Tech Time by Tim #40

The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is on the verge of concluding, so I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about the complex and intimate relationship between the tech and advertising worlds. Firstly through Google’s Ad tech puzzle, secondly through the brand safety blues, and finally through a tough crowd for loss leaders. Variety is the spice of life though, so we’ll also be looking at the AI that eats itself, origami robots, and Apple’s attempt to gain exclusive image right to apples… you know, to break the ad puzzle up a bit.

At A Glance

A quick overview of this week’s content.

·??????The Week that Was: Google’s Ad Tech Puzzle, The AI That Eats Itself

·??????Technobabble: Flatpack Robotics And Wearable Caretakers, No Country For Old Phones

·??????Rules of Engagement: Brand Safety Blues, A Tough Crowd For Loss Leaders

The Week that Was:

A look back at the tech world of the past week.

Google’s Ad Tech Puzzle

Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, often shortened to just ‘Cannes’, is one of, if not the most prestigious annual advertising events in the world. For those not into advertising, primers on what’s in vogue at Cannes may not immediately seem relevant. They very much are though, have a look at:

• Apple’s big presence and rumors that it will launch a Demand-Side Platform (DSP).
• Linda Yacarrino (new Twitter CEO) meeting with advertisers.
• Ad tech Merger and Acquisition (M&A) talk and plenty of hand-wringing about leaders in Supply Path Optimisation (SPO) eating up smaller players.
• Google still being months away from killing 3rd party cookies but introducing new AI-powered ad tools.
• Chat-GPT copywriting.
• Netflix and TikTok looking for more ad partnerships.
• Ad tech CEO’s trying to make their bottom lines look as good as possible whilst worrying about the economy’s impact on ad spend.

The relevance of advertising to tech is actually super straightforward. All major tech companies, be they Google or Alibaba, Amazon or Meta, Microsoft, or Apple… are advertising companies. Some obviously have a more active role in the space than others, but that too is changing rapidly. If user data is the lifeblood of tech, then advertising is the vein through which that lifeblood flows. And one cannot examine the EU’s latest antitrust moves against Google without a proper appreciation for how foundational advertising actually is to the power dynamics of the tech world.

In that regard, Google’s decision to sell its domain-hosting business to Squarespace makes a lot of sense. Google becomes a (marginally) smaller target, and all the domains it just sold will still need a way to be found by people searching for them. LINK

The AI That Eats Itself:

One of the most interesting aspects of the current AI boom has been its impact on the Application Programming Interface (API). APIs are how different programs talk to each other. Of particular note are visual arts and text-rich public platforms such as ArtStation, Pixiv, Imgur, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Reddit, among many others. Part of the reason so many APIs are getting locked down is to fight crawling by companies seeking to train Large Language Models (LLM’s).

OpenAI recently pushed out a major update to its own API, one feature of which stands out in particular here, ‘function calling.’?A function call, to stick with the programs talking with each other analogy, is like asking the person you are talking to, to go and get someone else for you. On a practical level, this enables GPT more reliably interact with external tools and APIs.

That being said, it is only through refinement by human feedback and tuning that the accuracy and overall efficiency of results can be improved. In this way, humans continue to serve as the bottleneck of real-world AI performance. Buuuuuuuuut! What if the humans meant to fine-tune and course-correct the LLMs were to outsource that job to AI tools? Perhaps even to the same AI they’re meant to be refining? The AI eats itself. The results produced by cannibal AIs are less than ideal. LINK

Technobabble:

Explaining complex techniques, technologies, and terminologies.

Flatpack Robotics And Wearable Caretakers:

When I say ‘flatpack’ both IKEA engineers and Linux diehards get very excited, very fast. I am, however, talking about robots this time, about a robot that can be stored and transported like IKEA furniture. This particular robot is an experimental machine developed by researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) that can do just that. One might say that it is more than meets the eye. It is able to transform and adapt based on the needs of users and the environmental circumstances it finds itself in. Wait, hold on, when this thing is ready for mass production there absolutely has to be an IKEA x Transformers promotion. IKEA marketing, call me!

Ahem, moving on. If the Origami transformer is akin to furniture, then another experimental robot is more like a cleaner. It’s nothing like the robot vacuum cleaners cats around the world have sworn an eternal oath of enmity against though. This little robot rides around on the user’s clothes, performing tasks for its owner. The immediate use cases for this little device are admittedly a bit more of a stretch. However, if iterated further, and with the right functions, there are potential healthcare applications I could see this working. The concept of a ‘wearable caretaker’ isn’t new, and there are even cases where users of devices like smartwatches have credited the technology with saving their life. LINK

No Country For Old Phones:

As Android battles a shrinking market share in Southeast Asia, iOS owner Apple continues waging a longstanding war over… apples… the actual fruit. This has caused issues for Apple (the fruit) farmers and Apple (the fruit) based organizations around the world, such as Switzerland’s 111-year-old Fruit Union Suisse. Apple (the company) wishes to secure general image rights for apples. The finer legal points are a lot more complex and nuanced, but general image rights are the ultimate intent.

Android’s shrinking market share and Apple’s eagerness to have sole control over apple related imagery are actually interconnected via the concept of the digital divide. The digital divide concerns those in less favourable socio-economic circumstances being left out of major aspects of modern life. They are left out of those aspects of modern life which rely upon a minimum level of technological literacy and access. The primary decider of such access is money.

Because of rising wealth in Southeast Asia, the historical dominance of Android-based Chinese phones in the region has rapidly eroded. This is because Southeast-Asian nations such as Indonesia have rapidly growing middle classes as well as prominent ultra-wealthy classes. Aside from wanting iPhones for their features, such buyers want one as a status symbol. Apple’s efforts to gain exclusive usage of apple (the fruit) related imagery around the world are in service of maintaining this appeal.

That being the case, tech such as smartphones requires sufficient technical infrastructure to operate properly. So it should come as no surprise that SpaceX has made a concerted effort to get Indonesia connected to the internet via its proprietary satellite technology. LINK

Rules of Engagement:

Ethics and legal matters regarding tech engagement.

Brand Safety Blues:

Another core aspect of advertising is so called ‘brand safety’. There are two sides to this, brand safety as it pertains to advertisers buying ad space, and brand safety when it comes to the experience of users on an ad supported platform. The product is ‘peace of mind’, statistical proof that ad dollars are being converted into sales. This is the purpose behind all of the tracking and analytics that are built into successful advertising infrastructure.

And this is also where ‘edgy’ content creators fit in. Edgy, for those that don’t know, refers to content that is expressly tailored to skew as close to harmful subject matter as possible, without actually crossing a red line. This style of content used to be a dominant force in the streaming world in particular due to enragement. Remember, rage engages. So if you’ve ever wondered why controversial content creators seemed to be such advertising darlings, here you go. Ad customers use their own wants and needs when requesting, approving, or rejecting ad campaigns. Yet the ones advertising agencies and platforms have to ‘convince’ aren’t actually their customers, but the customer’s customers.

And edgy content creators and brands have historically held tremendous sway over these customer’s customers. Yet the economy is tighter now and previous tools for ensuring successful ‘conversions’ are already dead or being phased out. Thus, many brands can’t risk ‘cutting themselves’ on edge lords anymore. That is why creators such as PewDiePie are rebranding. It is also why marketers are pulling away from former esports darling Faze clan. LINK

A Tough Crowd For Loss Leaders:

The ongoing Reddit rebellion has been described rather dramatically by some as the battle for the soul of the internet. Call me a cynic, but that battle was fought and lost back in 2007. No, what reddit got wrong is the same thing so many platforms got wrong before it. Users of a platform aren’t there for the platform; they are there for the content and for the community. Just like how customers of a web store don’t shop there because they love the web store. Customers will choose the webstore only so that they won’t have to go a brick-and-mortar store that costs more. This principle of operating at a loss to undercut rivals is known as ‘loss leading’.

Loss leading is why social media was ‘free’ until very recently. It’s also why Amazon used to have such crazy good deals that few other stores could match. As the old saying goes “you can’t compete with free.” And that’s also the Achilles’ heel of this particular strategy. Platforms that use loss leading strategies will always be subject to the inherent friction between investors and users on the one hand, and pressure from other loss leaders on the other hand.

That’s where ads used to fit in. By focussing on ads, platforms were able subsidise their loss leading business models. So whilst the users of ad supported platforms are often called ‘the real product,’ I disagree. Users of ad supported platforms are the raw materials used to make the product, easy to take for granted, impossible to do without. Thus, if users disappear as a result of overzealous monetisation, the platform can quickly enter into a death spiral. Virtuous circles are the opposite, one example of which are the communities that kept the relatively niche genre of fighting games going strong. This is a critical bit of nuance too often ignored, namely that communities on a platform can, by proxy, endear it to users. In such cases, a sufficiently loyal and devoted fanbase, when treated well, can sustain the object of their devotion through even the heaviest of market conditions. LINK

A Nice Cup of Serendipity:

Cool bits and bobs from around the web.

Ant Communication LINK

Mind Maps LINK

Static Island LINK

Animal Parenting LINK

Sonification LINK

Old Jets LINK

Card Trading LINK

Intel Refresh LINK

The Deep End:

A weekly batch of longform content recommendations.

Supernatural:

Why do people believe supernatural explanations for stuff? LINK

Inception:

Does dream inception actually work? LINK

Printable Ceramics:

A paper about 3D printing through the use of ceramic slurry. LINK

Decentralisation vs Centralisation:

Decentralisation And Centralisation in Sociocratic Organisations. LINK

Vision No:

A technical analysis and critique of the Vision Pro headset’s hardware. LINK

Mori3 Origami:

The research paper about the Mori3 Origami robot featured in ‘Flatpack Robotics And Wearable Caretakers.’ LINK

One More Thing…

I love the storytelling in the From Software studio’s game oeuvre. Rather than just burying you in one huge infodump, these games make you actively look through different parts of the world, examining the item descriptions of items and forming connections in your mind.

The most well-known of their games at this point is Dark Souls, but almost all of their games have the previously outlined style of hands-off exposition. I can’t be quite as vague and esoteric in my newsletter of course, but I thought it’d be fun to take a larger narrative, the role of advertising in tech, and split it up across several items, each with their own content and context. Everyone picks up and passes over different things after all.

Hmm maybe I should have gone with a baking analogy instead, like I tell you that I’ve left a trail of crumbs for you to follow or something… But that’d kind of make me seem like the witch from Hansel and Gretel wouldn’t it? I swear I’m not trying to eat you dear readers. I do have food on my mind though. I blame Apple’s latest shenanigans and Cannes for making me constantly think of Apple pie. Did you know that advertising and baking have a ton in common? You have to have the right mix of ingredients, prepare, and present them juuuuuust right.

Fail to do so and the people you serve either the baked goods or the advertisements to won’t want to dig in. Both bakers and advertisers definitely want people coming back for seconds, so both the right recipe and the right preparation are vital. Though tech companies in general tend to be obsessed with getting as large a ‘slice of the pie’ as they can, Google can’t seem to let go of cookies…