The Daily Carnage

Here’s what the speakers at Content Marketing World 2024 had to say about generative AI:

• “Some people recommend we avoid using generative AI, which not only sows fear but puts marketers at a disadvantage in a workforce and market landscape increasingly relying on generative AI.” — Melanie Deziel, co-founder, CreatorKitchen.com
• “Gen AI is just a tool. Don’t overcomplicate it. Treat it like a member of your staff. Ask Gen AI to help with strategy and ideation and to suggest questions you should be asking, but you’re not.” — Bernie Borges, vice president, global content marketing, iQor
• “The worst advice I’ve heard about generative AI in content marketing is to just get started. Before generative AI can create on-brand and useful content, even if it’s simply repurposing existing content, you’ll need to have a few foundational elements in place.” — Erika Heald, founder and chief content officer, Erika Heald Marketing Consulting
• “AI can easily make mistakes with the interpretations of culturally rich content. For example, it may utilize the tone of a French Canadian; however, it pulls something that is French from France. All it takes is one error like this to lose the trust of your French-Canadian audience.” — Michael Bonfils, global managing director, Digital International Group
• “Content marketing thrives on authenticity, creativity, and emotional connection—qualities that AI, despite its advancements, still cannot fully replicate. Over-reliance on AI can lead to generic, soulless content that fails to engage your audience or convey your brand’s unique voice.” — Ashley Baker, founder and chief marketing officer, Coastline Marketing LLC
• “Generative AI is taking your job. The extent of its effects largely depends on the company’s perspective. While some organizations might be inclined to replace human content creators, others continue to appreciate the value their content teams bring and view AI as a supplementary tool for enhancement.” — Pam Didner, vice president of marketing, Relentless Pursuit LLC
• The real value in starting with an ugly first draft isn’t just to end up with a first draft but to do the thinking that’s involved — to pressure-test your premise, percolate on the possibilities, refine your perspective, ponder whether you’re pushing the alliteration just. a little. too far. Training the AI on your style, voice, and tone may make the robot sound more like you, but writing is a muscle that gets flabby when it isn’t flexed. Use it or lose it.” — Carmen Hill, principal strategist and writer, Chill Content LLC
• “These tools are trained with existing content, and the output they create is often word-for-word plagiarism from existing documents. This technology is fantastic for brainstorming ideas, finding gaps in your content, adjusting the writing style or reading level, but not for copying and pasting.” — Brian Piper, director of content strategy and assessment, University of Rochester
• “You can use ChatGPT to measure the uniqueness of YOUR content ideas before you write or before you publish. Simply ask ChatGPT to measure the novelty of your content on a scale from one to 10 and explain its rating. This trick works for content, briefs, topics, outlines, and more.” — Dale Bertrand, president, Fire&Spark
• “Generative AI will likely be yet another marketing channel in your customer journey. Remember that search optimization means being understood. Generative AI is another channel for your brand and content to be understood. SEO is the mechanism for being understood online. The pursuit of being understood (by people, AI, search engines, etc.) is a worthy investment.” — Haley Collins, director of operations, GPO

Check out the full post at Content Marketing Institute.

Hello, fellow email marketers. 🫡 You hanging in there?

Let’s break down 4 changes coming to email soon:

1. More Apple disruption. Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) feature, introduced in 2021, masked email engagement data to protect subscriber privacy. The upcoming iOS 18 introduces Apple Intelligence, which will use AI to categorize emails into tabs like Gmail. This system, which includes features like on-device categorization and digest views, has the potential to impact email visibility, underlining the importance of sending relevant and engaging content to ensure subscribers can find their messages.
2. Expiring emails. The Email Expiration Date project proposes automatically deleting old emails to reduce energy and data storage, aiming to lower email’s carbon footprint. But we know subscribers often retain trusted brand emails for future purchases. Strategic selection of “kill-by” dates will be crucial to avoid disrupting the long-term value of emails that customers deliberately keep.
3. Unsubscribe prompts after 30 days. Google and Yahoo now require senders to include 30-day list-unsubscribe functions in email headers. If you don’t email new subscribers within 30 days, they’ll be prompted to opt out before receiving any messages, even though they’ve shown interest. Extending the opt-out window to 90 or 120 days could provide more time to prove your value, reducing the likelihood of subscribers opting out prematurely.
4. Automatic extraction. You might have noticed that some email client inboxes now display graphics, calls to action, and offer codes directly in the inbox. For example, Gmail’s “automatic extraction” uses annotation and Schema markup to add quick actions to inbox views, which can enrich the experience and entice recipients to open the email. But this can also disrupt the intended email engagement. If a customer grabs the annotated promo code, for instance, they bypass the email altogether and the sender misses out on that engagement.

Take a closer look at the factors affecting email marketing in 2024 at MarTech.