Nowism by Tom Goodwin - Edition 28

Scott Galloway talks about Brexit, Are AI Influencers really the future of marketing, Nobody Cares, and is AI really impacting Art?

Big One’s

Elections on Dial-Up:

It’s always apparent to me that innovation and transformation is almost never about technology, it’s about the interface between humans and technology, it’s about regulations, and it’s about how organizations actually change.?

This means that it's inherently messy, the rollout of technology is particularly prone to being held hostage by power, ego, and “that’s not how things are done around here” or “we tried it before”

One would imagine the promise of technology is a better solution, and better solutions rapidly take foot. But in reality, it's so much more messy, one of the best examples of this is voting technology. It appears across the USA, depending on the district, the state, the county, almost everything about the voting process can be completely different, for seemingly very few good reasons.? US voting today is a hybrid of Paper ballots marked and counted by hand, mechanical lever based machines, to optical scanners and 6 other entire GROUPS of technologies.

We live in an age where technology rarely kills the old, we merely augment the past, where we live in the paper age, the industrial age, the digital age and the AI age at the same time. And often is newer countries, that end up having much better systems, my Brazilian friends were incredulous as to how the vote couldn't be counted in seconds!

This piece is a fascinating guide on all elections technology from MIT lab, a bit old.

Innovation is like catching a wave.? Sponsored by Spinnaker Support.

Uber may be the world’s largest ride-sharing company, but it was far from the first.......Zimride launched three years earlier.?

Books .com?was the first online bookstore, three years before Amazon.?

VRBO started Ten years before Airbnb.?

Electric cars like the Electrobat preceded Tesla by more than a century.?

We love to think the world moves fast.?

We're obsessed with this idea of first-mover advantage

But time and time again- from Facebook vs. Friendster, Spotify vs. Napster, NVidia vs. AMD, Instagram vs. Hipstamatic, we learn that being first isn't everything

Read the post of Linkedin, where you can see how First mover advantage is a bit of a myth, and how to maintain core systems with Spinnaker in order to be ready to pounce at the right time.

The fakery of AI’Influence

Like web3, Blockchain and Crypto, AI seems to be reaching the point in the hype curve where scammers take over. You can always tell when this happens, because websites become more purple and black, fonts become more futuristic, and because it looks like everyone's selling shovels for the gold rush.

There is a current obsession with the idea the AI generated influencers will be the big thing.

After all, they are easy to work with, they can make thousands of pieces of content in seconds, the content is free to make, and people can look as beautiful or as accessible, or as weird, or a sexy, as you wish. The only limit to your imagination is your ability to prompt.

So these days we see endless reports of AI “people” making $10,000 per month from brands, followed by hundreds of thousands of people, and lots of people claim this to be “the future of marketing”. And now the internet is ablaze with people offering to help you “make” an AI influencer for a few hundred dollars per month.

What has not been widely reported, is there anyone who takes a couple of minutes to look at these profiles, can see a fairly standard playbook.

These AI influencers are followed entirely by fake accounts or other AI influencers?

The reports of earnings are always without proof and use caveats like “up to”

But more than anything else, we need to look at what influencer marketing is really about.

To some extent it's about a media play, and buying reach.

To some extent, it's about a human being who offers their endorsement

But what it's really about is taste, you're saying that you want be part of the tribe, you associate yourself with this humans characteristics, does this mean anything if the person is AI generated??

Drinking your own coffee?

The new Starbucks CEO did something crazy, they went to their stores, had to look around, bought some coffee, and came up with some common sense ideas. This follows the extraordinary behave of the Ford CEO, who actually bought a competitors vehicle, and drove it.? Perhaps this can be the start of a crazy move towards thinking, and empathy, and eating our own dogfood, rather than paying consultants to press find and replace on 120 slides of nonsense they did for their rivals.?

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Podcast of the week.

The second series of my podcast with Euronews launched this week, the guest this week is none other than Scott Galloway.

Look out for more videos.?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfECmZOaOtQ

Little ones.?

A deep dive on whether China will threaten the duopoly of Boeing and Airbus.

AI generated Fake news invents a Halloween parade, thousands sent home, fact checking remains an ever more vital skill

Generative AI and Search continue to morph together, a key question is if we want to generate answers or find them, which is more useful, and which is more profitable for the tech provider.?

A study on how AI will impact Art, what I like most about this is the presentation format.?

Time’s best inventions of 2024?

Can someone tell me why it’s so hard to find people who are heavy returners and stop over serving them? The wastage is insane?

People are buying face computers, so long as they look normal?

That’s it for now. Thanks

Tom