Month: February 2024

With four of the Big Six holding companies having released their 2023 financial results (still waiting on Dentsu and Havas), it’s safe to say that Publicis and Omnicom fared better last year than IPG or WPP. And though most analysts will gauge that hierarchy of success on organic revenue growth, it has more to do with the directions each holding company chose to go in with investments and types of clients won over the last few years — some of which paid off, and some that didn’t. 

Omnicom and IPG formally presented their 2023 earnings over the course of the week, while Publicis and WPP revealed topline results a few weeks ago when they announced AI strategies and investments. (Publicis did hold a call with analysts this past week.)

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AI providers and government entities announced a flurry of efforts aimed at bolstering the internet’s defenses from AI-generated misinformation.

Last week, major AI players announced new transparency and detection tools for AI content. Hours after Meta detailed plans for labeling AI images from outside platforms, OpenAI said it will start including metadata for images generated by ChatGPT and its API for DALL-E. Days later, Google announced it will join the steering committee of Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a key group setting standards for various types of AI content. Google will also start supporting Content Credentials (CC) — a sort of “nutrition label” for AI content that was created by C2PA and the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Adobe, which founded CAI in 2019, debuted a major update for CC in October.

The updates were especially noteworthy on a few fronts by bringing major distribution platforms into the standardization process. Bringing platform-level participation could also help with driving mainstream adoption of AI standards and helping people better understand how to know if content is real or fake. Andy Parsons, senior director of CAI, said giants like Google help with the “snowball effect” needed to improve the internet’s information ecosystem. It also requires alignment across companies, researchers and various government entities.

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Duolingo’s infamously irreverent big green bird took its talents to the next level, appearing in the language-learning app’s first-ever regional Super Bowl commercial on Sunday. It’s Duolingo’s biggest ad moment to date, in terms of efforts, and a play to establish itself as a credible brand in the language-learning space, according to Duolingo’s CMO, Manu Orssaud.

The five-second spot aired regionally in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh as well as Chicago, Miami, and Detroit, followed by a push notification reminding about 4 million Duolingo users to do their lesson. 

Per Orssaud, it’s a riff off of Reddit’s blip of an ad in 2021 that became one of the most talked-about (and posted-about) commercials of the day. Reddit’s play proved “you can win the Super Bowl game, the advertising game through creativity as opposed to big media buy,” he said. “That’s really why we decided to take this approach. Because that truly is our superpower — it’s creativity, it’s not media budget.”

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Siding against the California Chamber of Commerce, an appellate court said state Attorney General Rob Bonta can immediately enforce new privacy regulations.

An ad that answers the question: What do you get a country that’s just gifted you with the Statue of Liberty?

Self-righteous chatbot Goody-2 was built to take AI guardrails to an illogical extreme. The artists behind the project say there’s a serious point behind the gag.

Google should be subject to regulation as a common carrier service because it’s available to all web users and profits by transporting “goods” — meaning information — to the public, Ohio’s attorney
general argues.

“If you decide to follow accounts that post political content, we don’t want to get between you and their posts, but we also don’t want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you
don’t follow,” Meta said Friday. “So we are extending our existing approach to how we treat political content.”