Month: February 2024

This article was first published by Digiday sister site, WorkLife.

Nina McCollum, 55, was laid off last March from Glassdoor. It was her third career layoff. 

She was able to jump back into freelancing as a professional content writer with more than 20 years of experience, but any dreams of retiring faded fast. It wasn’t a new reality for her though, she had long suspected retirement would be out of reach. For most of her career, she didn’t have access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan, except for the year she was at Glassdoor. Before that, and again today, it is up to her.

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Social media can be like the wild west of marketing, with the constant changes (algorithms, anyone?) and increasing fragmentation, among other issues. But for brand and agency marketers, social media holds the top spot by far when it comes to spending and confidence that the channel drives marketing success.

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The writing has been on the wall for some time. But as Google’s third-party cookie finally starts deteriorating, advertisers are having to finally grapple with the cookie-sized hole in their targeting strategies. That hole is something that Red Robin’s CMO Kevin Mayer has been thinking about even before he started the job last May.

For the past year, the 54-year-old restaurant chain has been working toward its “North Star” five-point plan, part of which includes a marketing and advertising revamp to get in front of Gen Z consumers via their digital screens. The legacy brand has been working to build up its customer base, especially amongst younger shoppers, all while mounting data privacy initiatives have made digital marketing more difficult for marketers.

“This brand used to be more of a scatter shot television, national television type of advertiser,” Mayer said. “We’re much more now of a targeted behavioral advertiser.”

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As the Possible conference gears up for its second year, it faces the possibility of a sophomore slump. After all, year one in April 2023 generated solid attendance of 2,464 as well as a few headlines, mainly courtesy of one Elon Musk, who used his appearance in part to recruit Linda Yaccarino to be his CEO at X. All in all, 200 speakers presented in some form last year.

Year two of Possible is once again being held in Miami Beach, and it will take place from April 15-17 with 3,000 attendees expected to listen to another 200 or so speakers, according to Christian Muche, CEO and co-founder of Beyond Ordinary Events, which powers Possible.

So what are brands, platforms and agencies expecting to get out of the event, which bills itself as the convergence of marketing, media, culture and tech?

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The chatbot race is moving further into the land of digital documents.

The privacy-focused browser Brave has added more ways for its AI assistant “Leo” to help users read PDFs, analyze Google Drive files and transcribe YouTube videos. Other features include analyzing code on GitHub and summarizing messages on Slack.

When reading pages in Google Docs and Google Sheets, Brave uses a technique called optical character recognition, which allows Leo to see whatever a user sees. For PDFs, it uses metadata to understand the semantic structure based on a file’s accessibility tree, which often are used by screen readers in devices to assist people with disabilities. 

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Only one of Reddit’s two cofounders is named in a new filing that puts the company weeks away from going public. Ohanian and Steve Huffman, now CEO, fell out in 2020.

Pat Gelsinger says that Intel’s renewed investment in cutting-edge manufacturing technology will allow it to become a leading supplier of AI chips. Microsoft is already onboard.

Following its public launch, decentralized microblogging app Bluesky is allowing all users to run their own server on the platform’s network, a concept referred to as federation.

Food delivery service DoorDash has agreed to pay $375,000 to settle charges it “sold” consumers’ data to a marketing co-op, without giving consumers the opportunity to opt out.

Google said Thursday it plans to integrate Gemini generative AI models into Performance Max, an ad platform that allows advertisers to access all the company’s ad channels from one platform.