Google’s AI Overviews come to the UK
Our 5 stories this week include AI search, shoppable TV, continuing rise of SVOD in the UK, and a look at how ecommerce was covered by TV shows nearly 30 years ago.
An exciting day for me - having read about Google’s AI Overviews since they launched in the US in May, they have now arrived in the UK (& India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil – along with local language support in each country). The AI Overviews are essentially answers to ‘closed’ search questions where there is a definitive answer, turned into a paragraph or so of text by generative AI. The results are still marked with the disclaimer ‘Generative AI is experimental.’ and clickable citations are shown underneath so that searchers can check the sources for themselves. I have not seen any ads yet in my explorations! Major newspaper groups in the US claim that they are not seeing much change in the traffic that they get from these expanded results, compared to the ‘classic’ ones, but also that these are not appearing in that many queries yet. You can see some examples of screen grabs here, and if you want to test it for yourself the search query ‘average response time for fire department in london’ seems to work.
A new series of Netflix’s popular show Emily in Paris landed yesterday, and a partnership with Google is making it possible for viewers to shop the looks on their phones. Netflix is now the title sponsor of the show (if you are watching on the ad tier) and has bought ‘pause’ ads, so that when viewers pause, they can scan an image on screen which will take them to a specific shopping page where they can buy some of the looks. All viewers can use the Google Lens app on their phones to snap the screen during the episode to find similar looks, for example the red striped blazer that Emily wears in episode 1.
Netflix is clearly going all in on ‘Emily’ - its Stories game app now lets fans play along as Emily, in addition to games relating to other shows like Selling Sunset and Love is Blind.
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Every quarter BARB, the UK TV measurement body, surveys access to channels among UK homes. The latest figures out this week show that for the first time 20m homes (68.7%) have access to a paid SVOD service, up from 19.5m in the last quarter. Netflix is the most popular service with 17.1m, followed by Prime with 13.7m, Disney+ with 7.6m and Apple TV+ with 2.4m. The growth has presumably been helped by Netflix’s cheaper access via an ad-supported tier, but it also shows both how much the SVOD channels are ‘normal’ in the UK, and how potentially valuable the platforms are to advertisers; presumably the vast majority of the Amazon Prime watchers are seeing ads every 20 minutes or so.
Reddit is a comparatively small player in the ad ecosystem, but it is growing fast. Daily users are up 50% to over 90m, with ad spend up 41% y-o-y for the quarter at $253m. One of the reasons for its success is in how it is leaning into fandoms and passion areas like sports leagues, with the NFL, NBA, MLB, NASCAR, and PGA Tour, which allow exclusive access to video highlights, player AMA interviews and more. It is also integrating more AI capabilities, thanks to a partnership with OpenAI (which also gives OpenAI access to their content to help train its AI models), which is letting Reddit optimise its advertisers’ creatives. Definitely a very interesting AI transformation to follow.
A ten minute clip from the BBC TV Money Programme in 1997, looking at early ecommerce examples, including a bakery taking ‘a few thousand pounds’ of online orders a year, and - about 7 minutes in - an interview with Jeff Bezos. As the presenter says: "Many British people still find the internet too daunting a place to shop, and it seems that the idea is only really catching on in the United States."