What is ‘liquid content’?

Hello again, friends. I hope your week is going well 😊 A relatively quiet week this week, which is no bad thing because it will no doubt ramp up towards the end of the year, and that's what everything's leading towards now that Halloween is out of the way.

So we've already got the Christmas ads landing, and yes, some are made with AI whilst some are leaning into high-effort craft.

What do you think? I'll reveal the results next week.

OK, on with this week’s stories that caught my eye…

🤖 AI — Animated GIFs in ChatGPT, a better way to edit slides and AI agents aren't actually doing much for us yet.

📣 Marketing — Two Christmas films, two ways to make them, and what happens after someone clicks a ChatGPT ad.

📱 Social media — Instagram finds a home for long videos, Snapchat’s paying audience and a new bonus on X.

🎬 Media — The audience you reach by dubbing, a YouTube series that sells cinema tickets and the rise of “liquid content”.

🔗 Other stuff worth knowing about — Plane-spotting by ear, a hacked car clock and eight more quick reads.

From my testing, this is a slight improvement in image generation, but the headline feature is its ability to make animated GIFs, which on its own is probably going to mostly be used for novelty, but in a wider piece of work, let's say you're asking ChatGPT to create a PowerPoint deck or a microsite, its ability to include its own generated animated GIFs in that is quite handy.

Images 2.6 also lets you save a reference image and call it up in another chat. Useful if you want the same character to appear in six different posts (preferably looking like the same character). OpenAI.

Uber counted how many rides AI agents booked during Halloween week. Four. Yes… f-o-u-r! They did a bit better on Uber Eats, placing about 500 orders. Across rides and deliveries combined, Uber handled around 320 million trips and orders that week.

So maybe the general public isn't that into getting AI agents to run their lives for them... yet. TechCrunch · Uber earnings call.

We've all been there. The client sends over a new brand template and suddenly your perfectly-OK 40-slide presentation needs a new look.

Gemini in Google Slides can now take a reference deck and apply its style across yours in one go. You can also condense several slides into one or update the content using a file in Drive. The slides stay editable, and version history gives you a way back if it gets carried away. Google Workspace.

Apple is letting any app developer give Siri things to do inside their app. Think checking where a delivery is, booking a table or placing an order, all in your own words.

This isn't live to consumers yet, but when it is, will make Siri significantly more useful and might just be the thing that tips it over into becoming popular. It'll be interesting to see what developers do with it. I'll keep you posted. Apple.

You might not realise this, but all the big AI companies now bake an invisible watermark into the text that they produce.

That watermark survives copying and pasting, reformatting etc, because it's baked into the word choices that the LLM makes, and that encodes a secret pattern which no human can spot, and the popular AI detection tools can't spot, but detector tools issued by the AI labs will be able to spot with close to 100% accuracy. Although rewriting portions of the text does quickly decrease the detection rate.

So this week, Anthropic are rolling it out to more of the Claude models, and xAI are rolling it out to Grok in the API. Quick explainer video.

Sources: Anthropic · Updated dates · Grok.

A small update, and a welcome one. On iPhone and Android you can now stay signed in to two ChatGPT accounts and switch between them in Settings.

Great for keeping work and personal use separate. Swap accounts and your chats, memory, settings and subscription go with the account you’ve chosen. No more signing out just to ask what to do with the stuff in the fridge. ChatGPT release notes.

Firstly, if you don't know what Microsoft Clarity is, it's free and really good (I know, even though it's made by Microsoft!!). If you've used Hotjar or similar ‘behavioral analytics’ for websites, it's basically that but free.

So… if an AI agent tried to buy something on your website, would you know it had been there? Microsoft Clarity can now show you which agents visited and what they did, from searching and filling in forms to reaching checkout.

There’s also a simulator for trying a shopping task yourself. I’d start with the real visits. If agents keep finding the product and getting stuck at the same step, that’s a pretty good clue about what to fix. Microsoft Clarity.

Meet Gus, the furry yeti in Levi’s Christmas ad. Someone made his set by hand. Someone made the little clothes. And for every second of stop-motion footage you see, the crew spent four hours filming.

This is what I mean by ‘effort-maxxing’. Levi’s wants you to see the work, especially now that an AI tool could knock out a plausible Christmas monster in minutes. Knowing someone sat there moving Gus a fraction at a time is part of the pleasure of watching him. Watch the film · Levi’s.

Now watch Deutsche Telekom’s Christmas ad. A girl notices that her grandfather is somewhere else in his head. He’s remembering Christmases with his late wife. It’s familiar territory for a festive tearjerker.

Director Léo Cannone and studio New Forest used generative AI to build the characters and their world. Watch it straight after Gus. I’m curious which one moves you more, and whether knowing how each was made changes your answer. Watch the film · Deutsche Telekom.

Of the paid visits to US online shops in one study, 0.37% from ChatGPT ads led to a purchase. For Google Search ads it was 1.17%. That works out at roughly four orders per thousand visits versus twelve.

That doesn’t settle where your next pound of ad spend should go. It does give you a better question to take into a test. What did it cost you to get a paying customer? Working paper · Digiday.

Say you buy skincare at Sephora. A beauty brand can now use Amazon’s ad tools to reach an audience of people who’ve made purchases like yours, even if those purchases happened in a shop and you never looked the product up on Amazon.

Attain supplies the opted-in purchase data. Advertisers can select a retailer, a category and whether the sale was online or in store. That’s a big expansion of what Amazon can offer brands who want to reach somebody else’s customers. Attain · Adweek.

Canva is cutting jobs. Co-founder Melanie Perkins told staff that growth had slowed for the first time in a decade and that the company was bringing its product, growth and platform teams closer together.

You’ll have seen the 22% figure. That’s 1,271 people affected by the restructure, including people changing roles or being asked to relocate. Canva hasn’t said how many of those people are losing their jobs. Canva’s staff note.

Last week it was the news that Instagram would let some creators upload 90-minute videos. This week we got a look at where anybody might actually find the things. Some users are seeing long videos right at the top of Explore.

That’s valuable real estate. If you’re a creator deciding where to put a film you spent weeks making, though, there’s still the question of how you get paid. YouTube has had an answer to that one for years. Social Media Today.

More than 30 million people now pay for a Snapchat subscription. That covers Snapchat+, Lens+ and extra storage for Memories, according to Snap’s latest results.

The storage bit is easy to understand. Once years of your own photos and videos live inside an app, paying to keep them there is quite a different decision from paying for a new filter. Snap’s results · TechCrunch.

X is inviting creators to earn a bonus for posting original vertical videos. The deal is 15 qualifying videos on 15 different days within a programme period. They need to be under three minutes long, and the days can be spread out.

Your own videos from other platforms can qualify. If you get an invite and you already make Reels or Shorts, that’s worth knowing before you commit to filming another 15. X’s pilot rules.

Nearly a quarter of The Diary of a CEO’s YouTube views from January to October came from people watching with a non-English audio track. That’s 261 million views. Spanish led the way, followed by Russian, German, Portuguese and French. FlightStory.

If you publish in English, check that automatic dubbing is on in YouTube Studio and enable translations on your Instagram Reels when you can. There’s a huge audience for the thing you already make, in a language you might never speak. YouTube · Instagram.

Amelia Dimoldenberg is taking the final series of Chicken Shop Date to cinemas for one night. The initial screenings in the UK, Ireland and Paris sold out in three hours. New York and Los Angeles have since joined the line-up.

Quite a journey for a series built around two people having a deliberately awkward conversation over chicken. People are buying cinema tickets for something they’ll be able to watch on YouTube. Watching it with a roomful of other fans is the draw. Variety.

The New York Times added 420,000 net digital-only subscribers in the third quarter. That’s for the whole offering, which includes Games, Cooking and The Athletic alongside the journalism.

I meet so many people who think that today's digital landscape requires everything being dumbed down and reduced to snack-sized bits. But actually, if you look at the reality of the media landscape we live in, long-form has always won in the long term, as has hard-to-produce quality content, and there are plenty of people who will not just stick around for that but pay money for it too. Times results · Nieman Lab.

A term I heard this week was “liquid content”. Say you start a video podcast on the telly over breakfast, then finish it in your headphones on the way to work. To you it’s still one episode.

Among French digital audio listeners, 58% had started something on one platform and finished it on another. And 66% sometimes or often used a video platform without looking at the screen.

Audion and YouGov · Podnews.

Ben Thompson’s essay traces the journey from finding a brilliant blog through somebody else’s blogroll to hoping an algorithm will show your work to the right people. Add an endless supply of AI content and the odds of being discovered look pretty grim.

The optimistic bit is about going smaller. A niche publication can live on a few loyal subscribers. A group chat can be a better place for conversation. And a piece of software can be worth making even if the only people who’ll ever use it sit around one table. Stratechery.

Have a great weekend. I'm always here for thoughts, chats, questions, advice, etc. [email protected] 😊