Marketers Take Note: EU Regs Impact Generative AI Space

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Big players providing AI-powered tools for marketers face scrutiny from government regulators, as resistance from EU watchdogs kills a major merger between Adobe and Figma.

HERE’S TODAY’S ACTIONABLE AI MARKETING AGENDA:

• Top news of the day: Adobe and Figma Call Off $20B Merger

• Startup News: Arcane Raises $5M Seed Round

• Today’s top AI marketing trend: Customer-facing content second-most common use of generative AI for marketers

• Today’s Master Marketing Tip: Joe Chernov, CMO of Pendo.io

TOP NEWS

EU Regs Impact Generative AI Space: Adobe and Figma Call Off $20B Merger

Ditching a deal that would have combined two major players in the generative AI space, Adobe and Figma have called off their planned $20 billion merger, citing opposition from regulators in the EU and UK as the reason.

“Adobe and Figma mutually agreed to terminate the transaction based on a joint assessment that there is no clear path to receive necessary regulatory approvals from the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority,” according to a joint statement.

The decision to kill the planned merger demonstrates how current regulatory scrutiny over Big Tech is likely to impact the AI industry’s continuing evolution going forward, in ways that will affect sources of advanced tools for marketing operations.

Figma offers a collaborative web application for interface design, focusing on user interface and user experience design, with an emphasis on real-time collaboration using vector graphic editors and prototyping tools.

In June, Figma acquired the AI startup company Diagram, which offers a plugin built on Figma’s platform that leverages GPT-3 to generate design ideas with a simple prompt.

Figma's employee headcount grew over 50% in the past year, as the company has focused on AI-powered features and expanded into software development, according to Reuters.

Adobe also has launched its own generative AI-powered solutions such as Adobe Firefly, which enables users to ideate, create, and communicate while improving content workflows, and is designed to be safe for commercial use, according to the company.

In addition to its Firefly web app, Adobe also supports a broader suite of creative generative AI tools in the company’s page-design apps and Adobe Stock, a provider of stock images that’s powered by Firefly.

Adobe will pay a merger termination fee to Figma of $1 billion.

STARTUP NEWS

AI Marketing Startup Arcane Raises $5 Million of Seed Capital

Arcane, the London-based developer of an AI co-pilot solution for marketing teams, announced on Thursday it has raised $5 million in a seed capital round led by Accel.

The startup was founded in late 2021 by Ben Hacking, who previously worked at the British online food delivery company Deliveroo. That’s where he conceived of the potential for an AI solution that automated routine and time-consuming tasks for marketers, such as SEO analysis, media planning and ad buys.

Arcane’s AI solution collects data from a marketing team’s various platforms such as social media data and content assets to create a knowledge base of information and make suggestions about complex campaign strategy questions.

"An example use case is that marketers have to do competitor research," Hacking told Business Insider. "So some of the first capabilities we've built into our copilot is you can start to ask questions about what is this doing in this market? What are they running on different platforms and things like that," he said.

Currently in beta-test mode, Arcane plans eventually to charge customers on a usage-based pricing model.

TODAY’S TOP AI MARKETING TREND

Survey Reveals Customer-Facing Content Most Common Use of AI-Generated Content

A new survey of marketers found that nearly three-quarters of their companies’ AI-generated copy is used for editorial and other consumer-facing content.

Copy generation is currently the second-most common use of AI by marketers, with 41% reporting that their companies are employing the tech that way.

The survey of 118 marketers was conducted by Digiday, whose report authors cautioned that “using AI for [customer-facing content] is not without some risk.”

“Many marketers and industry watchdogs are concerned about copyright issues that can arise with public-facing generative AI outputs, especially when there’s a lack of transparency around what data is used to train the models,” according to the report.

Meanwhile, Chatbots and AI assistants remain the most common application of AI technology by marketers, with a majority (51%) of respondents identifying these as the most common use at their companies.

Social media listening represents the third-most common application of AI, according to the survey, with 38% of respondents reporting they use AI for social media listening because it enables them to analyze information at a faster rate than humans or other non-AI tools.

AI trained on social data such as likes and shares can predict what content will connect with customers and to identify emerging consumer demand faster than more conventional methods.

AI social media tracking “allows companies to react faster to customer needs and to ride — or attempt to avoid — the wave of consumer sentiment before it starts to decline or shift,” according to the survey.

TODAY’S MARKETING MASTER TIP:

Joe Chernov, CMO of Pendo, previously served as the VP of marketing at HubSpot and Eloqua, helping to shepherd both his former companies through successful IPOs.

Content Marketing Institute named Chernov as “Content Marketer of the Year” and AdWeek designated him as one of the 100 most creative people in advertising.

Chernov’s advice, embodied in the quote above, highlights a fundamental aspect of successful marketing strategies – keeping the customer’s experience at the center of every campaign. Indeed, at the very heart of product design.

It’s the basis of Pendo’s own growth, which over the last ten years has expanded with more than 800 million monthly users and 10,000-plus business customers, including industry giants such as Cisco, Red Hat and BMC.

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THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY, FOLKS!