Dear Reader,
As 1Q23 ends, April sprays rain through New York City with gusts of wind.
If you’re like me, you welcome the idea of a fresh start.
New beginnings give me the energy to plow through the projects that linger on my desk, falling further down my list of “to-dos” and leaving me enough joy to jumpstart new projects.
The start of April also marks the beginning of major religious holidays, Easter, Passover and Ramadan. (Okay, you got me–Ramadan started on March 23rd and extends to April 23rd.)
Beyond yellow marshmallow chick-shaped peeps, hollow chocolate bunnies and pastel hand-dyed Easter eggs, food plays a major role in these holidays. Each holiday involves giving up a special type of food or fasting such as lent for Christians, fasting from sunup to sundown for Muslims and eating unleavened bread for Jews.
Table of Contents | Volume 11, Issue 14
- Marketing Lesson of The Week – What Artificial Intelligence Everywhere Means For You
- Marketing Reads
- Mark Your Calendar
These holidays are steeped in family traditions and food. In my family, most holiday meals were held at my parents’ home mainly because they had enough room for everyone and my mother was the best cook.
Gefilte fish has its origin in various forms of European cuisine such as French quenelles de brochet and Viennese Hechtnockerl in Dillsauce (Source). Many Jews buy gefilte fish in a clear glass jar that lets the buyer view the unadorned beige balls of fish, but not my mother.
She learned to make gefilte fish from my grandmother. To create a repeatable recipe, my grandmother measured each ingredient by handfuls and pinches. Then, she put each one into a bowl so my mother could measure the amount used.
Even better, my mother later contributed this recipe with the title, “Elaine’s Never Fail Gefilte Fish” to a cookbook created by her synagogue to raise money.
From a content marketing perspective, businesses have been giving away or selling recipes and/or patterns to encourage prospects to buy their products for years. Invented in 1897, Jell-O launched the first of many recipe books in 1903. Here’s an example from 1905.
Here’s another example of such a cookbook for Ronzoni Italian products. It was created in the 1960s by a Madison Avenue agency to promote the brand in a book format that contained 4 color photos.
Recommended Reading
So what can you take away from these holidays that you can use for your specific products and brands beyond providing upbeat promotional merchandising hooks?
A great example of this is Daffodil Project. To commemorate those who died on September 11, 2001, Hans Van Waardenburg and the City of Rotterdam donated 1 million daffodil bulbs to New York City to wrap the city in a symbolic ribbon of yellow flowers.
Twenty-two years later the Daffodil Project continues to weave the yellow, white and orange flowers with their bell-shaped heads and clown collar of petals across the city.
Recommended Reading
To create your own event or holiday, ask questions like these:
- What holidays does your business, brand, industry or location celebrate? Ideally, your holiday should serve the greater good.
- How does this celebration relate to the qualities that make your brand unique?
- What can you do to incorporate this holiday into your marketing while adding to your brand?
Recommended Reading
Marketing Lesson of The Week
► AI And Related Apps Explode In March
During March, GPT and various forms of AI grew at an exponential rate.
One source reported that 1000+ AI-powered tools were offered on their own or as a part of an existing product. These tools are based on differing Large Language Models (LLMs) and various versions of the core code. Further, the base training set for this range of products differs.
Unveiled on March 14, 2023, OpenAI’s multimodal GPT-4 can use image inputs compared with GPT-3.5’s text-only inputs. Scoring 40% higher than GPT-3.5 in an internal adversarial factuality evaluation, GPT-4 hallucinates less frequently than older models with GPT-4. This means that it returns wrong or incorrect information.
Microsoft’s Bing Chat runs on OpenAI’s most advanced LLM (or large language model), GPT-4. In its first month, 45 million chats took place on Bing and it attracted 100 million daily active users (DAU). (Note: Microsoft is an OpenAI investor.) (Source: Znet)
OpenAI, ChatGPT’s company, reported that high-profile companies like Expedia, OpenTable, and Instacart, created plugins to allow their chatbot to access their services. So a user can ask ChatGPT to do tasks normally requiring the current web or an app and the AI app will respond.
This shifts how we use computers, apps and the web since AI programs can now access the real-time internet, not just their training set. By using OpenAI to build their tools, these companies position OpenAi at the heart of AI’s next phase.
Although these AI models still have lots of potential vulnerabilities that haven’t been tested. (Source: https://www.wired.com/story/chatgpt-plugins-openai/)
Actionable Marketing Implication
- It’s time to get up-to-speed with AI and evaluate the impact it will have on your marketing, employees and technology across your organization.
Recommended Reading
► Will Artificial Intelligence Keep Growing?
AI continues to learn on its own at an accelerated rate so that its results improve over time. Yet its knowledge is limited by the strength and quality of the learning set.
With the massive increase in users and products, AI has reached a tipping point. So many people across businesses realize that they need to understand and start to use it or be left behind.
The real question is:
Whether AI at this level is ready for prime time?
While Italy has banned the use of AI, over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers have called for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AI models for at least 6 months to study their capabilities and dangers. (Source: The Guardian 2023)
The problem with this request:
Many believe there’s no clear rationale for the 6-month ban. Further, many believe that it’s just a way for the leaders in the AI field to either catch up or create a larger lead.
With existing products from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and others available to the public, people will continue integrating these tools and output into their lives and their jobs. Also, new players and individuals would continue working on their models and forms of AI in the interim. They’d do it in a less public way.
The major existing technology-based corporations are constrained by their existing business models. So they need to integrate AI in a way that supports their current revenue streams as Microsoft is doing with Bing and its Office Suite.
By 2030, AI-powered technology is expected to yield $15.7 trillion. Of this, 6.6 trillion will be improvements in productivity and $9.1 trillion will be increased customer demand.
Further, $7.0 trillion or just less than half of this increase in economic impact will occur in China.
► AI And The Gartner Hype Cycle
Based on Gartner’s AI Hype Cycle, AI innovations will continue to yield transformational benefits for both businesses and individuals. Where possible adopt composite AI, decision intelligence and edge AI which are expected to drive major competitive growth and advantage to businesses.
Other factors to consider:
- Both Amazon and Google recently pulled back funding and support for their voice assistants. As AI-driven functionality continues to evolve and people start to talk to their machines and expect spoken responses, this will look like a poor decision.
- Most governments don’t have the expertise and resources available to create a set of standards for evaluating these AI models. For example, the current AI models that scrape Internet data violate European GDPR regulations.
As a user, test different products to determine which ones work best to meet your needs. By doing so, you keep up with this extremely fast-moving and changing technology while building the basis for your business to continue to grow over time.
About 3 out of 5 US adults either strongly or somewhat agree that generative AI can save work time and resources. Yet they’re concerned about its effectiveness and accuracy.
Recommended Reading
Marketing Reads
In honor of this week’s holidays, here are some helpful marketing articles.
► To celebrate Passover, read:
► To celebrate Easter, read:
► For those of you looking to fill your spring calendar with content:
Plan Ahead: Mark Your Calendar
► Project Voice 2023 – April 24 – 28 in Chattanooga, TN
The number 1 event for Conversational AI / Voice tech in America
► Creator Economy Expo – May 1-3 in Cleveland, OH
If you run a content-first business this is the event to attend!
Use the code AMG100 to get $100 off any pass. I’ll be there along with Jesse Cole (Savannah Bananas), Joe Pulizzi, and other inspiring creators.
► CX Connect– June 13–15, Online via Zoom
CX Connect will feature three days of thought-provoking presentations from the leading experts in customer experience.
► The Conversation Design Conference – July 24th – 25th in London, UK
bringing together the leading thinkers and doers in Conversation Design. Organized by VUX World.
► Marketing AI Conference – July 26 – 28 in Cleveland, OH
► Are you hosting an event that you’d like us to add to the Marketing Calendar?
If so, let us know by using our Contact Form with the Subject Line:
Event For AMG Newsletter Calendar.
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Happy Marketing,
Heidi
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