Persado was using AI to create marketing content when ChatGPT was still learning to sing Daisy. They haven’t had much attention recently but did just release this interesting study that found senior marketers do no better than chance at picking the winner among three possible email subject lines. The key is less that AI generates better content than that Persado tests many alternatives to find which performs best.
Excitement about ChatGPT and friends is already being replaced by doubts it can live up to the hype. (Here’s a Gartner take, for example.) What’s good about that is vendors are already building tools to address those concerns. For example, Credo AI, an AI governance software vendor (yes, it’s a category), just released GenAI Guardrails, which helps companies minimize the risks of AI misuse and build the most valuable applications first.
Retailers continue to struggle for access for complete customer data. A CommerceNext survey of ecommerce managers found that only web analytics (95%), behavior (89%) and email/SMS interactions (83%) are used by more than half the respondents. Underused sources include loyalty data (47%), point of sale purchases (44%), and customer service interactions (42%). An impressive 64% said they do incrementality testing but many fewer capture customer IDs (46%), do predictive scoring (25%) or attempt ID resolution (22%).
Disney has agreed to license more than 200 characters, costumes, and environments (but not voices or talent likenesses) to OpenAI for Sora, its gen AI video platform. This is highly unusual for Disney, which generally sues AI models for copyright infringement; in fact, it sued Google for that a day before announcing the OpenAI deal. Disney will also invest $1 billion in OpenAI, nicely illustrating how very eager they are to join the AI party.