Context Collapse: GenAI's Downstream Effects on Media, PR, Advertising & Marketing
Don't fear the GenAI tech boom: CC #254
In this issue: LLMs = search engine chaos / GenAI will make a new set of industry winners & losers / Acquiring GenAI expertise = $$$.
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Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
I’m a writer, but I’m a generative AI optimist—not a doomer. From where I sit, ChatGPT and Midjourney and all the rest are awesome: Powerful tools that are the best thing since autocorrect and smartphones for getting stuff done.
But I’m also an industry veteran in my forties with a very extensive skillset, lots of experience and entrepreneurial tendencies. So my perspective is a little different than, say, someone who’s just getting started in the creative, journalism or advertising world. I’m fully cognizant of that + it is what it is.
But boy oh boy LLMs like ChatGPT are going to fuck up the media ecosystem well and good.
TLDR:
LLMs will upend the traditional search engine experience. This will change how traffic goes to media outlets.
The rise of generative AI will shake up the tech industry and create a new set of winners and losers. Media and PR and advertising are downstream from tech and will get shook up by this.
Personal assistants like Alexa and Google Home were a false alarm in how we interact with technology. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. are the real things.
RIP Search Engine Results
Earlier this year I did something really, really weird. I switched my primary search engine from Google to Bing.
It turned out that Bing offered a superior experience, and Bing’s ChatGPT-powered Gen AI functionality is a big part of that.
Look at that right column! That’s the future of search engines right there! And, I mean, it was a decent answer. If I was teaching a college class and a student handed that it in wouldn’t be the brightest answer in the class by any means but it definitely wouldn’t be the worst.
As I write this in fall 2023, Google’s built-in generative AI functionality lags way behind Bing’s. I fully expect Google to catch up in the future.
But as time goes on—and especially as newer cohorts of technology users get their first smartphones and start using their first laptops/desktops—querying search engines to get LLMs to answer questions will be the future. Waaaay less visits to websites basically. How this will impact video search engines/platforms like YouTube and TikTok is a really interesting question I’m pretty unclear on.
What this does mean is that basically everyone is expecting web traffic from search to plummet. This will change SEO greatly (though it won’t kill it by any means). It will mean media outlets will be emphasizing email as a channel to reachout to audiences because social is a disorganized mess right now (Twitter’s a mess + the Meta omniplex wants their services to be walled gardens w/o users leaving their sites + LinkedIn is totally having a growth moment right now that we’re rolling with). It will mean that a lot of the dark art SEO that public relations for movies/pop music/television shows have been doing—the fake reviews, the ghost websites, the social media bot armies—will matter way way less.
Advertisers and marketers will be adjusting to a SEO-deemphasized future. Though I’m a skeptic on the idea of every company having their own customer facing LLM (though this has all sorts of cool applications for the B2B space), there’s going to be much more emphasis on both online and offline events, on social community building and on brands themselves as social hubs. We’re in an environment where it makes absolute sense for a candy bar to start their own Discord server and where whichever consumer brand cracks the code on getting baby boomer customers to join a heavily-moderated social media group at scale will make lots and lots of money.
Meanwhile, the web itself will pivot from useful webpages outnumbered by SEO churn built around keywords to useful webpages outnumbered by SEO churn built around chatbot spider accessibility. So the enshittification goes!
GenAI: New Winners, New Losers
GenAI is shuffling the tech deck. The rise of generative artificial intelligence means a whole new set of industry winners and losers—it’s an industry era-defining event similar to the rise of smartphones (which cemented Steve Job’s Apple renaissance, turned Facebook into a global power and created massive new hardware supply chains) that will have big ramifications years and years from now. OpenAI has some real substantial first-mover advantage and there are some non-obvious industry incumbents (Adobe, Getty Images, the New York Times) who are very well placed to benefit from increased LLM use.
With that said, there’s a point where the crystal ball gets cloudy. We’re at that point when it comes to guessing just what the hell media/PR/advertising/marketing folks are looking at when it comes to allocating LLM resources.
For one thing, generative AI relies on truly expensive amounts of computing power. At press time, OpenAI spends more than $700,000 to keep ChatGPT running daily. Google and Microsoft and a fleet of venture capitalists are sinking truckloads of money into keeping your favorite genAI services running. As we all know from the collapse of the 2010s techlifestyle economy (VCs subsidizing your Uber ride! VCs subsidizing your WeWork! VCs subsidizing your meal delivery!), the gravy train doesn’t run forever.
Users will have favorites, users will have less favorites, some existing companies will do a great job of integrating genAI into their products, some existing companies will do a terrible job of integrating genAI into their products. Want to know which will be which? Hire me to assemble a report for you!
There are also larger x-factors at work here. As I write this in autumn 2023, the US is in a profoundly weird economic state where economic indicators are pointing in every direction and noone’s quite sure if there’s a recession or not but everyone knows that the marketing, advertising and media sectors are having quite a hard time right now. Meanwhile, the global geopoliticial situation is… tinderboxy… (is that a fair way to put it?) with one person making an extremely dumb decision in a far-off part of the world having an extremely high chance of dangerous aftereffects right now.
Hard to predict, hard to predict, etc.
…
LLMs As The New Interface
There’s no really, really good reason why we use QWERTY keyboards instead of anything else. Scientists at CERN have access to an alternate universe where smartphones still run on BlackBerry-style physical keyboards. If a few decisions at Xerox PARC went differently, we’d be using trackballs instead of mice.
Right now we’re in a world where our Macs and Windows machines work on a graphical user interface format that dates back decades. Our Androids and iPhones work on a touchscreen format that descends, in turn, from Apple and Microsoft.
The way we interact with tech changes the way we interact with advertising, entertainment, sports, art, and basically everything else.
LLMs are a fundamental different way of interacting with technology - the spoken prompt, the written prompt, the fact that mastering a tool like ChatGPT requires a casual user to think almost like a detective or an engineer or an interrogator, depending on the context.
This means opportunities.
And you want to be on the side of the opportunities, not the side of the left-behind. Get on it.
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