Sunday Shuffle v. 9

Satya Nadella Takes the Stand | The CMO Survey | Insight Partners on Responsible AI

Happy Sunday! There's been a lot of tap dancing in courtrooms these past weeks. Sam Bankman-Fried is facing charges for defrauding crypto investors, Elon Musk is being sued for defrauding former Twitter investors, and Amazon is up against the FTC for using its monopolistic leverage to raise prices. But it was the antitrust lawsuit against Google, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella taking the stand, that seemed both symbolic and ironic -- especially since the last major tech antitrust suit in the '90s had Microsoft facing similar accusations.

Let's Shuffle into it!

Inside this week's Shuffle:

• Featured Story - Microsoft's Nadella waves the white flag, or does he?
• Other Top News - Irresponsible AI & the latest CMO Survey results
• Marketing Nuggets - LinkedIn, Podcasts and Ad-free Experimentation
• Mayday Alert!

Featured Story:

Satya Nadella took the stand on Monday for over 3-hours, and to the casual observer it may have seemed that Microsoft's CEO all but declared defeat to Google by acknowledging their superiority with certain products. However, his seemingly defeatist rhetoric masked a well-considered strategy to undermine his biggest competitor at a critical inflection point. [Inc, Fortune, Axios]

“Microsoft was caught sleeping when Google introduced Chrome, which was a far superior browser.” - Satya Nadella

The Claim: The US government claims Google illegally created a monopoly in online search by paying to be the default search engine on popular web browsers and mobile devices, namely Apple's. Google contends consumers have alternatives, but Bing still has 3% market share vs. Google's 92%.

Why It Matters: Just 10 months ago, Microsoft invested $10B in OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT), cementing its partnership with the AI leader to create an "AI supercomputer for the world." With its early integration of ChatGPT into Bing, the hope was that they could gain ground on Google, but alas, that has not happened. The Large-language models (LLMs) require vast amounts of user-generated content and data to operate, so with a measly 3% market share, the company is caught in a vicious cycle against the dominant search engine.

Irresponsible AI?

Despite reassurances about "responsible AI" from big tech, recent news reveal a different reality. Last week Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team, while Meta downsized its own Responsible AI group. For all their rhetoric about safeguards against misuse, offensive content still slips through - take the lewd, rude, and crude AI-generated stickers in Facebook Messenger.

The Takeaway: As effective as these AI tools can be to quickly and easily generate compelling content, it is our responsibility to maintain control of how they are used by our teams, our agencies and our influencers. Insight Partners hosted an excellent webinar on What Founders Need to Know About Responsible AI that lays out the legal landscape and "dos and donts" for all of us.

Marketers Feeling Optimistic According to Latest Survey

Deloitte, Duke Fuqua and the American Marketing Association released results from their comprehensive Fall 2023 CMO Survey, which shows a considerable rise in optimism among senior marketers regarding the economy despite marketing spending decreasing overall since the previous quarter.

Highlights:

• 49% of marketers report feeling “more optimistic” about the U.S. economy this quarter, up from 30.1% in the Spring-2023 survey
• Marketing budget as a % of company revenues dropped to 9.2% from 10.9%
• Marketing organization size growth increased by 5.5%, up from 3.4%
• 94% of marketers have started using AI in their jobs

Why It Matters:

While sales growth continued to weaken for the 3rd consecutive period since February 2022, it still remains strong at 10.8% compared to its pandemic low of 2.6% in February 2021. Deep cost-cutting measures the past year has strengthened business profits and buoyed optimism for the coming year, but marketer leaders will be prioritizing "ability to pivot" and "navigating ambiguity" as desirable skills when looking for new talent.

Marketing Nuggets

• LinkedIn (owned by MSFT) went BIG this week by announcing many new AI tools for learning, recruitment, marketing and sales -- all powered by OpenAI.
• Panel of podcast experts share their thoughts and advice on Why Now is a Great Time to Make a Podcast. One reason, according to Fatima Zaidi is 4.4X better brand recall compared to other digital channels.
• According to NCSolutions, creative remains far and away the most important factor for ad effectiveness compared to brand, reach, targeting and recency.
• Why are all the social platforms like Meta tinkering with ad-free subscription models? Is it the EUs new Digital Services Act ... or realization that they need to monetize their loyal users? SocialMediaToday offers this great analysis.
• Thinking about SMS marketing as a new channel? Check out this Everything You Need to Know About SMS Marketing from Marketing Brew.

Mayday Alert:

If you see this thing hanging around your friend or co-worker's neck, I recommend you stop talking! :-)

Rewind Pendant is a "wearable [recorder] that captures what you say and hear in the real world and then transcribes, encrypts and stores it locally on your phone." Think of it as your own personal dash cam, but worn around your neck.

Rowan Cheung of The Rundown surveyed his subscribers for their thoughts:

• 35% - Yes, I am excited for this technology
• 22% - No, I don't need it
• 40% - This should be illegal

One thing is for certain, we're gonna need many more lawyers in the years ahead!

That it, marketeers! Please feel free to share "The Sunday Shuffle" with your network and and provide feedback/comments, too!

Also, please check out my new website where I will publish these newsletters and will expand on other key topics.

Let's all try to stay One Shuffle Ahead!