EMT News - Vol. 8
EMT Partners
Specialising in Entertainment, Media, Sport and Technology advice, through EMT Lawyers and EMT Advisory.
Start your Monday morning reading the latest news in Entertainment, Media & Technology, guest written by our very own Nic Hodges. We hope it serves you.
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1 - Retail media.
Amazon's ad business is now bigger than the global newspaper business. After first reporting ad numbers in 2021, 2022 saw Amazon?bringing in $38 billion from advertisers. And while that's less than 10% of its overall revenue, it's also probably more profitable than AWS (and more revenue than Prime).
Amazon's growth is another strong datapoint in the rapid rise in retail media, with?GroupM estimating?that the segment was around 11% of global advertising last year, and 18% of all digital advertising.
Meanwhile in Canada, the privacy commissioner?has found?that Home Depot was taking email addresses supplied for receipt delivery and sending them off to Facebook to measure conversions. Not good! It's also a practice I think is quite common, and may start causing more issues for brands as retail media booms and both customers and regulators become concerned about these practices.
2 - AI.
The most fun I'm having with AI at the moment is using it to bridge natural language with code (I'm?very fun?at parties). The ability to write very specific code to create everything from a mobile app to a piece of music is a huge blocker for most people. So it's nice to see newsletter-favourite Roblox?testing AI tools?that allow players to create worlds and avatars based on natural language prompts.
YouTube is in the unfamiliar position of fighting for relevance these days. So it was interesting to see newly minted YouTube boss Neal Mohan?hinting at a suite of AI-powered tools?that will provide creators simple editing, post-production, and rendering capabilities that normally took time and money. While YouTube is focusing on creators first, expect these types of tools to hit advertisers as well soon enough.
It's still the beginning of the beginning for the current wave of AI. The flood of startups with breathless pitches but very little actual product (or just an interface for ChatGPT or StableDiffusion) has strong echoes of the whole crypto/Web3 nonsense. Interesting things?are?being built, but sorting through the noise is a challenge (even VCs are admitting that?the hype may already be out of control). If you're in the brand and marketing world, do check out?Noah Brier's Brxnd project, where he is mapping the landscape of AI-powered tools and startups for marketers and agencies (and doing his best to avoid the vapourware).
3 - TikTok.
TikTok continues on the quest for ways to drive revenue and keep creators happy (and on the platform). The latest?announcement is a feature called Series, allowing content creators to have up to 80 videos behind a paywall. Videos are bundled into collections and offered to viewers for a one-off payment (presumably subscription is in the works).
At launch creators will keep 100% of the revenue. The first big question here is "will it work?". TikTok upended the influencer model by allowing any rando to go viral in a day. While the concept of following big names on TikTok certainly exists, the Series product seems more suited to Instagram (or OnlyFans ??). The second big question is around revenue. TikTok isn't minting billionaires like YouTube does, and some reports are indicating that the ad revenue sharing program launched in October has been disappointing – including?creators with 100k+ follower earning less than $5.
Now for the ???? Bit…
领英推荐
Amidst rocketship growth in both users and advertisers, there remains a regulatory sword hanging over TikTok. The EU recently banned the app on officials' phones, and as a response?TikTok has launched "Project Clover"?(pro tip: don't let your project codenames out of the building) – aimed at storing European user data in Europe and out of reach of China.
The entire "ban TikTok" thing continues to be baffling, not least because no government has put forward both a compelling and reasonable case for why. Are they worried about data? Or the algorithm? Or disinformation? And if any of those three, why is TikTok the one to worry about? The result of all this confusion is that advertisers probably don't need to worry about the platform disappearing any time soon.
While I'm not giving a lot of brainspace to the TikTok vs. US Government palaver,?this is an interesting NYTimes opinion piece?on the topic. The key point that stood out was that data regulation in the US is so lax that you don't really need to create the world's most popular app to track people – you can just buy it from data brokers. ??
4 - Social media.
This is a great piece by Alex Krantowitz. I think he's nailed the latest trend of social platforms charging for power users to access power tools, so I’ll just rip some quotes...
“Social media feeds, once filled with content from ordinary users, are now programmed primarily by professional creators. These creators need identity verification, customer service, and visibility boosting. And they’re willing to pay.”
“After long relying on ordinary users for content, social media companies are giving up on them. Regular people either post too infrequently, are too boring, or both. And now they’re being pushed aside.”
Amongst everything else going on in tech, it feels like something important is happening in the background here. Many social platforms have now crossed a line from "what are my friends and family up to?" to "I'm bored entertain me with stuff from people I don't know". And it makes sense, given actual social networks are shifting to message groups. Reports of social media’s death are greatly exaggerated, but are we seeing it shapeshift into something completely different?
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