Meta AI, Adobe drama, Voodoo x BeReal and Threads API | MKTRSU #007
Alright so today’s issue is a different one.
Not only is it late, because I’m sick, but also because we don’t have one large yapper fest of a topic, but rather 5 shorter ones.
My name’s Mark Valasik and this is the #007 edition of Marketing Right Side Up (or MKTRSU) newsletter (and also Youtube channel, and daily memes and news on TikTok and Instagram).?
I do weekly marketing topic summaries and social media one liners..
And if you haven’t yet, opt-out from Meta AI immediately, here’s a tutorial for How To Opt-Out of Meta AI in Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and Whatsapp:
Of course, the beautiful weekly AirTable of Social Media One Liners for the 2nd week of June is here as well:
Meta AI, Adobe Drama, Voodoo buys BeReal and more
Meta AI delayed in EU/UK; US users unable to opt-out
If you haven’t yet, go ahead and opt-out of Meta AI training. Why? Well I talked about it in one of my previous videos and also my previous blog post about why you should opt-out from Meta AI - but long story short, Meta AI is a ChatGPT wannabe competitor that can’t train it’s AI model on public data regardless of copyrights, like OpenAI did with ChatGPT, so Meta tries to misuse their “owned user data”. And when I say “their” I totally mean “your”. The idea is that Facebook already has 3 billion (with a B) active users and Instagram has over 1.4 billion (again, the B word) and it would be such a shame if someone totally stole and misused those years and years of your personal photos, videos and stories (that Instagram keeps for up to EIGHT YEARS) to create a better Skynet (Terminator reference) than the other sociopathic competitor, right? RIGHT?? So that’s exactly what Meta set out to do, and when launched in US, due to their non-existence of GDPR, they just went and did that. And people revolted. But Meta was like “nah, I’d win” and as we now finally have confirmed, robbed the US users of their option to opt-out. So basically in US, Meta AI training on user data is mandatory.
However in Europe, and this is the first time I will go on record and say it, thank God we have GDPR! EU and ICO (Irish privacy regulator) were like “nope, can’t do that” and Meta was like “well, that’s unfair, and we are very disappointed that Europe can’t see our attempt to innovate the European humans” (they actually did play the victim card and say they are disappointed).?
The main issue was how shadily Meta hid the “just to have it” opt-out form and acted as if the user data misuse can be labeled as “legitimate interest” (which is massive oversimplification on Meta’s part).
So for now the 26th June Meta AI launch date is delayed, but rest assured, Meta will be back with a new plan how to feed your children data to the AI machine, later in the year. So definitely opt-out if you haven’t yet.?
Your data on social media are not your data, don’t act like we can trust these massive for-profit companies.
Adobe Terms of Use Drama and what’s next
So, the last bit took way too much word, I’ll try to make this one shorter. Strong emphasis on “try”.
Adobe launched a new Terms of Use agreement that basically claimed ALL your work on Creative Cloud can be and will be used under free rights policy for Adobe’s use, whether that’s analysis, reproduction, AI training or selling rights to?? Including your NDA projects???
As you can guess, people were LIVID. Started unsubscribing en-masse. What definitely made things worse was that people could NOT use Photoshop and Illustrator if they didn’t hit AGREE. And what made things absolutely ballistic was the fact that Adobe turned off their customer support after going live with the terms.
However, only about a week later Adobe released an announcement that they understand they did a wee-woo and will NOT apply the new Terms of Use into action. The training and analysis stays in the terms but will be mandatory.
Still, people started to look for alternatives, so here’s a neat list of Adobe products alternatives and if you hate subscription just as I do, Affinity, one of the Adobe competitors, has a 50% sale AND extra sale on their Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign competitors for less than $100 for a LIFETIME LICENSE, one-time payment! Check the Affinity discount for Adobe alternatives. Not an ad, but boy did I forget we actually were able to OWN software! Such a foreign concept these days….
The end of BeReal??
French mega publisher Voodoo , the company behind social apps like Blitz and Wizz, and games like Hole.io, Paper.io, Helix Jump and many other 100M+ downloads games, bought the one-trick-pony social app BeReal.
But Mark, I hear you ask, why are you so mean towards BeReal??
领英推荐
BeReal was created as a standalone app around 1 feature, and 1 feature only - post a photo/video where you are being real. That’s by itself always a recipe for disaster if the app fails to innovate and evolve. And oh boy, fail to innovate and evolve they did!
As with all the social media at the time, us social media managers were eager to jump on the hypetrain only to find out BeReal was super against brands and ads on the platform.
Automatically, such platforms immediately lose their appeal to me, professionally. And personally I didn’t want to get invested into it, since I had a feeling the app will die soon.
Well, 50 million downloads later, BeReal still kicking. Still no brands and ads, but a couple new cringe features.
Though popular and and heftily invested in, BeReal burned a lot of money. And the future was still very murky and unsure. Up until now.
As Voodoo has massive proven track record of acquiring, prototyping and scaling apps to millions of downloads, their expertise might be exactly what BeReal needed. And what excited me even more - one of the first comments from Voodoo was that they plan to introduce paid ads.
And suddenly, brands and marketers are interested. Me included.
Read more about the BeReal deal in the Voodoo blog if you’re interested.
TikTok US Court Hearing
In one of my first articles I’ve talked about how the TikTok ban is actually dumb due to its rushed nature and how ByteDance/TikTok will for sure pursue legal action against the US Congress to halt, stall or completely overturn the ruling.
With the Congress and Senate actually voting FOR the law to force divest/ban TikTok, TikTok really doesn’t have that many options to oppose this. But one of the first steps is a hearing in front of the US Court.
And as of June 17th, that TikTok Court hearing has a date. September 16th to be exact.
Is this a new hope for TikTok, content creators and social shopping businesses across US?
Or will it be just a show? We have to wait and see.
And talking about waiting and seeing…
Threads releases 3rd party API
Announced later last year, we now finally have 3rd party API for Threads.
What this mean is that tools like Buffer , Later or Kontentino can add scheduling and publishing for Threads.
Since this story is fresh news, that’s all I’ll leave you with for now!
I need your help!
My content here and on my youtube was always meant to be insightful and helpful.
Recently I ran a poll on my Linkedin regarding the type of content you’d want to see or get the most value out of. Since my reach on Linkedin is currently abysmal, chances are you have not seen the post!
So if I may ask you, click on that link and react to that post either with ?? for marketing news and updates (like the Meta AI, Google Leak, Adobe ToS drama) or ?? for ‘how to’ content.
Your contribution would be much appreciated!
Take care and see you in the next one!
Mark.