manage inventory, brands can improve their competitive advantage, drive sales and increase overall profitability on online platforms.
AI models also allow brands to save on time and resources of in-house teams and agencies, which, in our experience, companies typically hire to get their products to the top of marketplace storefronts. Сonsider, a medium-sized company from the food industry. Typically, a marketplace team (the one working to distribute products through online platforms most efficiently) includes an e-commerce leader, a manager, a designer, and a marketer. In addition, the company may hire an outside contractor to help its internal team.
Nevertheless, these people are forced to engage in routine operations instead of using their time to solve strategic problems. With AI, teams can focus not on playing cat and mouse but on developing strategy and launching innovations, while algorithms will help implement them around the clock and in the most efficient way.
Pavel Podkorytov is a tech serial entrepreneur, a co-founder of ElDinero.ai, an AI sales office for SPG vendors on marketplaces, a former CEO of TalentService.com, and an advisor of Stanford’s R&D project Future Talents. He has more than 15 years of experience in the tech industry.
Major brands are paying for ads on these sites and funding the latest wave of clickbait, according to a new report.
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We’ve heard a lot about AI risks in the era of large language models like ChatGPT (including from me!)—risks such as prolific mis- and disinformation and the erosion of privacy. Back in April, my colleague Melissa Heikkilä also predicted that these new AI models would soon flood the internet with spam and scams. Today’s story explains that this new wave has already arrived, and it’s incentivized by ad money.
People are using AI to quickly spin up junk websites in order to capture some of the programmatic advertising money that’s sloshing around online, according to a new report by NewsGuard, exclusively shared with MIT Technology Review. That means that blue chip advertisers and major brands are essentially funding the next wave of content farms, likely without their knowledge.
NewsGuard, which rates the quality of websites, found over 140 major brands advertising on sites using AI-generated text that it considers “unreliable”, and the ads they found come from some of the most recognized companies in the world.Ninety percent of the ads from major brands were served through Google’s ad technology,despite the company’s own policies that prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated content.”
The ploy works because programmatic advertising allows companies to buy ad spots on the internet without human oversight: algorithms bid on placements to optimize the number of relevant eyeballs likely to see that ad. Even before generative AI entered the scene, around 21% of ad impressions were taking place on junk “made for advertising” websites, wasting about $13 billion each year.
NewsGuard identifies these websites by using AI to check whether they contain text that matches the standard error messages from large language models like ChatGPT. Those flagged are then reviewed by human researchers.
Most of the websites’ creators are completely anonymous, and some sites even feature fake, AI-generated creator bios and photos.
As Lorenzo Arvanitis, a researcher at NewsGuard, told me, “This is just kind of the name of the game on the internet.” Often, perfectly well-meaning companies end up paying for junk—and sometimes inaccurate, misleading, or fake—content because they are so keen to compete for online user attention. (There’s been some good stuff written about this before.)
The big story here is that generative AI is being used to supercharge this whole ploy, and it’s likely that this phenomenon is “going to become even more pervasive as these language models become more advanced and accessible,” according to Arvanitis.
And though we can expect it to be used by malign actors in disinformation campaigns, we shouldn’t overlook the less dramatic but perhaps more likely consequence of generative AI: huge amounts of wasted money and resources.
What else I’m reading
Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader in the US Congress, unveiled a plan for AI regulation in a speech last Wednesday, saying that innovation ought to be the “North Star” in legislation. President Biden also met with some AI experts in San Francisco last week, in another signal that regulatory action could be around the corner, but I’m not holding my breath.
Political campaigns are using generative AI, setting off alarm bells about disinformation, according to this great overview from the New York Times. “Political experts worry that artificial intelligence, when misused, could have a corrosive effect on the democratic process,” reporters Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers write.
Last week, Meta’s oversight board issued binding recommendations about how the company moderates content around war. The company will have to provide additional information about why material is left up or taken down, and preserve anything that documents human rights abuses. Meta has to share that documentation with authorities, when appropriate as well. Alexa Koenig, the executive director of the Human Rights Centre, wrote a sharp analysis for Tech Policy Press explaining why this is actually a pretty big deal.
What I learned this week
The science about the relationship between social media and mental health for teens is still pretty complicated. A few weeks ago, Kaitlyn Tiffany at the Atlantic wrote a really in-depth feature, surveying the existing, and sometimes conflicting, research in the field. Teens are indeed experiencing a sharp increase in mental-health issues in the United States, and social media is often considered a contributing factor to the crisis.
The science, however, is not as clear or illuminating as we might hope, and just exactly how and when social media is damaging is not yet well established in the research. Tiffany writes that “a decade of work and hundreds of studies have produced a mixture of results, in part because they’ve used a mixture of methods and in part because they’re trying to get at something elusive and complicated.” Importantly, “social media’s effects seem to depend a lot on the person using it.”
More than 140 brands are advertising on low-quality content farm sites—and the problem is growing fast.
People are using AI chatbots to fill junk websites with AI-generated text that attracts paying advertisers, according to a new report from the media research organization NewsGuard that was shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review.
Over 140 major brands are paying for ads that end up on unreliable AI-written sites, likely without their knowledge. Ninety percent of the ads from major brands found on these AI-generated news sites were served by Google, though the company’s own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages that include “spammy automatically generated content.” The 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.
Most companies that advertise online automatically bid on spots to run those ads through a practice called “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 end up paying for ad placements on websites that they may have never heard of before, with little to no human oversight.
To take advantage, content farms have sprung up where low-paid humans churn out low-quality content to attract ad revenue. These types of websites already have a name: “made for advertising” sites. They use tactics such as clickbait, autoplay videos, and pop-up ads to squeeze as much money as possible out of advertisers. In a recent survey, the Association of National Advertisers found that 21% of ad impressions in their sample went to made-for-advertising sites. The group estimated that around $13 billion is wasted globally on these sites each year.
Now, generative AI offers a new way to automate the content farm process and spin up more junk sites with less effort, resulting in what NewsGuard calls “unreliable artificial intelligence–generated news websites.” One site flagged by NewsGuard produced more than 1,200 articles a day.
Some of these new sites are more sophisticated and convincing than others, with AI-generated photos and bios of fake authors. And the problem is growing rapidly. NewsGuard, which evaluates the quality of websites across the internet, says it’s discovering around 25 new AI-generated sites each week. It’s found 217 of them in 13 languages since it started tracking the phenomenon in April.
NewsGuard has a clever way to identify these junk AI-written websites. Because many of them are also created without human oversight, they are often riddled with error messages typical of generative AI systems. For example, one site called CountyLocalNews.com had messages like “Sorry, I cannot fulfil this prompt as it goes against ethical and moral principles … As an AI language model, it is my responsibility to provide factual and trustworthy information.”
NewsGuard’s AI looks for these snippets of text on the websites, and then a human analyst reviews them.
Making money from junk
“It appears that programmatic advertising is the main revenue source for these AI-generated websites,” says Lorenzo Arvanitis, an analyst at NewGuard who has been tracking AI-generated web content. “We have identified hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and well-known, prominent brands that are advertising on these sites and that are unwittingly supporting it.”
MIT Technology Review looked at the list of almost 400 individual ads from over 140 major brands that NewsGuard identified on the AI-generated sites that served programmatic ads, which included companies from many different industries including finance, retail, auto, health care, and e-commerce. The average cost of a programmatic ad was $1.21 per thousand impressions as of January 2023, and brands often don’t review all the automatic placements of their advertisements, even though they cost money.
Google’s programmatic ad product, called Google Ads, is the largest exchange and made $168 billion in advertising revenue last year. The company has come under criticism for serving ads on content farms in the past, even though its own policies prohibit sites from placing Google-served ads on pages with “spammy automatically generated content.” Around a quarter of the sites flagged by NewsGuard featured programmatic ads from major brands. Of the 393 ads from big brands found on AI-generated sites, 356 were served by Google.
“We have strict policies that govern the type of content that can monetize on our platform,” Michael Aciman, a policy communications manager for Google, told MIT Technology Review in an email. “For example, we don’t allow ads to run alongside harmful content, spammy or low-value content, or content that’s been solely copied from other sites. When enforcing these policies, we focus on the quality of the content rather than how it was created, and we block or remove ads from serving if we detect violations.”
Most ad exchanges and platforms already have policies against serving ads on content farms, yet they “do not appear to uniformly enforce these policies,” and “many of these ad exchanges continue to serve ads on [made-for-advertising] sites even if they appear to be in violation of … quality policies,” says Krzysztof Franaszek, founder of Adalytics, a digital forensics and ad verification company.
Google said that the presence of AI-generated content on a page is not an inherent violation. “We also recognize that bad actors are always shifting their approach and may leverage technology, such as generative AI, to circumvent our policies and enforcement systems,” said Aciman.
A new generation of misinformation sites
NewsGuard says that most of the AI-generated sites are considered “low quality” but “do not spread misinformation.” But the economic dynamic of content farms already incentivizes the creation of clickbaity websites that are often riddled with junk and misinformation, and now that AIs can do the same thing on a bigger scale, it threatens to exacerbate the misinformation problem.
For example, one AI-written site, MedicalOutline.com, had articles that spread harmful health misinformation with headlines like “Can lemon cure skin allergy?” “What are 5 natural remedies for ADHD?” and “How can you prevent cancer naturally?” According to NewsGuard, advertisements from nine major brands, including the bank Citigroup, the automaker Subaru, and the wellness company GNC, were placed on the site. Those ads were served via Google.
Adalytics confirmed to MIT Technology Review that ads on Medical Outline appeared to be placed via Google as of June 24. We reached out to Medical Outline, Citigroup, Subaru, and GNC for comment over the weekend, but the brands have not yet replied.
After MIT Technology Review flagged the ads on Medical Outline and other sites to Google, Aciman said Google had removed ads that were being served on many of the sites “due to pervasive policy violations.” The ads were still visible on Medical Outline as of June 25.
“NewsGuard’s findings shed light on the concerning relationship between Google, ad tech companies, and the emergence of a new generation of misinformation sites masquerading as news sites and content farms made possible by AI,” says Jack Brewster, the enterprise editor of NewsGuard. “The opaque nature of programmatic advertising has inadvertently turned major brands into unwitting supporters, unaware that their ad dollars indirectly fund these unreliable AI-generated sites.”
Franaszek says it’s still too early to tell how the AI-generated content will affect the programmatic advertising landscape. After all, in order for those sites to make money, they still need to attract humans to their content, and it’s currently not clear whether generative AI will make that easier. Some sites might draw in only a couple of thousand views each month, making just a few dollars.
“The cost of content generation is likely less than 5% of the total cost of running a [made-for-advertising] site, and replacing low-cost foreign labour with an AI is unlikely to significantly change this situation,” says Franaszek.
So far, there aren’t any easy solutions, especially given that advertising props up the entire economic model of the internet. “What is key to remember is that programmatic ads—and targeted ads more generally—are a fundamental enabler of the internet economy,” says Hodan Omaar, senior AI policy advisor at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC.
“If policymakers banned the use of these types of ad services, consumers would face a radically different internet: more ads that are less relevant, lower-quality online content and services, and more paywalls,” Omaar says.
“Policy shouldn’t be focused on getting rid of programmatic ads altogether, but rather on how to ensure there are more robust mechanisms in place to catch the spread of misinformation, whether it be direct or indirect.”
At Cannes Lions, the year’s biggest ad event, you couldn’t escape talk of ChatGPT or Midjourney, even at the yacht parties.
“If you were branding this Cannes, it would be the AI Cannes,” Meta ad executive, Nicola Mendelsohn, told me last week. We were sitting in a glass-walled cabana on the French Riviera, steps away from the shimmering blue Mediterranean Sea.
The Cannes she was referring to isn’t the one you’ve probably heard of — the film festival — but rather Cannes Lions, a similarly swanky festival celebrating advertising instead of cinema.
Every June, thousands of advertising professionals fly in for a bonanza of events. While the festival’s official programming happens at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès convention center, the real networking happens at beachside business meetings, yacht deck happy hours, and celebrity-studded after-parties. The hot-ticket items this year were Spotify’s invite-only concerts by Florence and the Machine and the Foo Fighters, consulting agency MediaLink’s and iHeartMedia’s exclusive Lizzo performance, and TikTok’s end-of-week closing party. On the iHeartMedia yacht, Paris Hilton DJ’ed to a crowd so packed that the party was shut down by the cops.
But it’s not all rosé and champagne: Cannes Lions is a high-stakes hustling opportunity for power brokers at tech companies, ad agencies, and consumer brands — think Nike, Unilever, and Coca-Cola — to check in on multimillion-dollar advertising deals in the second half of the year, and plan new ones for the year ahead.
This year, the festival came on the tail end of a particularly rough time for the tech and advertising world. Digital ad spending slowed down significantly in 2022 compared to years prior, primarily due to rising inflation, an unsteady global economy, and policy changes that made it harder to track users’ browsing habits. That decline contributed to mass layoffs and budget cuts across the media industry. Although conditions are improving a bit, it’s unlikely spending will return to the levels it reached in the early pandemic, and the latest forecasts show continued advertising spending cuts. Given the economic uncertainty, some companies were sending fewer staffers to the festival and cutting back on their presence.
But everyone wants a reason to party and make deals at Cannes Lions. Since advertising funds so many of the free online services we rely on — everything from Facebook to Google to media publishers, including Vox — the industry’s success or failure has massive effects on the average consumer. And in the past year, the advertising industry has desperately needed something to be optimistic about.
Luckily for those looking for a vibe shift, AI had officially entered the chat.
The Carlton Hotel where TikTok had its press preview on June 19, 2023, in Cannes, France. Olivier Anrigo/Getty Images for TikTok
For a week in June, the developing technology was the talk of the beach in the south of France. And while I’m used to nonstop AI hype back home in Silicon Valley, I was not expecting to experience so much of it in Cannes. The streets were plastered with billboards; panels and late-night party chatter were all about AI. Google demoed new tools, Meta announced an upcoming AI assistant that will help advertisers make ads, and Microsoft hosted back-to-back days of AI-themed programming at a beachside venue decorated with images of AI-generated sea creatures.
There was so much AI talk at Cannes Lions this year that, at times, people sounded sick of talking about it. “I’m trying to find the AI superpowered yacht,” I heard one attendee say in jest as he sat on the deck of a luxury vessel, drink in hand.
Jokes and some healthy cynicism aside, the questions everyone seemed to be asking hint at some pretty serious shifts for the media business. Will AI fundamentally change the way we create and consume advertising? Will it be able to lift digital advertising out of its slump? And will it ultimately enhance or replace the human creativity that goes into making ads? Will it save (or destroy) journalism?
AI isn’t new, but it’s the saviour the ad industry needs right now
Six years ago, one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, Publicis Groupe, was widely ridiculed for cutting its marketing presence at Cannes so that it could instead invest money into developing a new AI business assistant, called Marcel. Clients and competing ad firms alike dismissed the idea that AI was a worthwhile endeavour for an agency in the business of human creativity.
“At the time, it was panned by everybody, but now it looks pretty smart,” Jem Ripley, the US CEO of digital experience for Publicis, told me in the hotel lobby of the Le Majestic hotel, a hot spot for executive meetings at the conference. To rub it in a little, this year, Publicis launched a hate-to-say “I told you so” billboard campaign around Cannes reminding people how prescient they’d been with developing the AI-powered Marcel platform.
Even before they became hot buzzwords in the industry, automation and AI were powering advertising behind the scenes for years. The two biggest digital advertising platforms, Google and Meta, have long used AI technologies to develop the automated software that determines the price they charge for an ad, who they show the ad to, and even what lines of marketing copy are most effective to use. As users, we don’t see it day-to-day, but that technology is core to many tech companies’ businesses.
Paris Hilton performed a DJ set during the iHeartMedia After Party on the iHeart Yacht, The Dionea, during the Cannes Lions Festival on June 20, 2023, in Cannes, France. Adam Berry/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
On the consumer side of things, apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube all build AI into the underlying algorithms that decide what content you see, based on what the tech thinks you’re interested in. Think about how TikTok predicts what funny videos you want to see next or how Google ranks your search results; all of it uses AI.
“Everybody wants this to be the year of AI, which I think to some degree it is,” said Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, sitting with me in his company’s Cannes outpost inside the swanky Carlton Hotel. “AI is not new. This concept of large language models, it’s been around for years. … What’s new is ChatGPT and some of the bots and the applications of the technology.”
Just as everyone from artists to writers has learned the value of AI from apps like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Bard, advertising companies are now realizing what these tools can do for them. That mainstream adoption, combined with the fact that marketers are looking to cut costs in this uncertain economic climate, means that AI is exploding in the ad industry at this moment.
I chatted with everyone from creative directors at the top of the totem pole to rank-and-file copywriters at the festival last week, and almost everyone I spoke with said they had experimented with AI tools in their day-to-day duties. And not because their boss told them to, but because they thought it could save them time writing an email, sketching an ad mock-up, or brainstorming an ad concept. Some of them were also worried that it could one day replace their jobs — more on that later — but for now, they were having fun with it.
“I think this year is particularly exciting because it’s sort of like the iceberg breaking through the surface,” said Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager for Google Ads, in an interview at Google’s beach outpost last Wednesday. “And so I think it’s more personal, and it’s much more tangible for people now. And that brings about a different kind of energy.”
What the AI future of advertising will look like
Standing onstage in a grand theatre at the Palais du Festival, Robert Wong, vice president of Google Creative Lab, touted the AI tools his company has starting to put in the hands of advertisers.
In one demonstration, Wong showed how a client can upload a single image of a company logo — a colourful Google “G” icon, in his demo — into Google’s systems and immediately get back a bunch of high-quality 3D images in the same branded style, from a Google dog cartoon to a Google-branded glass of rosé, which was fitting for the venue.
A waitress serves drinks to visitors arriving for a guided meditation by British podcaster and author Jay Shetty aboard the iHeart Yacht, The Dionea, during the Cannes Lions Festival on June 20, 2023. Adam Berry/Getty Images for iHeartMedia
While this quick demo may not seem dramatic compared to some of the splashy generative AI creations we’ve seen lately, like the Pope in a puffer jacket, it was met with “oohs” and “ahhs” from the audience of advertising professionals. That’s because for designers, work like that could take days or weeks. In just a few keystrokes, this new Google tool could give them limitless iterations of a design to experiment with.
“Day-to-day, what I see is designers literally doing sketches in a matter of seconds versus hours. And not one, but like 10,” said Wong in a press conference after the presentation. “And that’s just the beginning. I think we don’t even know what these tools might be in the future.”
Meta also made some AI announcements at the conference, including that it’s working on an AI-powered assistant that can help advertisers create ads. With its so-called AI Sandbox, the company in May released a slew of advertising tools that let advertisers use quick text prompts to come up with AI-generated advertising copy, create different visual backgrounds for their ads, or resize their images. For now, the program is only open to a small group of beta testers, but it’s expanding to more users later this year.
In the long run, the cost savings for brands using generative AI for advertising could be “substantial,” according to Mendelsohn, Meta’s global head of business group.
“It gets better as we train the machines,” she said during our interview at Meta Beach. “And then you think about the reduction not just in cost, but in the impacts on climate. People are not having to travel to be able to do shooting in different ways, or even the reusing of back catalogue of ads and things in the past.”
As the tech giants build out tools for their advertising customers, some are already experimenting with open source generative AI software with some impressive results.
For example, some major household brands are already starting to use AI to create high-production-value commercial videos.
In October, Coca-Cola enlisted the AI image creation tool Stable Diffusion to help create a video that was shortlisted for an award at the festival. The ad, called “Coca-Cola Masterpiece,” used AI in addition to traditional methods, like CGI, to create complex animations under a tight deadline. The two-minute spot shows characters popping out of the art in a gallery to toss a classic Coca-Cola bottle in and out of famous paintings, like a Warhol and a van Gogh; the bottle takes on the visual style of the work of art when it enters each picture. It’s an incredibly complex animation process that took only eight weeks, according to visual effects company Electric Theatre Collective, which Coca-Cola commissioned. Without the help of AI, the company told Digiday, it could have taken five times longer.
“We wanted to use technology to get the kind of perfection we needed, the kind of quality we needed, in a short time,” Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s global head of generative AI, said on a panel hosted by Microsoft.
Generative AI holds promise for creating new kinds of audio advertising, too. Spotify, for instance, is exploring whether it can train AI on specific people’s voices so that it can one day generate original audio ads from scratch.
“Can we start to get to a place where — I use Morgan Freeman as a canonical example — if you go and license the IP for his voice, can we use machines to help scale that even further?” said Lee Brown, global head of advertising for Spotify, which has been growing its ad business in recent years. “So is there an opportunity here for us? I think there’s a lot of potential there.”
Spotify’s villa party at Cannes Lions. Antony Jones/Getty Images for Spotify
Some of these more sophisticated generative AI tools are still just possibilities for the ad industry at the moment. In the meantime, both Google and Bing are doing something a bit simpler: putting ads inside the conversations people are having with their AI chatbot assistants (Search Generative Experience and BingAI, respectively). The companies say this helps advertisers show users ads that are more relevant to people than what they’d see in a regular search.
The idea is that when you’re researching something like how to plan a trip to Greece, a chatbot would have more context about what you’re looking for — somewhere near the beach that’s kid-friendly in June, for instance — based on a series of follow-up questions you’re having with the bot rather than just through a single search query.
“From a marketer’s point of view, it’s interesting because you have a deeper insight into the user’s intent, because they’re in the conversation where you have more context about what they’re doing,” said Google’s Srinivasan.
Google’s presentation on new generative AI tools it’s rolling out for advertisers. Google
In other words, with generative AI search engines, people ask detailed follow-up questions and actually talk to the bots. Jennifer Creegan, general Manager of global marketing and operations for Microsoft advertising, said in a panel last Wednesday that people’s search queries are three times longer in BingAI because of this back and forth. This leads people to click on an advertiser link, she added, and buy something more quickly.
“The best thing about all of this is this is not something I’m showing you in PowerPoint at Cannes to talk about the future,” Creegan said. “This is real. This is in the wild today. People are using it.”
The concerns about AI and ads
Even though new advancements in AI and advertising are real and in the wild, human judgment still needs to play a role in how it all works. Advertisers aren’t ready to fully hand over the reins to the robots to make their ads.
SNL’s dinner party at Cannes Lions 2023. Fred Jagueneau/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
First of all, AI doesn’t replace taste. That means humans still need to review all the draft AI marketing copy or artwork manually. That’s because big companies are still cautious about protecting their brands, and it’s up to the people at the ad firms they hire to make judgment calls.
“At the end of the day, there’s still a healthy concern — I think rightfully so — from our clients about what is going out there,” said Publicis executive Ripley.
Another reservation major brands have around AI is that it could use other people’s creative work that it scrapes from the web, which could open them up to copyright infringement lawsuits. Publicis recently joined C2PA, a standard that watermarks images created by generative AI and can attach proper copyright information to it so that artists get credit for their work.
Advertisers are also worried about brand safety. Given how AI chatbots have a propensity to generate incorrect information, also known as “hallucinations,” or occasionally veer off into emotionally loaded conversations, advertisers need to make sure that the quality of AI-generated ads is up to par.
“For every hour you put into generative AI as a business driver, you need to put an hour into governance,” said Lou Paskalis, a long time ad executive who’s now chief strategy officer of Ad Fontes Media. “You need to make sure you don’t create a monster.”
All this raises some red flags for the workers in the ad industry. After all, if generative AI can reduce the number of people it takes to, say, produce a video or sketch an animation, the technology could wipe out a swath of jobs, particularly those on the creative side.
Among many advertising executives at Cannes Lions this year, there was an acknowledgment that AI will fundamentally change the kind of work people do. Despite tech companies’ optimism that AI will enhance and not replace human creativity, many said the new technology will get rid of some jobs while creating other new ones. One common refrain from ad execs was that the more creative your work is, the harder it will be to replace.
In the words of Coca-Cola’s Thakar, “Five-out-of-10” level creative advertising work is “free now.” He said, “So we need to figure it out … if you are really doing nine-out-of-10 work, then definitely there is always a demand.”
Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine performs onstage during Cannes Lions at Spotify Beach on June 20, 2023, in Cannes, France. Dave Benett/Getty Images for Spotify
Other executives compared AI to the invention of photography, which didn’t entirely replace painters as some thought it would. like Google’s SVP of research, technology, and society, James Manyika.
“AI and art are not at odds,” Manyika said in a keynote introducing Google’s new advertising tools. “AI doesn’t replace human creativity. It enhances, enables, and liberates it.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t seem as though any of the concerns about AI stealing or replacing people’s work are stopping advertisers from jumping on the AI bandwagon. This embrace of the new technology could be a boon to the struggling ad industry. And that, in turn, could benefit consumers who rely on free services propped up by advertising.
But like every other industry AI is impacting, the rise of AI-powered ads will force us to decide what still needs a human touch and what we’re happy to leave to the bots to handle.
Feature Image Credit: At Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2023, AI dominated the conversation.Paige Vickers/Vox
Shirin Ghaffary is a senior Vox correspondent covering the social media industry. Previously, Ghaffary worked at BuzzFeed News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and TechCrunch.
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