This Month In The World Of Marketing

[00:00:00] Intro & Host Introduction

[00:01:00] AI and Its Impact on SEO and Marketing

[00:15:00] Tech Giants' Legal Battles: OpenAI vs. Musk, Apple's Antitrust Lawsuit

[00:27:30] The Future of Social Media: TikTok's US Challenges

[00:35:00] Advancements in Web Design Tools: Canva and WordPress Updates

[00:45:00] Closing Thoughts & Announcements

[00:00:00] Hello there. So it is Thursday and it is the end of the month, which means it is time again for geeks week. And today we are doing the world, this world and the, this month of the world of marketing. Totally tripped over my words right out of the gate. That's great. That's good. Yeah, startup strong. And of course, my name is Phelan.

[00:00:20] I'm with Seymour digital media. We were focused on search engine marketing. And I'm Greg with Original 72 Creative and we're full service website [00:00:30] graphic design, digital marketing firm in Vancouver. Awesome. And today we're missing Rina and Pip they're doing a peer mentorship program and so they're gonna be, they'll be done fairly soon, so it won't just be the two of us for forever.

[00:00:46] Good. 'cause they're the real show, right? Oh, I wouldn't go that far, but yes I think that this week or this month though, there's been a lot of change, a lot of tumult, especially with the AI [00:01:00] world even in relation to SEO because Google is being back. Has been cagey about it was going to do search generative experience And so they've been a little cagey about when they're releasing it how they're releasing it Apparently they've got a lot of pushback from beta testers That didn't like that.

[00:01:19] It didn't do any citations Which is that's ai's Raised on detras to basically obscure who actually produced it And so it's been interesting to get for them to get that kind of [00:01:30] pushback from people using the platform. And so I think that Google's been trying to find its own, find its way with, getting that much pushback from their own users of we don't actually like this experience.

[00:01:42] And I think that they've been spinning their wheels. I feel like I did get citations when I used Gemini last month for something. Now, I can't recall whether it was in Gemini or whether it was in [00:02:00] OpenAI because I used both as test cases to try to do the same thing to see which one produced me something that was better or how closely they were just to see, yeah. And maybe I thought one of them gave me citations and the other one didn't, thinking back now, I can't recall which one did. Which is even funnier as well, that they give you the same experience, but they are so blurred between them that you can't even tell which one was doing which [00:02:30] thing.

[00:02:30] And they, I think that it's also humorous on their platforms of You don't even know which one's actually telling you what you think you remember. Yeah, I know that apparently the search generative experience is not Gemini. Gemini is it's competitor to chat GPT.

[00:02:46] It's like a replacement for the, like the chat when you type into Google, best dog food recipe or something like that, it's just going to spit you back as like a chatbot response, similar to like how Bing was doing it with their with their AI. What was, [00:03:00] I forget what Bing's was called, but they yeah, that was the main idea that they were aiming for.

[00:03:05] And I don't think that they yeah, they haven't really rolled it out to everyone. Speaking of AI, I keep seeing in the bottom corner of my Windows computer the logo for Copilot. Which is going to be their AI in, in Windows. I assume I haven't done a lot of research on it, but it annoys me when I look down and I see this thing [00:03:30] staring at me in the face and knowing in the future is probably going to be something that, annoys the crap out of me and I just want to turn off.

[00:03:39] Yeah. It's like clippy 2. 0 basically. Exactly. Yeah. It's clippy with a couple of extra steps, basically, like it can do some things, but it also will still annoy you significantly. Just wait. It would be very funny if they just rebooted Clippy as the co pilot AI. And it's just Hey, it looks like you're trying to write a [00:04:00] document.

[00:04:00] Clip. Yeah, that clippy could be the mascot for ai. It's, and I'm sure that would do it wonders. That is definitely a system that would definitely give it nothing but good promotional material. Now it's making me think Clippy was ahead of its time and underappreciated when it came out.

[00:04:20] I'm it was like, what was it, 95 when that came out. That was part of Windows 95, like the clippy experience. So it's it's definitely. Fairly old school [00:04:30] system for it. It was really more guided tours of how to do things than it was like, it was not artificial intelligence, it wasn't a large language model or anything like that, where it was like doing like complicated, like rundowns of when this word said, this is the other word that usually follows it.

[00:04:49] It's more just Hey, it looks like you're writing a work document, but you want some help with that. But yeah, there's but going off that there's definitely been a lot more news with the open ai stuff of [00:05:00] elon musk has decided that he's suing sam altman and the open ai and so that's but that's related to like them changing from non profit to a for profit or Limited profit they like they were in some weird classification.

[00:05:14] That's like Just seems very made up. But basically was there to take on an investment And that one's going on. Also, Sam Altman got booed at South by Southwest, which is usually very pro tech, which is a big deal in that kind of those circles to [00:05:30] get that kind of exposure. And then as well, was there any context to why the booing of him, or is there something specific that people are unhappy with open AI at the moment?

[00:05:44] Or. It mostly because open AI has led to massive layoffs at pretty much every big tech company, right? So it's pertaining to what AI is doing in the job marketplace. Yeah. So basically when it was like [00:06:00] Uber and it was going after taxi drivers it didn't affect the tech people that were doing that, but now the AI has shrunk one ring further in, and now it's coming for the tech guys jobs.

[00:06:10] And so now they're realizing like they're getting left outside the wire as it more jobs try to get automated away. And so they're unhappy with that part is like coding jobs and stuff like that. Like some people are saying they're trying to get rid of like junior developer positions and stuff like that as well, because you can do it with chat, UBD, which is true up until [00:06:30] you realize that like eventually your senior people are going to retire and then you're not going to have a next generation, like the reason why you trade.

[00:06:37] Train people like that is because you need the next generation to step in and do those jobs and Yeah, you're just not gonna do it. But that's just me thinking like more than you know a quarter a quarterly profit report and so yeah, that's the big one that's been going on with it there's been a lot of pushback when it comes to How open ai is interacting with tech [00:07:00] jobs as it's taking up more and more bandwidth as well Not even getting into, it's also pissed off a lot of other people because it's eaten up a lot of the graphics cards as well that would have been going to Bitcoin and stuff like that.

[00:07:12] Now they're being redirected to OpenAI and those kind of guys that are eating up more server space as well and so it's increasing costs across the board because It turns out that AI is not like some magical thing. It turns out it's just a lot of computing power that requires like [00:07:30] big data servers to compute all this stuff.

[00:07:32] And it takes a lot of work to do. And so it's pushed out a lot of other people because they have the 10 billion from Microsoft to do that. So yeah, it's causing it. I think it's just, it's causing a lot more waves in the tech community than they were expecting. And so I think they're getting a lot more pushback now as people are realizing that it's coming for them.

[00:07:54] And Yeah, I know there's a lot of AI being built into a lot of the web [00:08:00] platforms that that are in use the the theme and services that I tend to gravitate to building my sites, I know AI is being built has been released and built into all of that stuff. Being able to generate content, relevant content to your industry on the fly and into your site is is in there.

[00:08:23] And that's very helpful for. For people to build a site and get like a base. If you don't know what [00:08:30] you're going to start with, or even a developer like myself, who hasn't maybe received content from the customer to create layouts with some type of relevant to their industry information to give them a preview of what.

[00:08:46] Their site could look like and layout. Because I've found in my time doing web development, it's always been the hardest thing for me to get content [00:09:00] from the customer because they know they need a website and I'm like, okay, we can build a website, give me what you want to put on your website and I'll start creating designs and layouts with that.

[00:09:14] Content, but they're like I don't know what I want to put on my website. I just know I need a website, creating designs and layouts from thin air with something you don't know, even what they want to put on there is always been like a a hindrance to [00:09:30] being able to do projects efficiently.

[00:09:34] So I agree with you that AI in a lot of ways has been super helpful for If like you're working and it extends what you're working, I think that's a good use case. And I definitely think that it that's where it should be going and putting its efforts into. I just get nervous when they say Oh, we can replace our entire like support team with chat GPT.

[00:09:57] And it's no, the reason why I'm getting ahold of a [00:10:00] person is because it's a complex situation that needs like a person to look at, to understand, like, All things coming in I just get nervous when there's like the company Klarna that does all the those Pay, monthly payments for e commerce fired 90 percent of their support staff at least with chat gpt as a cost saving measure and it's you're dealing with like money and complicated transactions.

[00:10:22] It's I don't, I get a little nervous when I think that they could just like, magic wand away, like all the [00:10:30] complexity and just like going back on a couple of weeks ago, how we had the Air Canada situation where they're. Chat gave a customer wrong information and now we'll probably get their, whatever refund for the ticket or so just situations like that are sure to come up in the future with these things.

[00:10:52] So when you're dealing with a payment processor and customers who are, getting their [00:11:00] information from these bots or AI. If it's not going to give it the right information, what kind of implications could there be from in that industry with if it gives out the wrong information?

[00:11:13] Yeah. And it's definitely one anytime you're dealing with like support and it's in, it's involves something about payments though. That's when people are going to be the most high tension when you need people. It's the easiest because like people are going to be upset when there's money changing hands and they got charged something they weren't supposed to or they [00:11:30] were supposed to keep in mind like that's like the highest tension or where people get the most actually which is understandable it's like your livelihood is getting affected by this company and if it's just some like Chattopadhyay response and it's like making stuff up which you can do like in the Air Canada situation Like that'd be very frustrating and you yeah, what are the safeguards?

[00:11:49] What are the responsibilities? I think that we still haven't figured that part out so I think that I think that there's a lot of Issues still on the table with the AI that are still [00:12:00] working themselves out but also speaking of Court cases one of the big ones that happened this week is going to be the Apple got sued by the federal or the U.

[00:12:10] S. government for monopoly practices. And what's interesting about it is that it's mostly focused around like banking and automobiles, which until I learned more about it which we've got an article by Matt Stoller who does a lot of the antitrust stuff. That's his beat as a reporter. And so he dove [00:12:30] into it.

[00:12:30] Apparently what had happened is if you use Apple Pay. What had happened is they had so many people using Apple Pay that then Apple turned around to the banks and said we actually want a percentage of the payments that you process. And because they've got such a lock on that segment of the market that they said we know that these people are going to be stuck using Apple Pay.

[00:12:52] We want to be paying them. compensated for from the banks, and so now they're making the banks pay them, as well as auto manufacturers [00:13:00] that like, I'm familiar with android auto, but i've never used like the apple version, but Also, I my car is like ancient so I don't really I think there is not a computer to be found on my car And so i'm not really the target market per se but like apparently the auto industry is like similar to the apple pay where they're like We know that like X number of people are using Apple, so we want you to route like even your sensors and everything are all going to go to the iPhone [00:13:30] and we're going to make your Auto OS.

[00:13:33] So like the operating system that they use is going to connect to the Apple system and that's how they wanted to set it up. And so they're being sued over monopoly practices, which. Yeah. I'm curious. I I don't know a lot about the the auto stuff because I don't have a vehicle that would integrate either with the, Apple or the Android.

[00:13:56] But my sister has a vehicle that she [00:14:00] hooks up with with her iPhone. So I don't know. I'm curious if her vehicle is specifically for. Apple or it has the same functionality if you were an Android user. Yeah. So the issue in question is I don't know the details, but apparently it's that the auto manufacturers ratted on Apple because it was going to be in the next year's.

[00:14:28] Cars, the likes of the [00:14:30] 2025 cars. So it was, they were getting ahead of it. And I guess that this had leaked to the U S state that this was going to happen. So it hasn't, they haven't actually implemented it yet. It's more of that. Apple has been strong arm in them. They've been, the auto manufacturers slow walk doing it.

[00:14:46] And so now they're at a crossroads where it's they're Apple's kind of been caught saying Hey, we're going to make you do this. And so that's where they went to the government and said, Hey could you get them to stop doing [00:15:00] this? And so it's more, yeah, it hasn't happened yet.

[00:15:03] It's more, everything's interoperable right now. It's more like this was Apple's plan in the future. Of course, like Apple's been trying to have their own car as well for last, I think, three years. 2010 is when they started wanting to have their own car. And they just, apparently they just can't make it work.

[00:15:20] I can't remember, but I did watch when whatever senator who was speaking in Congress [00:15:30] about the lawsuit being filed. He did list off a bunch of examples of the monopoly. Situations that they were being sued for. And to me, he was talking to and referring to a lot of things that have already happened or they've done already in the past.

[00:15:57] Oh yeah I absolutely, yeah, they've, [00:16:00] the, just looking at the app market, right? Like you only have two people that you can buy an app for your phone from. And you have no recourse if they decide that they're going to pull your app or if you violated some TOS, then you have no recourse. And Apple's already done a lot in that way.

[00:16:15] And also the so I get to use one of my favorite words cause it has an asphyxiated S. But they are also a monopsony. So they're not only a monopoly, like meaning that they're the only people that sell the product, but they're also the only buyer, [00:16:30] like one of the major buyers of a product as well.

[00:16:32] So they're also like, because they have such pull with like chip manufacturing with that they can redirect how companies interact with them as well. And they're not the only ones, obviously, like we have a lot of people that are like number one buyer But they're definitely in the hardware market are pretty big up there that they, because they command so much money that like you have to bend your to their will in a lot of ways.

[00:16:58] And so I it's done a lot of [00:17:00] distortions. I'm glad that. The government's looking at them to see what they can do to break it up and not have it so concentrated, because I don't think it's been very good for most end users. , oh. We should probably move on. We have we.

[00:17:16] I was going to do a segue for this one. Not enough. Speaking of senators listing off potential crimes of a a company. We also have the biggest news that we were talking about with social media, which was TikTok getting banned. [00:17:30] Sorry. I was like, That was where I was going, but you had a much better transition.

[00:17:34] Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I, as soon as you started talking about the senators in Congress, I was like, yeah, that's the transition. That's the turn point. Yes, thank you for loving that word. That, that is a great word that I like to use. But yeah, the TikTok ban. So that is a potential. Okay.

[00:17:51] Sorry, someone just mentioned TikTok getting banned. So there's, it's not a ban. It is a forced selling [00:18:00] of the company to American whole and a company that's hold in America. Yeah. So that's it's, it's easier to say TikTok getting banned in the U S is an easier headline to write than is being forced to get sold to an American company.

[00:18:14] But basically if that doesn't happen, the ban would, they would try to ban it's use in America. I just, what I understand it as. Yeah. Yeah. So what they would try to do [00:18:30] my understanding based on what I've read about it is that they're just basically, it's a Singaporean company currently that has a Chinese product.

[00:18:39] Parent company and what they're trying to do is force the sale to an american company that'd be more compliant with following You know anything that the u. s. Wants it to do And right now it's past the house and it's going to basically just sit there and probably die in the senate Which is most legislation in the u.

[00:18:56] s And yeah, so it's not it's [00:19:00] I wouldn't stress about it just yet. It's but yeah right now it I don't What they're trying to do is force the sale. And I think you and I were talking about what would be the mechanism to do that? And it's basically that they would make it that any sort of Tik TOK ads, which is how they generate money.

[00:19:17] It would just basically, they couldn't run it because the credit card payment processing would, the processor would be told by the U S government. If you process these payments, apparently it's a hundred thousand dollar fine per [00:19:30] transaction and visa and MasterCard payments. Do up to 10 million transactions a minute.

[00:19:37] So that you could see how fast, if you screw up by one minute, like you were on the hook for billions of dollars. So it would be, they're not like it's, and it's a serious one that like Visa and MasterCard pulled out of Russia, like back in 2022, when the Ukraine stuff went down, because they were like, They were potentially gonna get banned and so they just preemptively were like no we're not even gonna process it because if we [00:20:00] have a record that we had done that no We're just not even gonna come close.

[00:20:03] So And so it I don't know how it's going to shake out. My guess is that. So they're trying to, they're doing this to try to force the sale. And the other thing too, is that I heard that the TikTok CEO has flat out come out and said, they're not selling. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I had heard as well is that he said come and take it.

[00:20:27] Which, personally, I think is probably the right, [00:20:30] if I were the CEO, I would just say Pound Sand, come and see what you can do to take it, and really make them work for it, because I just don't, I don't see it happening. I see a lot of smoke, a lot of bluster it's gonna be all bark, no bite. As it pertains to Canada, do you see anything that's happening in the States impacting how TikTok is going to be used in Canada or are we on an island up here and have nothing [00:21:00] to do with if that were to happen in the States?

[00:21:04] I see it as if we did anything about TikTok where it's just. We're just not going to get the service. They're just going to IP block us like Facebook does with sharing news because they have to pay for it. And we can pass all the laws we want. And then there's such big companies that they can just they'll just refuse service to us.

[00:21:23] I just don't yeah. If we did anything like that, we would just, they would just ignore [00:21:30] us basically, or just do just say okay, fine, if you're going to do this, then we're going to pull out entirely. Nobody cares about Canadians anyway, do they? We're only like 40 million people, right?

[00:21:41] Compared to the U. S. We're 41 million now. Oh. Okay, fair enough. I always do 10 percent of the United States. We've almost tracked perfectly. We're 10 percent of the United States population. Yeah. And yeah, like we're basically nobody in as far as the country goes. So we're rounding error for most of these companies.[00:22:00]

[00:22:01] All right, I don't have any great transition into the next, but we should move on with only four minutes left. We have a bunch of other things. One relating to design that I thought was interesting. We don't really have a lot of design related news things that we bring up, but this is a quick one to go through everybody's favorite online tool.

[00:22:21] Canva. Acquired a platform called affinity. I don't know if a lot of people know what affinity is, but affinity basically is an [00:22:30] alternative to some of the Adobe products like Photoshop and InDesign and things like that. They acquired affinity and are thinking that will give them.

[00:22:44] Affinity, a little bit bigger of a boost in the AI push because Adobe has been putting out so many AI features in their design platform. And I guess Affinity has not been able to keep up. Because [00:23:00] Canva has AI already built into a lot of it. That acquisition by Canva, they feel that it'll be a good merger to bring AI quicker into the Affinity products to keep up with competition between Affinity and Adobe, or have that alternative that doesn't just fall by the wayside because they can't implement that quick enough.

[00:23:24] So that should be interesting to see over the next. Yeah, no. That's definitely interesting. Cause yeah, [00:23:30] Canva still, and Canva has pretty deep pockets as well. They're like a billion dollar tech company from Australia. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's definitely interesting to see them go into a bit of a race with Adobe, which is bound to happen.

[00:23:43] Cause Adobe is one of those weird companies that you don't realize that like Google analytics is a company. Big response to Adobe analytics. It's that's how old they've been around and how long they've been doing this kind of stuff at an enterprise level that they've been. So yeah, it's interesting to see [00:24:00] the rivalry come to the ground between Adobe and canvas or especially in the race.

[00:24:06] Cause I know that's an interesting one as well with the AI stuff that's circling back to like jobs and stuff that a lot of people say that the AI implementations on Adobe are some of the best. That have happened because they're like, they actually speed up doing a bunch of like weird finicky design work that would that used to be, like a mainstay of what people would do, but like with the AI stuff, it actually does a pretty good job at, extending a photo a little bit or [00:24:30] like erasing stuff from backgrounds.

[00:24:31] Like it actually does it pretty quick. Yeah, used in the right context and for, business purposes, like creating graphics for, whatever your design whatever kind of things you need for your site it's effective. But just in general, that's aside from being able to.

[00:24:49] The fact that you can manipulate images into things that maybe are questionable or not real. . Yeah, the downside. , yes, that's a [00:25:00] AI images. But yeah. And then our last bit of business sorry, I'm, we only have a couple minutes last Oh, yeah. No. I was gonna do the transition to the last bit of business of yeah.

[00:25:10] The biggest I guess would be the word for WordPress. We've got six. It was scheduled for release today, actually but they pushed that off for a week till April 2nd to do further testing and another release candidate. A couple of the [00:25:30] notable things coming out in the next WordPress is that it will have a fonts library.

[00:25:35] So it'll be integrated so you can get all of your Google fonts directly within WordPress now. And I know that's been something that's been built into a couple of themes, but it'll be available in WordPress. Custom field blocks is another interesting one that I'm looking forward to seeing what that's that's all about.

[00:25:57] There's also going to be plugin [00:26:00] dependency notifications. So when you look for your plugins, You'll see dependency checks if things are now, if other plugins are now required, or I don't know if it has anything to do with potential conflicts, but when you go into the plugin area, you'll actually see a plugin dependency section, and it'll give you some information on whether that plugin requires something else or what have you.

[00:26:29] So [00:26:30] that'll be useful. Yeah. And then sync patterns are going to get more powerful and there's a handful of block editor improvements coming with this release. Nice. And then also I want to touch on Astra theme and Rank Math both had major vulnerabilities. So if you are using either of those, make sure to get the updates once they fixed that issue.

[00:26:53] Yeah. I like how we saved that important stuff for last. That's all kind of important. This wasn't like [00:27:00] anything was like. Superfluous. People need their TikToks and people need to know if they're going to get laid off because of AI. But yeah, for sure. That was everything we identified for this month.

[00:27:13] So that's good. Yeah, that's pretty good. And it leaves us just to say thanks for watching and you'll, you will be seeing me next week on, I believe I'm going to be doing a live about what the special guests that's going to be talking about [00:27:30] sales as an agency or. Awesome. Is next week with Ashley or is she I thought it was frantically checking.

[00:27:40] I thought it was going to be. It's going to be with Oh, we need to update the banner, but I believe that mine next week with Oh, you're meeting with Darby. I think Darby. Yes that's correct. And we're going to be talking about agency sales. And yeah, we'll be keep your eyes peeled for that one.

[00:27:56] And in the meantime I'll post the Apple [00:28:00] monopoly right up as well in the comments in cyberpunk geeks, marketing mixer where you can join us and continue the conversation there and my name's Phelan and I'm Greg. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Bye for now.