Like much of the tech industry, the News Gods seem to be phoning it in this week. They did offer a modestly interesting acquisition: CRM vendor Pipedrive purchased email marketing automation system Mailigen. Interesting because the idea seems to be for salespeople to run their own automated email campaigns. Maybe that makes them “citizen marketers”.
Just after we finished scratching our head over Salesforce’s acquisition of The CMO Club, email giant Mailchimp announced it had bought Courier Media, a London-based publisher whose main product is a 100,000-circulation print magazine for small-business people (not small business-people). So, martech vendors owning media organizations is apparently now a Thing. Let’s interpret it as vendors ensuring they can reach their audiences without relying third party data.
Not quite a bot but close: digital agency Jellyfish has leveraged the Google Cloud Vision API to analyze performance of video and dynamic ad content and recommend the best-performing items for new ads. You could have people do that but it would be a lot of work and nowhere near as impressive.
Unauthorized training data isn’t an existential threat to generative AI but it’s certainly a headache for users and developers alike. Most developers are trying to exclude materials that creators have explicitly labeled as unauthorized and citing “fair use” as justification for copying everything else. Getty Images has taken an opposite approach, building its gen AI tool only on materials that are explicitly licensed. It’s possible that tracing the provenance of training data will become a standard, similar to how organic food producers trace the origins of their ingredients.