ROUND UP: AI & Scams Are Everywhere

This is a snippet of this week's edition of The Marketer's Playbook. Subscribe here at www.marketersplaybook.co/subscribe for the full run down, including 3x more news updates, a breakdown of this week's hottest marketing campaigns, and more!

GOOGLE’S CONVERSATION AI AD FEATURE

Google Ads has announced that they’ve officially integrated their largest AI model, Gemini. The new conversational experience, now fully accessible to English-speaking advertisers in the U.S. and U.K., assists in creating optimized search campaigns. Users can input their website URL, and the AI generates relevant ad content, including keywords and creatives. This tool has been shown to improve ad quality and performance, with a future update to suggest campaign-specific images using generative AI. Also, it’s worth noting that all AI-generated images will be watermarked for identification, of course. Check out Google’s resource here for a deeper explanation.

RULES TO THE PAID MEDIA GAME

You may have seen a few articles here or there of DTC darling brands being sued for various reasons, whether that is infringing on trademarks, not getting proper permissions for assets and more. As it turns out, this is pretty common, and the US gov’t is pushing to get more strict with these rules. To that end, Barry Hott put together a thread of the top posts breaking these cases down from DTC Twitter’s favourite lawyer - Robert Freund. Check out Barry’s thread here to give yourself a quick crash course on exactly what you shouldn’t do.

LINKEDIN PUTS LOOKALIKES ON ICE

Somewhat surprisingly, LinkedIn has announced in a help article uploaded relatively quietly that they are discontinuing support for Lookalike audiences. For those familiar with Meta Ads, these are the bread and butter of many ad accounts. As it turns out, they aren’t quite as popular on LinkedIn, though they haven’t actually said why they’re sunsetting them. Either way, they do recommend using Predictive Audiences or Audience Expansions as a replacement for this change, which takes effect on February 29th. For more info, check out LinkedIn’s help article here.

AI SCAM ADS ARE RUNNING RAMPANT

Have you seen the Jennifer Aniston ‘Free MacBook Pro’ ad that’s been shared like wildfire lately? For those who are less gullible, it should have been clear that this was a fake video used to scam people through ads, but unfortunately, many users are not quite as astute and fell for it. Beyond this one example, there have been a handful of others, too, prompting a lot of discussion about the implications of AI visual and auto replication. I wonder if we will see laws come into play soon surrounding the use of other people’s voices in AI. Strange times, indeed. Check out this article from The New Indian Express covering YouTube’s >1k video takedown in an attempt to address this.

Reminder: this is a snippet of this week's edition of The Marketer's Playbook. Subscribe here at www.marketersplaybook.co/subscribe for the full run down, including 3x more news updates, a breakdown of this week's hottest marketing campaigns, and more!