Pandemic-driven pressures for productivity may have broken down marketers’ resistance to AI-based creative. This Bynder report finds just 1% of marketers think branding can’t be automated, compared with 23% last year. A whopping 89% believe technology will help creativity at the companies, although (in a different question) 29% said automation will diminish creativity and 28% said it will eliminate jobs.
Maybe it’s National Stick to Your Knitting Day: Meredith Corporation is selling its local TV stations for $2.7 billion, leaving it free to concentrate on its core publishing brands, which include People, Better Homes & Gardens, and Allrecipes. Those may sound old-fashioned but Meredith already makes more from digital advertising than print advertising. This might be a good time to sell: TV viewing time dropped 9% in the first quarter of this year and is expected to fall further.
After much fanfare, support by Florida’s governor, and passage of conflicting versions in the state House and Senate, the Florida legislature adjourned without a final vote on a proposed privacy bill, which would have been the third enacted in the U.S. The House included a private right of action while the Senate did not. The House then failed to vote on the revised bill, leaving the state with no new legislation. Washington State also saw its privacy bill fail - for the third year in a row. As in Flordia, the state House and Senate failed to agree on private lawsuits.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.