THIS WEEK SUMMED UP
SKIMS is in hot water for tracking users...even the ones who opted out, you can now shop for virtual groceries and get them delivered to your real house, and the AI-content (cold) wars are heating up with Google and OpenAI’s latest updates. Oh and there were bees, lots of bees.
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THREE PARTS THAT MATTER
Marketing
We’ll start with two pieces of big news. A new interpretation of an old California law designed to prevent telephone wiretapping has led to SKIMS (amongst others) being sued for use of Meta pixels on their site.
TBD how the courts will rule but to avoid getting caught in the chaos, you can make sure that users clicking ‘opt out of tracking’ actually does opt them out of Meta and any 3rd party tracking. A dev can help you with this or there are platforms like *Transcend* and numerous *Shopify apps* to help with consent management and tracking.
Courtesy of that pixel, ad spend on Meta is on track to overtake all linear TV ad spend within the next few years according to today’s data from WARC.
In other news, the *Bumble re-launch* had us refreshing our feed in excitement on 4/30. But it turned out to be… a (not great?) ad campaign… naturally with some *AI features* - just when we needed dating apps to become less human. And celebrity-led collaborations keep making a splash. Zendaya’s tour de force with Challenger as *a giant promotional vehicle* for Loewe (pronounced Lo-ev-e, we didn’t know 👀). 818 (Kendall Jenner) teamed up with Chamberlain Coffee (Emma Chamberlain) to cobrand an Espresso Martini Kit.
Culture
All the worlds are colliding in this era of determining what us humans want to experience for real life or online. In Roblox’s bid to become a one stop shop for your digital life - you can now enter a virtual Walmart in Roblox, shop, checkout and have the Walmart products delivered to your IRL door. This news comes alongside Walmart closing their unprofitable virtual and in person healthcare clinics. But don’t worry you’ll soon be able to bet on IRL arcade games at Dave & Buster’s via their app.
Technology
The battle between AI-content and human-content is heating up. Simultaneously *Google* and *Instagram* have launched updates to strip AI driven and generally low quality unoriginal content out of our feeds. While *OpenAI is partnering with embattled publishers* to ingest their content in a bid to make AI-content better, with the *Financial Times* being the latest addition.
If your organic traffic has been dinged by the Google core update this reinforces the need to start with a strong information architecture and a valuable user experience and content strategy (just saying).
WHAT ELSE WE ARE READING