☀️Weekstarter Links 03/18/24

Brain exercises for your inbox: CC #290

In This Issue: FTC Sending Out Refunds In “Review Hijacking” Case / YouTube Redesigning TV App To Make Fullscreen Viewing Harder + Push Online Shopping / Microsoft Expanding GenAI For Advertisers / Marketing Strategies For GenAI Search / Guernica Magazine Collapses After Staff Protests Article By Israeli Author / House Passes TikTok Ban, But Noone In Senate Wants To Touch It / Surprising Noone, Elon Musk Interferes With A Good Business Idea / Teaching Amazon’s AI To Teach Forbidden Knowledge

Photo by Ramón Salinero on Unsplash

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.

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May you have an amazing week.

Here are the links.

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FTC Sending Out Refunds In “Review Hijacking” Case: The FTC announced today it was going to send more than $527,000 in refunds to consumers who bought products which were marketed based on “review hijacking”.

This announcement is related to a case where the FTC brought charges against The Bountiful Company, a supplement marketer. The FTC accused The Bountiful Company of “review hijacking” by merging new products under existing products to take advantage of the existing product’s ratings and reviews on Amazon. This complaint marked the first time the FTC’s first law enforcement action around “review hijacking”.

The FTC mentioned review hijacking in the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking around fake reviews they released in October 2022. They described it as “Review Reuse Fraud” and claimed that “Some sellers hijack or repurpose reviews posted about another product or service”.

The Bountiful Company was tagging new products (for example, zinc gummies) as a “variation” of an existing product (for example, zinc plus magnesium tablets). The existing product typically had a large number of positive reviews and the vitamin company was hijacking that large number of reviews to propel the sales of the new product.

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YouTube Redesigning TV App To Make Fullscreen Viewing Harder + Push Online Shopping: Concrete details are scant, but the streaming platform says the new design will “open the door for a broad range of new experiences such as shopping for your creators’ favorite products.”

Beyond the pivot to shopping, the update should also improve existing features, with easier access to “video descriptions and comments.” To that end, both the descriptions and comment feed will take up a larger amount of room, when selected, with the actual video shrinking in size. YouTube says that users regularly request a smaller video feed and a prioritization of comments.

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Microsoft Expanding GenAI For Advertisers: “Copilot allows marketers to instantly generate assets for campaigns, such as images, headlines, and descriptions. […] Specifically designed for advertisers and agencies, Copilot leverages AI to generate recommendations for assets such as product images, headlines, and descriptions.

How it works. A user describe the content needed, like an image, and Copilot generates suggestions based on the description.

Why we care. Copilot may simplify asset creation, saving users time, and providing inspiration for better-quality materials for campaigns. This functionality should also be more efficient than using stand-alone generative AI tools because it’s baked-in to the Microsoft Advertising Platform.”

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Marketing Strategies For GenAI Search: “Playing around with these AI chatbots represents a crucial initial phase for gauging the tool's comprehension of your company and its positioning amongst rivals.

Perplexity, the AI search engine app, reportedly grew to 10 million monthly active users (MAU) in less than a year and resolved over half a billion queries in 2023. If I type in the search question "What is the best CRM software?", it lists five solutions as the answer. It does cite web link sources.

Will your brand be shown as the solution when someone types in questions or keywords related to your products or services? According to an FAQ article about how it ranks answers, it says "Perplexity AI uses AI technology to gather information from multiple sources on the web and provide responses to users' questions; it also uses a Bing-based retrieval system for verifying the answers." So, optimizing for Bing search seems to be relevant again.”

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Guernica Magazine Collapses After Staff Protests Article By Israeli Author: “A poetry editor resigned as well, calling Chen’s essay a “horrific settler normalization essay”—settler here seeming to refer to all Israelis, because Chen does not live in the occupied territories. More staff members followed, including the senior nonfiction editor and one of the co-publishers (who criticized the essay as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism”). Amid this flurry of cascading outrage, on March 10 Guernica pulled the essay from its website, with the note: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.” As of today, this explanation is still pending.”

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House Passes TikTok Ban, But Noone In Senate Wants To Touch It: “The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would lead to a nationwide ban of the popular video app TikTok if its China-based owner doesn’t sell its stake, as lawmakers acted on concerns that the company’s current ownership structure is a national security threat.

The bill, passed by a vote of 352-65, now goes to the Senate, where its prospects are unclear.”

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Surprising Noone, Elon Musk Interferes With A Good Business Idea: “X has canceled a high-profile partnership with former CNN host Don Lemon to stream a video talk show on the platform. Lemon said that the company canceled his contract hours after he interviewed X’s billionaire owner Elon Musk for the first episode of “The Don Lemon Show,” which was scheduled to stream on the platform this Monday.

“Elon Musk is mad at me,” Lemon said in a video posted to X on Wednesday. “Apparently, free speech absolutism doesn’t apply when it comes to questions about him from people like me.”

Lemon’s announcement came a day after company CEO Linda Yaccarino declared that X was becoming a “video first” platform. It announced the partnership with Lemon in January as part of a larger strategy to stream more original content on the service.”

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Teaching Amazon’s AI To Teach Forbidden Knowledge:

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