📓 The Creativ Brief: Problems, Solutions, and Products

OpenAI inks Dotdash-Meredith deal. TikTok Sues US. Sony-Apollo chase Paramount deal. Streaming TV advertising. Co-pilots.

May 10, 2024

The best products solve a problem.

The swirling tempest of AI assaulting tech news obscures a major disconnect between AI products and problems. Every tech, media, and agency firm has recently incorporated AI into their products or services. Most of them have done so without even stopping to think about the problem they want to solve.

The trick to incorporating net-new technology into a product or service is to understand the overlap between what the technology can do and what problems exist in the market.

Engineers are grand at building things, but rarely understand industry markets. This leads to industry experts not knowing what’s possible and products misdiagnosing what customers want.

In its most reductive form, artificial intelligence can crunch massive quantities of data quickly, find correlations between disparate sets of data points, and generate outputs from those correlations.

The hard part is figuring out what data to ingest and what outputs to produce.

While others have gone generative, we think measurement has far reaching applications in marketing, media and advertising.

Campaign reporting - still done manually, data intensive, lots of human error
Brand and competitive tracking - lots of data feeds, channels, and inputs that contribute to a brand. Large need from marketers to understand what’s working.
IP and brand valuation - Lots of publicly available data on big brands. IP and brands are traditionally hard to value because their worth is tied to consumer awareness and previous unquantifiable sentiment.

We’re betting the farm on machine learning applied to media, marketing, and advertising. But we’ll start with the problems, then engineer the solutions.

3 Stories Dominating Media and Tech Headlines

OpenAI inks licensing deal with Dotdash Meredith (axios.com). Dotdash Meredith, one of the largest digital publishers in the U.S., finalized a deal with OpenAI. The deal allows OpenAI to train AI products with Dotdash Meredith-licensed content. This would allow OpenAI’s products to better provide real-time, authoritative information from Dotdash Meredith sources to customers using AI programs like ChatGPT.

Why it matters: Experts theorize that generative AI programs may replace internet-based search engines like Google or Bing. With the new, multi-year deal, the publisher goliath will gain millions of dollars in licensing revenue while Open AI will receive valuable training data and updating resource to serve to customers looking for information.

TikTok Sues US Over Divest-or-Ban Law, Alleging It Is Unconstitutional (variety.com). The new U.S. law requires TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell the massive social media platform or face a ban.

Why it matters: TikTok is a platform that over 170 million Americans use to create, publish, and share videos across the internet. It has also amassed billions in advertising revenue to reach that audience. ByteDance is expected to completely sell off TikTok in 270 days. The federal lawsuit will buy the company time, regardless of whether it's successful or not.

Paramount in talks to open its books to Sony-Apollo (Reuters). Paramount Global has reportedly started the process of opening their books to Sony Pictures and Apollo Global Management. The new consortium interested in acquiring the U.S.-based media company offers Paramount shareholders an alternative to Skydance.

Why it matters: Paramount Global owns a 3,500+ movie library, including valuable IP franchises such as Ninja Turtles, Star Trek, SpongeBob and more. Sony Pictures has made an effort to expand its multimedia catalog - movies, music, and television production - and a tie-up between Sony and Paramount would give it a 20.5% share of the North American box office.

Creativ Spotlight - Iconic Arts Launches in LA and Tokyo

Transmedia Studio Iconic Arts officially launched this week in LA and Tokyo. We were to support the release of this news. The new firm boasts a stacked roster of industry veterans to develop net-new IP, emerging tech, and brand partnerships with iconic Japanese art houses.

See their exclusive on Variety and interview on GamesBeat.

Stat of the Week - Streaming TV Advertising

This chart shows the percentage of total viewership on their platform that is ad supported.

Subscription OTT ad-supported viewer penetration rates are led by Amazon Prime (80% of total viewers), Peacock (77.7%), and Paramount+ (73.2%). Despite availability for ad-free options on most streaming services, the majority of average viewers still choose to stay with ad-supported versions.

Ad supported streaming is on the rise because platforms can price discriminate amongst consumers, charging higher rates for ad-free and lower for ad-supported. This allows streamers to cater to a larger overall audience.

One Fun Thing - AI Co-Pilots

Courtesy of the Microsoft marketing team, the term ‘copilot’ has entered the tech lexicon as an AI tool that helps you become more productive. Since then several companies have adopted the term for their own products.