We’re starting off with this month’s number one tech scandal. OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman got fired for allegedly “being not consistently candid in his communications”. The company’s staff wasn’t happy about this decision. Over 730 employees, including Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and lead scientist, signed a letter threatening to quit unless Sam Altman is reappointed as the CEO. This worked, and by November 22nd, Altman was brought back to the company.
Don’t ask us, we don’t know what the hell that was either.
Since AI is still the talk of the town, here’s some interesting info for you. Common Sense Media, a non-profit organization that provides media ratings for parents, reviewed some popular generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Google’s Bard, and even Snapchat’s My AI. And none of these tools received a rating higher than 3 stars, which means that they’re not safe for kids due to potentially harmful, incorrect, or biased content.
According to Tracy Pizzo Frey, Senior Advisor of AI at Common Sense Media, all generative AI contains cultural, racial, and other biases — and the ratings are created to prevent kids from reproducing these stereotypes via AI output.
Just as Common Sense Media deemed AI tools unsafe for kids, Google opened Bard, its own AI chatbot, to teenagers in most countries. Bard will be available to teenagers who are 13 years old and above, it will come with extra safety measures and will help users find inspiration and solve their everyday problems.
At the same time, Google filed a lawsuit against scammers who advertised a fake Bard chatbot that was actually malware.
Okay, enough about AI, let’s get back to marketing and stuff. A study showed that on average, marketers get at least 11 additional working hours because Black Friday campaigns require more content than usual. In more extreme cases, 6% of 600 surveyed specialists worked more than 25 extra hours around the Black Friday weekend.
And did you work overtime on Black Friday?
Black Friday is not that easy on consumers either — let’s take a look at the recent Aprimo survey. According to it, 58% of U.S. adults feel that promotional holiday content adds to stress levels. Even worse, 31% of American consumers said they were so done with excessive promotion they unsubscribed from a brand’s communications — and 15% even left negative reviews.
At the same time, 85% of Americans said that holiday content affects their purchasing decisions, so poor marketers work overtime for good.
Still questioning if email marketing is alive? Consider this study. Turns out, 73% of B2B marketers say that out of all channels, emails are the most effective way to connect with prospective customers — outperforming phone, events, and even paid ads.
By the way, isn’t it ironic that we actually have a definitive guide on B2B emails in our blog? What a weird twist of fate…
Apparently not only marketers work extra hours during the season but also scammers. This month, Amazon claimed to have shut down more than 45,000 phishing websites and 15,000 fake telephone numbers. The problem is, the scammers get more intricate and entice victims with emails offering deals on rare items and fake “Amazon” websites with ridiculously cheap prices.
A kindly reminder from Selzy: if it’s too good to be true, it most likely is.
Google Maps has released a few updates including functionality for planning group outings within the app. This will allow users to save their favorite places to a list and share it with friends, discuss the options in the Google Maps group chat, and plan the entire route together.
Sounds great on paper but we’ve kinda seen this before with Google going social…
Brand loyalty can be achieved via many ways, including but not limited to… video games? This month, E.l.f. cosmetics entered Roblox with the game “E.l.f UP”. It’s a tycoon-style open world where players can try walking in entrepreneurs’ shoes and run one out of four shops that are related to E.l.f. and its makeup and skincare products.
Yep, Gen Alpha is becoming an audience for ads now, feeling old yet?
Decentralized alternative to Twitter Bluesky reached 2 million users this month, despite being an invite-only platform. Since the audience keeps growing, the company plans to launch a public web interface, so Bluesky can function more like a regular social media app. They’re also planning to launch “federation” next year.
Federation is a structure that will allow users to join “micro-Blueskies” or run their own and freely move their accounts and all their connections between them, which makes the platform “billionaire-proof”.
