AI Content Platform Jasper Acquires Clipdrop, Expands into Europe

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Legal claims about copyright infringement continue to dog OpenAI, while AI marketing innovations keep on coming. So, let’s get right to the top stories!

TODAY’S AI-POWERED MARKETING UPDATE:

• Top News: AI Content Platform Jasper Acquires Clipdrop, Expands into Europe

• New Money: AI-Driven Photo Editing Provider Photoroom Raises $43 Million

• Product Innovation: Ontopical Launches AI Copilot Designed to Win Government Contracts

• Data Deals: Internal Docs Reveal Automattic Plans to Sell User Content for AI Training

• CMO Strategy: Majority of Marketing Leaders Disconnected from Business Goals

• AI Lawfare: OpenAI Faces More Copyright Lawsuits from News Outlets

• Master Marketing Tip: Howard Luck Gossage, the “Sage of San Francisco”

TOP NEWS

AI Content Platform Jasper Acquires Clipdrop, Expands into Europe

Jasper, the provider of an AI marketing copilot that helps create quality content faster, announced it has completed the acquisition of Clipdrop, the Paris-based provider of an image creation and editing platform founded in 2020 by a trio of former Google employees.

In making the acquisition, San Francisco-based Jasper has expanded its presence into Europe. The Clipdrop team will join Jasper and continue to lead research and innovation on “multimodality” tech at their headquarters in Paris, which has become a hub of AI innovation in Europe, according to Jasper.

Multimodal GenAI combines text, images, and audio to enhance creativity, using deep learning tech, a branch of AI that’s based on a model of how the human brain’s neural networks function.

"The addition of Clipdrop to Jasper will advance our vision to be the most comprehensive end-to-end marketing copilot in the industry, powering all the formats, channels, and functions enterprise marketing teams need,” said Timothy Young, CEO of Jasper, in the announcement.

NEW MONEY

AI-Driven Photo Editing Provider Photoroom Raises $43 Million

Photoroom, a Paris-based provider of AI photo editing solutions, has raised $43 million in its second round of venture capital led by Balderton Capital and new investor, Aglaé, with YCombinator participating, the company announced on Tuesday.

Photoroom said it will use the funding to accelerate its generative AI innovation, expanding its model by investing in more GPUs, securing content from leading image providers and photographers, and doubling the size of its team by the end of 2024.

“Having control over a custom model means that Photoroom's machine learning team will be able to incorporate new research as soon as it is released,” the company announced. “Photoroom's custom architecture will also increase the speed of image generation by up to 40%.”

The company has now raised a total of $64 million in two rounds of venture capital.

PRODUCT INNOVATION

Ontopical Launches AI Copilot Designed to Win Government Contracts

Ontopical, a venture capital-backed AI company founded in 2017, announced the release of a new AI copilot solution designed to help companies discover early signals of local government contract opportunities and provide support for quickly developing winning proposals.

The company says its new offering, called Oliver, provides “complete” coverage of local government activity, delivering daily alerts on early signals of new business and competitor activity. It mines data across more than 12,000 municipalities and local agencies, with analysis of over 100 million pages of minutes, agendas, plans, budgets and video transcripts.

“Winning new public sector work is difficult for businesses, as incumbent providers have a hard-to-shake advantage,” according to Ontopical. “Even for firms with significant sales teams, it’s labor intensive to discover new government opportunities before an RFP, and by then it’s often too late to build relationships or prepare a winning proposal.”

Oliver is already in use by some of North America’s largest construction and engineering, environmental, govtech software, power and utilities firms, with effort underway to roll the solution out to additional customers in telecom, critical infrastructure and other industries, the company said.

DATA DEALS

Internal Docs Reveal Automattic Plans to Sell User Content for AI Training

Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress.com, is either preparing to sell its two websites’ user-generated content to OpenAI and Midjourney to use in training AI models, or else already has done so, according to a report by 404 Media.

Internal documents obtained by 404 reveal that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a significant number of user posts that should have been excluded, based on the websites’ terms of service.

The data-sale deal has not been confirmed by any of the companies involved, and it’s not clear whether the user content already has been transferred to OpenAI or Midjourney, or instead whether the leaked internal documents were only discussing the process of data being scrubbed.

Last week, Reddit announced it has signed a $60 million annual deal to provide user-generated content to Google to use in training its AI models.

CMO STRATEGY

Survey: Majority of Marketing Leaders Disconnected from Business Goals

In a survey of more than 150 marketing leaders and 50 non-marketing C-suite executives, a majority say that their organizations’ marketing goals and business objectives are disconnected from each another.

Only about a quarter of marketing leaders start their planning process by identifying desired business outcomes, according to the survey conducted by Walker Sands, a full-service B2B marketing agency.

Here are some additional findings from the report:

74% of C-suite executives say their marketing teams struggle to understand business outcomes they expect from their marketing activities.

58% of marketers struggle to understand these expectations from the C-suite.

86% of C-suite executives say their marketing teams struggle to demonstrate the impact of marketing activities on business success.

87% of marketers prioritize business objectives over channel-based KPIs, but only 27% begin by focusing on outcomes before recommending specific channel activations.

A majority (73%) of marketers first focus on activating specific channels and achieving KPIs, and then connect metrics back to the outcomes.

“That’s not the case with all marketers, though,” says Dave Parro,  co-CEO of Walker Sands.

“Increasingly, we’re hearing from clients and prospects who ask us for help solving big business problems — without a preference on the marketing mix. These channel-agnostic requests have shifted many of our conversations to outcomes, whether it’s category creation, market penetration, talent recruitment or another broader business objective.”

AI LAWFARE

OpenAI Faces More Copyright Lawsuits from News Outlets

Following up on existing copyright infringement lawsuits from The New York Times and several famous book authors, three more publishers have filed similar cases against OpenAi and its owner Microsoft, claiming the AI company wrongfully used their content to train its ChatGPT model.

The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed suit on Wednesday in New York federal court, accusing OpenAI of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing copyright information such as author names and article titles in an attempt to circumvent the law.

The publishers are seeking monetary damages of at least $2,500 per violation and a court order for OpenAI to stop misusing their work, Reuters reported.

TODAY’S MARKETING MASTER TIP:

Howard Luck Gossage is considered an American advertising pioneer who earned his reputation during the "Mad Men" era, and was often called "The Socrates of San Francisco."

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THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY, FOLKS!