🧟Zombie Brands, Sauce Data, and Google's Useful AI
Look out SEO! Google AI is here
Hey friends! And welcome to this week’s edition of The Land of Random.
This was a fascinating week in tech - with that WILD Apple AR/VR device, and all those cool new IOS features.
If anyone can take AR/VR mainstream, it’s Apple.
The era of AR/VR digital geo-located popups is coming - and it’s gonna be NUTS.
I think it’s gonna end up looking more like that crazy Hyper-Reality video than we care to admit.
I’m curious to see if all the Reddit blackouts will have any effect on saving third-party apps like Apollo. Is Reddit beginning the next chapter of its long demise - or can the train be slowed down just a touch?
As we know - getting rid of old.reddit.com will be the final straw haha.
Oh - did I mention that I’ve been working on pulling up a stump in my front yard?
Well - it’s currently winning the war. I’ve cut off all the rotten bits and roots - and am now left with a (200-300 lb?) massive chunk of very hard wood.
I can even lift the whole thing off the ground by a few inches! (using a shovel as a lever of course - it’s too dang heavy to lift on my own).
Have you seen Cocaine Bear yet?
Blew away my expectations. It’s absolutely the next Tucker & Dale vs. Evil in my book.
Yes - it’s incredibly dark humor, but it’s been a long while since I’ve laughed so hard. If you like dark humor - it’s the perfect movie for this weekend!
Well, let’s dive in - shall we?
🧟Zombie Brands
The year is 2030.
You see one of those ads with a “trendy saying” on a shirt (for example - OK Boomer) and click on it.
It captures your heart - and you click buy.
However - it’s not some POD (print on demand) guru who you bought the shirt from.
It’s an AI hosted on a prepaid server!
That’s the argument that article “Necrobrands: Digital end-stage capitalism - we’re just yelling into the void“ by Trevor Twells makes.
Once a week, the online store uses Twitter’s API to find trending topics.The top-ten trending topics are run through an image generator, like Midjourney, and added onto stock imagery using Printful’s API. The newly designed T-shirts are pushed onto a Shopify Store, using AI-generated descriptions by Critbot and OpenGPT. New products are advertised on Instagram using ChatGPT prompted descriptions and hashtags. Orders are taken care of by Printful’s drop-shipping service. Any questions by customers are answered by Ada, ZenDesk or the other myriad of customer support chatbots.
Now, imagine that the company that created the brand has long since dissolved. Artificial intelligence continues to churn out new designs and sell them to an unsuspecting public. The company and its human counterparts are gone, but the product lives on. (source)
Wouldn’t that be WILD?
It’s not too difficult to imagine, given how easy it is to connect tools and create contingencies.
For example - let’s say your marketing stack is Shopify, Zapier, FB ads, Facebook Ads, and a few other tools.
You can connect those all to a bank account, set up a TON of automation - and have the system essentially run itself.
When Ads go down, zaps break . . . you can contract out an agency to keep an eye on that kind of stuff.
As long as the AI is able to communicate effectively across these different platforms - keep an eye on issues - and keep money flowing into the account to pay for everything - I think the system could sustain itself for years!
In a sense - zombie brands are already around when it comes to influencers who have passed away. It’s a touch morbid, but important to discuss.
For example - I searched “dead influencers 2022” and discovered Maja Janeska from South Africa.
She passed away under mysterious circumstances in December - but her Instagram and Youtube are still around.
There’s no way without looking up news reports that you’d know she passed away.
Her Youtube account with over 1 million followers is still getting views - where’s all the ad revenue going? Did her family take over all her affairs? Did they know the ins and outs of her various finances? is there a Paypal account somewhere just silently filling with YT ad dollars?
Morbid questions - but interesting nonetheless.
Go check out the Necrobrands article at the link!
🍗Sauce Data
Remember when the Coke Freestyle machines came out?
We all oooooh and ahhed over them, and I still enjoy trying different combinations out when I get a chance.
There’s a new one coming out - but for sauce.
At first, Heinz Remix simply appears to be a mix-n-match soda dispenser — for sauce. Yet, a great deal more is going on beneath the surface. This is about responsibility, in sauces.
Kraft Heinz said yesterday that the machine will offer folks the “power to personalize their sauces like never before.” It follows a two-step process — select a base (for now, ketchup, ranch, 57 steak sauce, and BBQ), plus one or more “enhancers” (for now, jalapeño, smoky chipotle, buffalo, and mango). The enhancers can each be customized via three “intensity levels” (low, medium and high), said Kraft Heinz in a statement. (source)
This sounds incredible.
Buffalo Ketchup? Mango BBQ?
Sounds like fun.
Why is Heinz rolling this out?
to see what YOU like - and sell you more of it.
To put it lightly, “it’s more than a sauce dispenser,” said Alan Kleinerman, the vice president of Disruption at Kraft Heinz. “It’s an insights engine and business model enabler,” the executive clarified in a statement. According to Kleinerman, the machine will enable the $47.75 billion sauce giant to “understand and respond to consumer trends and flavor preferences in real-time.” (Emphasis TechCrunch’s.) “Who knows,” Kleinerman added, “maybe our next new sauce combination will come from a superfan using HEINZ REMIX!” (source)
It would be interesting to peer into some of the data behind the Coke Freestyle and see what sort of things they’re testing at scale because so many people create it.
For Heinz - this is also a fantastic opportunity to create sauces that people will actually buy.
For example - if hundreds of thousands of people around the USA create buffalo steak sauce - it stands to reason it might be worth putting it on the shelf.
Let the market do your research, eh?
Check it out at the link!
🤖Google’s Useful AI
AI This.
AI That.
AI everywhere.
However - Google has a really neato AI summarizing tool that they’re testing in beta.
It’s called “Search Generative Experience” and will summarize your search with some helpful content. You can even ask it followups!
Here’s how it works. You do a Google Search - and the AI instantly starts generating a response.
It’s really cool!
It works on desktop and mobile - and is surprisingly fast.
Here are two more examples.
Pretty cool stuff - Both of these prevented me from having to go click on links on the Google Search page.
I’m curious to see how SEO strategies adjust to when this is rolled out to everyone.
How will this effect people’s searches and clicks? How many clicks will these summaries take away from websites?
How do the SEO masters get their content ranked in the AI summaries?
All interesting questions!
Go get on the Google Search Generative Experience waitlist, and check it out!
🐙The Land of Random
Into the random, we go - oh oh!
Tales of World War Z
A forgotten fan fic website inspired by World War Z.
Ｃｒｅａｔｅ Ｆａｎｃｙ Ｔｅｘｔ
s̴o̴ m̴a̴n̴y̴ k̴i̴n̴d̴s̴ o̴f̴ f̴a̴n̴c̴y̴ t̴e̴x̴t̴
▂▃▅▇█▓▒░ so many kinds of fancy text ░▒▓█▇▅▃▂
The Web Design Musuem
Travel through all sorts of old website designs - like McDonalds from 1996!
Apple Vision Pro
The long awaited trailer. It’s pretty wild.
Dateforce
Salesforce for dating? LOL
EyeCandy Visual Inspo Website
Tons of examples of really cool visual techniques, shown with gifs.
Floor 796
Explore all the wild stuff happening in this digital space station. Think Where’s Waldo, but with motion, and soooooooooo many references.
🎶TikToks You Can’t Miss
Ah yes - the joys of Urbex gone wrong.
How was this car still running?
Yo i wish I had that much mint in my yard. that’s awesome. Instead I have weeds.
LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
🤖AI AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
A point and click game made with chatgpt and MidJourney? OOOOOH
Can’t wait until I can test out Drag Gan - this will be an AI art game changer. Just drag arms / legs/ smiles around until your subject looks the way you want it to.
Chatting with NPC’s using NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine is gonna be wild.
That’s all for this week! See you next time. :)