OpenAI Suspected of Scraping YouTube Content to Train AI Video Model

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The Data Rights Wars between major players heat up, as speculation swirls that OpenAI might be scraping YouTube’s content without permission to train its own AI video model. Also, notable innovation and strategic partnerships are forming to collaborate on new AI solutions for marketers…

TODAY’S AI-POWERED MARKETING UPDATE:

• Top Story: OpenAI Suspected of Scraping YouTube Content to Train Video Software

• AI Market Trend: AI Customer Engagement: Mature Brands Saw 123% Rev Jump in 2023

• ROI Keys: New Research: “When AI Investments Pay Off in Marketing”

• Joining Forces: WPP and Google Cloud Form GenAI Marketing Partnership

• Leadership Ideas: IBM Marketing Head Describes Company’s Strategy for Harnessing AI

• Email Promo Innovation: SAP Emarsys Launches “Out-of-the-Box” Product for Email Marketing

• Social Media Solution: Salesforce Announces AI-Powered WhatsApp Integration

• Today’s Master Marketing Tip: Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture

TOP STORY

OpenAI Suspected of Scraping YouTube Content to Train Video Software

While it hasn’t been solidly substantiated, there’s widespread speculation among tech industry observers that OpenAI has been using YouTube content without consent to train its AI video software service called Sora—which if true would be a violation of YouTube’s terms of service.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube said he didn’t have clear evidence that OpenAI’s engineers have been scraping content from his company’s service, but added that it would violate YouTube’s “rules of the road.”

OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati has responded to inquiries from journalists about the situation with “uncertainty” about whether or not the content scraping has in fact been occurring.

OpenAI faces similar allegations from publishers including New York Times, which has filed a lawsuit charging the company with copyright infringement by using the publisher’s content without permission to help train its ChatGPT text-generation service.

AI MARKET TREND

AI Customer Engagement: Mature Brands Saw 123% Rev Jump in 2023

Mature brands that have made significant investments in AI and the data it needs to function effectively reaped an average revenue increase of 123% last year, according to a new report from Twilio, a provider of customer engagement and marketing solutions.

The survey included 4,750 business leaders and 6,300 consumers in 18 countries, conducted between Nov. 16 and Dec. 22, 2023. Of the business representatives surveyed, 17% were deemed to be “engagement leaders.”

“In fact, 94% of engagement leaders say personalizing customer engagement is a high or critical priority in 2024 and they expect their investment in digital customer engagement to increase 133% by 2027,” according to Twilio.

“With the right tools in their tech stack and the help of AI, these leading brands are well positioned to meet and even exceed rising customer personalization and engagement expectations.”

ROI KEYS

New Research: “When AI Investments Pay Off in Marketing”

Marketing leaders are realizing gains from AI in three key areas, including sales productivity (+6.2%), increasing customer satisfaction (+7%), and reducing marketing overhead costs (-7.2%), according to a new research report by Duke University Professor Christine Moorman, published in MIT Sloan Management Review.

“From content creation to software coding and customer segmentation, artificial intelligence deployment fever is real,” according to Moorman. “But amid a great deal of media, analyst, and executive speculation about how AI will impact enterprises, it’s still not easy to see where organizations are reaping the results.”

The survey of 316 marketing leaders indicates that 60.4% of companies have used AI in marketing for less than one year, 17.9% for one year, and 18.7% for two to five years, and only 2.9% have used AI in marketing for more than five years.

Moorman is the founder and director of The CMO Survey and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Marketing.

JOINING FORCES

WPP and Google Cloud Form GenAI Marketing Partnership

Google and WPP, a British multinational advertising and public relations company, on Tuesday announced a new collaboration “that will redefine marketing through the integration of Google's Gemini models with WPP Open, WPP's intelligent marketing operating system used by more than 35,000 of its people and adopted by key clients including The Coca-Cola Company, L'Oréal and Nestlé.”

The deal will combine Google's expertise in data analytics, generative AI technology and cyber security, with WPP's marketing capabilities, global creative scale, and understanding of client brands, “to drive a step-change in marketing efficiency and effectiveness,” according to the announcement.

Under the agreement, Google Cloud's gen AI tools will be used with WPP's proprietary marketing and advertising data to create brand- and product-specific content using GenAI, to gain deeper insights into target audiences, to predict and explain content effectiveness, and to optimize campaigns with ongoing adaptive processes, the companies announced.

LEADERSHIP IDEAS

IBM Marketing Head Describes Company’s Strategy for Harnessing AI

In a newly published “as-told-to-essay,” IBM’s head of marketing Jonathan Adashek presents a thirty-thousand-foot view of his company’s strategy for integrating AI into its various departments.

“With IBM Watsonx.ai, we are going to create a product assistant to help us as marketers and communicators tell our stories and personalize that content for more audiences and get more versions of those stories out,” Adashek says.

As a successful case study, he offers the example of a campaign the company’s marketing team created last year to promote the Masters golf tournament, which IBM sponsors.

Using Adobe Firefly, IBM’s marketers “had thousands of selects in a matter of minutes,” according to Adashek. “We didn't just take the one that looked best and move it. We took time to go through them and put the right words to sit on top of it. It still took that human touch.”

It was IBM’s best-performing digital ad of the year, he says, performing 26 times better than IBM's average paid-social benchmarks in terms of driving engagement on IBM.com among key targeted audiences.

“We have an HR service center here in the company that had roughly 800 people in it,” Adashek adds. “Today, that service center has 60 people because we were able to automate the repetitive rote tasks, allowing people to get into more value-creating roles and creating a better interface for our clients.”

EMAIL PROMO INNOVATION

SAP Emarsys Launches “Out-of-the-Box” Solution for Email Marketing

Emarsys, an omnichannel customer engagement company owned by SAP, on Wednesday announced the launch of AI Product Finder, a new email marketing solution for product recommendations and personalized content.

The new solution is designed to help marketers run searches of extensive product catalogues to find relevant content for emails, and uses genAI to recommend relevant email subject lines.

In a press release, Emarsys says it is now “a fully AI-first business.”

SOCIAL MEDIA SOLUTION

Salesforce Announces AI-Powered WhatsApp Integration

Salesforce on Wednesday announced the general availability of “Unified Conversations for WhatsApp,” a new AI-powered solution that updates customer engagement by merging marketing and service interactions into personalized WhatsApp chats.

The solution is intended to enable brands to connect with customers, especially in Latin America, through their preferred messaging platform.

“With more than two billion people using WhatsApp today, Salesforce’s new [solution] enables brands to connect with their customers where they are and have a single, connected, and trusted experience,” said Steve Hammond, general manager of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

TODAY’S MARKETING MASTER TIP:

GET YOUR BRAND REFERRED TO ACTIVE, ENGAGED, TARGETED READERS:

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THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY, FOLKS!