Marketers may or may not love AI, but vendors keep trying. Anyword, formerly Keywee, recently added a $19/month pricing tier and enhanced its “Language Optimization Platform,” which promises to pick the best word for performance marketing ads. Meanwhile, AI-powered video ad creator Pencil has partnered with ecommerce funding provider Clearbanc to offer Pencil’s services to the 4,000+ Clearbanc-backed companies.
Yum! Brands, which owns KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and more, is clearly a martech enthusiast. They just bought online ordering and marketing platform Tictuk, following an early March deal for AI-based consumer insights and marketing analytics firm Kvantum. It’s intriguing that Yum! wants to own this technology, especially since McDonald’s may sell part of the Dynamic Yield personalization platform it acquired in 2019.
Marketing is less interested than other departments in data and analytics, according to this Alation study. Operations, compliance, finance, and sales are all more frequent proponents. Marketing and product share fifth place while customer service and human resources bring up the rear. Alation also reports that AI adoption is broad but shallow: 76% of firms have deployed some AI but just 8% use it throughout their organization.
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.