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One story, curated by Gregory Bufithis. More about me here.

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THOUGHTS OVER MY MORNING COFFEE:

Barbie and the AI-generated juggernaut

How AI is bleeding into advertising, and professional likeness

The devil works hard, but Barbie’s marketing team works harder

20 July 2023 -- Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. And another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born. Oppenheimer’s leadership of the Manhattan Project that led to Trinity is so famous that most of us (even me, sometimes) forget that he also did brilliant - at least for a while - physics. And my secondary university degree was in physics so I really have no excuse.

I watched the Oppenheimer movie last night (a privilege of being a member of the producers guild) but that’s not what this post is about right now. I want to talk about Barbie.

The Barbie x Xbox collaboration; Mattel keeps 5-15% of sales on Barbie promotional campaigns

The upcoming Barbie film’s marketing campaign is one of the more ingenious (and one of the more inescapable) in recent memory. Barbie advertising is everywhere.

The Greta Gerwig-helmed film - which stars Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken - has over 150 brand collaborations in market, ranging from Crocs to Pinkberry, Burger King to Xbox. Mattel, the brand’s parent company, reportedly receives either a flat fee or 5-15% of sales for each collaboration.

The crossovers seem to be working: according to MuckRack data, half a million articles have been written about Barbie since January - impressive earned media value. June alone brought 186,000 articles.

The latest box office tracking also looks promising: Barbie is tracking for a $100M opening weekend gross this weekend, compared to $45M for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which also opens tomorrow. A couple months ago, before the marketing push, Barbie was only tracking around ~$40M.

NOTE TO READERS: I am genuinely curious about this. Could it be an "event" style weekend for Barbie and that's why it's blowing up? And does that mean it's a one weekend phenomenon? Barbie is certainly being front-loaded.

My favorite collaboration, of course, is Barbie’s collaboration with Airbnb: a real-life Barbie DreamHouse in Malibu that anyone can book on Airbnb. Well done. Brilliant 👏

The Barbie campaign was designed for virality. This started a few months back with the website barbieselfie.ai, which allowed anyone to create their own version of the movie’s poster:

The Barbie poster phenomenon was immediately meme-ified across the internet. Nearly every recent pop culture moment got the Barbie poster treatment.

The campaign was genius in its inherent virality - it was accessible, simple, easy-to-understand. Most importantly, it could be remixed endlessly. This is all part of what is called in the entertainment/media business as "viral growth". It is how you keep lightning in the bottle. Or the market, in this case. The campaign is genius in its inherent virality - it’s accessible, it’s simple, it’s easy-to-understand. Most importantly, it can be remixed endlessly. It generated massive buzz and awareness for tomorrow's film release.

NOTE TO READERS: for those of you who subscribe to my entertainment/media newsletter, you might recall my post about "The Dark Night" which gave birth to this concept. It was the savviest movie promotion ever seen. Before the 2008 release of "The Dark Knight", Christopher Nolan (yes, the director of "Oppenheimer") hired an agency called 42 Entertainment to produce a year-long real-world experience (known as an ARG, or “Alternate Reality Game”) that got 11 million people to participate across 75 countries. Millions took to the streets in support of Gotham’s fictional district attorney Harvey Dent (their signs read “I Believe in Harvey Dent”) while 650,000 took part in a complex Joker-themed scavenger hunt. "The Dark Knight" went on to smash records for an opening weekend, film opening numbers never seen before. Savvy marketing fuels commercial performance.

This is true in box office, and it’s also true in startups. Virality has always fascinated me. In a world of abundance, how do products catch fire and spread rapidly through society and culture? Virality is an art (can you tap into the zeitgeist?) and a science (can you design a product that embeds viral loops?). Startups need virality; they need to reach escape velocity. The venture model is built on this premise.

Watching Barbie succeed at breaking through the noise of the internet, again and again, reminded me how tall a task that is in 2023. There’s a glut of advertising content online; digital advertising is a ~$670B market and now accounts for over 66% of the total global ads market. Attention is finite, and we’re inundated with an ever-expanding sea of content. The average person sees 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day.

And so we’re about to see a lot more ad content online, powered by AI.

Generative AI is eating technology. And generative AI is about to eat advertising. As you can see from the chart above, Bloomberg expects generative AI to swell to a $1.3 trillion market and to reach 12% of total tech spend within 10 years. The AI-assisted digital ads business, meanwhile, is expected to draw $192B annually by 2032.

Digital advertising is a massive segment of technology, so this makes sense. But what does it look like in practice? We’re already seeing early-mover startups change how advertising is done.

For instance, there is a company called Treat which generates creative for CPG (consumer packed goods) brands. I met with scores of such companies at Cannes Lions last month. The goal is to find the best product images that drive conversion. Without AI, this can be cumbersome, time-intensive, and expensive. But using generative AI, brands can generate multiple options in seconds; they can then test each one, seeing which performs best.

All of the following product images, for instance, were generated with AI using Treat:

For its part, Shopify recently introduced Shopify Magic, which generates product descriptions for brands using AI. You type in a few descriptors, and the tool spits out a nicely-written paragraph for the product detail page:

Marketers want flexibility to quickly test and iterate, doubling down on what drives higher clickthrough rates, average order values, and return on ad spend.

AI lubricates that entire process. This is especially important in a world of deteriorating direct response in the wake of Apple’s ATT privacy changes.

So 2023 has a been a big year for brand refreshes. Major brands like Burger King, Pepsi, and M&Ms have all revamped their logos using generative AI to create thousands of possibilities, which are then market-tested.

There’s a lot of advertising content out there; brands have to try a lot of things to see what works. Not every brand has Barbie’s small army of marketers behind it, or Mattel’s and Warner Bros’s financing. AI offers a powerful new arrow in the advertiser’s quiver, which will disproportionately benefit small brands. The internet was revolutionary in allowing for targeted advertising, again to the favor of smaller brands; what happens now when every individual gets a specifically-generated ad designed by AI just for their tastes and preferences? 

Maybe a brand learns that you prefer car commercials that take place in summer, while your spouse prefers fall foliage; maybe a brand learns to generate ice cream ads that show you vanilla, while showing someone else chocolate. Or maybe Barbie 2’s marketing can discern that you prefer ads with Ken (you’ve always had a thing for Ryan Gosling, after all) while your younger cousins prefers seeing Barbie herself. In milliseconds, brands will be able to generate ads targeted to your preferences (pending many of the privacy changes in advertising), reaching a new level of specificity and, consequently, conversion. 



I see the intersection of advertising and AI as one of the most interesting areas to watch in the new AI epoch. Advertising continues to power much of the internet, and as content shifts to being generative, the ad market will shift in tandem. By 2030, I expect that a good portion of the product images, banner ads, and even YouTube pre-roll ads we see are generated by AI.

The plotline of a new "Black Mirror" episode centers around Salma Hayek being upset about how a streaming service is using her likeness in one of its AI-generated shows

And one last thing. I am writing a very long piece on the writers' and actors' strike. Because that strike is going to remake the future of art, content, creation, collaboration and copyright. It is a very, very complex paradigm disruption area. Don't get caught up in the Silverman and other copyright cases. That is the "old world". All of the institutions we assumed were immutable - copyright, the concept of creativity as property, mass media and its scale, advertising and the attention economy - are not forever. That is to say that we are going to reconsider, reinvent, reject, or replace them as our need and our opportunity present.

A few thoughts from my longer piece:

Taylor Swift’s re-recorded version of "Speak Now" came out a couple weeks back and, naturally, as you listen, you think "This song sounds like an AI-generated Taylor Swift song". 

Swift has long been outspoken on how technology impacts artists. She wrote an open letter to Apple when Apple Music wasn’t paying artists during its free trial, causing the company to quickly change course; she pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 after asserting that artist economics on streaming were insufficient. And I expect Swift to soon be one of the first artists to issue a statement about AI-generated music.

AI songs are blowing up on TikTok—you can listen to Britney sing "Part of Your World" from "The Little Mermaid", or even The Beatles to a cover of Harry Styles’s "Watermelon Sugar". An entirely-new, surprisingly-plausible AI-generated Drake song recently went viral.

What is happening is we are moving toward "Artist" + "Genre" + "Mood" to generate a brand new song.

A similar concept might extend to other media formats. What if instead of watching Barbie this week with Margot Robbie in the title role, you’d rather watch it with Charlize Theron? Or even with a young Marilyn Monroe? Or maybe you and your friends want to watch "The Avengers" starring ... well, your own friend group. AI will be able to power these experiences.

This has interesting repercussions for an artist’s name and likeness. I doubt artists like Swift will allow their voice to be used in AI-generated songs—unless they profit handsomely. Companies like Authentic Brands have built sizable businesses out of acquiring celebrity likeness rights — Muhammad Ali, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe. Those likenesses might become more valuable in a generative AI-powered world. The estates of late artists like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston might consider putting out new albums "sung" by those artists. Things are about to get ... well, confusing.

There’s an episode in the new "Black Mirror" season that centers around actress Salma Hayek, who plays herself. In the episode, Hayek is upset because she had sold her likeness to a Netflix-like streaming service, and the service is using her likeness in inappropriate ways. Hayek simply licenses out her image and gets paid handsomely in return; AI creates the TV show using her likeness. If you squint, you can see this as the future of movie stardom - a far more scalable, economical way to create content and to squeeze money out of celebrity.

This seems far off. It is not. The ongoing actors strike in Hollywood positions AI as a key issue: actors are worried about studios using their likeness. In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) said that its proposal included "a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members". The response from the Screen Actor Guild’s top negotiator didn’t mince words:

"This 'groundbreaking' AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again".

Yikes.

It’s fascinating that these are questions we’re already grappling with in 2023. They’re only to get more nuanced and complex; that "Black Mirror" plot-line might not be fiction for long.

Over the past decade, as more content has flooded the internet, IP has become more valuable. This is why Disney scooped up Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Fox under Bob Iger’s first reign, and it’s why Warner Bros is financing a Barbie movie. It’s also why there are some seriously ridiculous bits of IP-fueled content out there: Eva Longoria recently directed a Cheetos drama called “Flamin’ Hot” and Jerry Seinfeld is at work on “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.” (Mattel also has movies in the works on Hot Wheels, Uno, Barney, Polly Pocket, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and Magic 8 Ball. Brace yourself).

Generative AI will fuel another explosion of content, meaning that any prior IP-related name recognition will become only more critical to breaking through a sea of noise. Expect many more IP-fueled movies and shows, and many more battles over image and likeness rights.

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