marketing Archives — Carrington Malin

July 10, 2021

The UAE Council for Digital Wellbeing and the UAE National Programme for Artificial Intelligence this week published a Deepfake Guide to help raise social awareness about the technology. But what are deepfakes and are they all bad? Here are my top 9 deepfake video predictions!

Deepfake videos first hit the headlines six years ago when Stanford University created a model that could change the facial expressions of famous people in video. In 2017, University of Washington researchers released a fake video of former President Barack Obama making a speech using an artificial intelligence neural network model. It wasn’t long before consumers could create their own deepfake videos using a variety of tools, including deepfakesweb.com’s free online deepfake video application. Deepfake videos have now become commonplace circulating on social media of presidents, actors, pop stars and many other famous people.

So, what’s all the fuss about? Simply, that fakes of any nature can be used to deceive people or organisations with malicious intent or for ill-gotten gains. This could include cyber-bullying, fraud, defamation, revenge-porn or simply misuse of video for profit. It perhaps comes as no surprise that a 2019 study found that 96 per cent of all deepfake videos online were pornographic.

However, using technology to produce fakes is not a new thing. The swift rise of the photocopier in the 1970s and 80s allowed office workers all over the world to alter and reproduce copies of documents, letters and certificates. The ease with which printed information could be copied and altered, prompted changes in laws, bank notes, business processes and the use of anti-counterfeit measures such as holograms and watermarks.

Like photocopying, deepfake video technology is getting better and better at what it does as time goes on, but at a much faster speed of development. This means that the cutting edge of deepfake technology is likely to remain ahead of AI systems developed to detect fake video for a long time to come.

Any technology can be used for good or evil. However, in a few short years deepfake technology has got itself a terrible reputation. So, what is it good for? My take is that deepfake video technology – or synthetic video for the commercially-minded – is just one aspect of artificial intelligence that is going to change the way that we use video, but it will be an important one. Here are my top nine deepfake video predictions.

1. Deepfake tech is going to get easier and easier to use

It’s now quite easy to create a deepfake video using the free and paid-for consumer apps that are already in the public domain. However, as the world learns to deal with deepfake video, the technology will eventually be embedded into more and more applications, such as your mobile device’s camera app.

2. Deepfake technology’s reputation is going to get worse

There’s an awful lot of potential left for deepfake scandal! The mere fact that developers are creating software that can detect deepfake video, means that the small percentage of deepfake video that can not be identified as fake may be seen as having a virtual rubber stamp of approval! And believing that a influential deepfake video is authentic is where the problem starts.

3. Policymakers are going to struggle to regulate usage

Artificial intelligence is testing policymakers’ ability to develop and implement regulation like no other force before it. The issues are the most obvious when deepfakes are used for criminal activitiy (the courts are already having to deal with deepfake video). In the near future, regulators are also going to have to legislate on the rise of ‘legitimate’ use, seamlessly altering video for education, business, government, politics and other spheres.

4. One:one messaging

One of the most exciting possibilities is how deepfake modelling might be used to create personalised one:one messaging. Today, it’s possible for you to create a video of you voicing a cute animation via an iPhone. Creating and sending a deepfake video of your real self will soon be as easy as sending a Whatsapp message. If that sounds too frivolous, imagine that you’re stuck in a meeting and want to send a message to your five year-old.

5. Personalisation at scale

As the technology becomes easier to use and manipulate, and as the processing power becomes available to automate that process further, we’re going to be able to create extremely lifelike deepfake videos – or synthetic videos, if you rather – at scale. London-based Synthesia is already testing personalised AI video messages. That will open the doors for marketers to personalise a new generation of video messages at scale and deliver a whole new experience to consumers. Imagine if every new Tesla owner received a personal video message from Elon Musk (well, ok, imagine something else then!).

6. Deepfakes on the campaign trail

As marketers get their hands on new tools to create personalised video messages for millions, then there may be no stopping political parties from doing so too. Has your candidate been banned from social media? No problem! Send out a personalise appeal for support directly to your millions of supporters! In fact, this is one use that I could see being banned outright before it even gets started.

7. Video chatbots

There are already a number of developers creating lifelike synthetic video avatars for use as customer service chatbots, including Soul Machines and Synthesia. As AI generated avatars become more lifelike, the lines between different types of video avatars and AI altered deepfake videos are going to blur. The decisions on what platform, what AI technology, what video experience and what type of voice to add, are going to be based on creative preferences or brand goals, not technology.

8. Deepfake entertainment

Although some deepfake videos can be entertaining, their novelty value already seems to be fading. In the future, whether a deepfake is entertaining or not will depend on the idea and creativity behind it. We seem to be headed for an some kind of extended reality music world, where music, musicians, voices, characters and context are all interchangeable, manipulated by increasingly sophisticated technology. The Korean music industry is already investing heavily in virtual pop stars and mixed reality concerts. Deepfake representations will not be far behind. After all, they’re already reading the news! The Chinese national news service (Xinhua) has been using an AI news anchor for the past two years.

9. Your personal AI avatar

In 2019, Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter and Lars Buttler, CEO of San Francisco-based The AI Foundation, announced that they were working on a new technology that would allow anyone to create an AI avatar of themselves. The AI avatar would look like them, talk like them and act like them, autonomously. In comparison, creating personal avatars using deepfake technology (i.e. manipulating already existing video) could be a lot easier to do. It remains to be seen how long it will take before we have the capability to have our own autonomous AI avatars, but creating our own personal AI video chatbot using deepfake tech is just around the corner!

I hope that you liked my top deepfake video predictions! But, what do you think? Will AI altered deepfakes and AI generated video avatars soon compete for our attention? Or will one negate the need for the other? And how long do you think it will be before consumers are over-targeted by personalised AI generated video? Be the first to comment below and win a tube of Pringles!

This article was first posted on Linkedin. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I also wrote about deepfakes for The National a couple of years ago. You can find that article here.

December 3, 2020

You may have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, but how well does it support ongoing communication with your internal stakeholders?

The phrase ‘hearts and minds’ was first used by a French general during the French Indochina-Chinese border rebellion in the 19th century. It’s been used as a military strategy ever since, making emotional or intellectual appeals to the other side, in recognition of the fact that military superiority does not always provide the best or the swiftest victory in armed conflict. And, like many other military concepts, the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy was appropriated by marketing and communications strategists long ago!

However, marketing is by no means alone in borrowing from military strategy. Human resources has proved to be another big user of ‘hearts and minds’ and there are good reasons for this: budget and organisational dynamics. HR never receives the budget that it feels it deserves and so is forced to choose its battles carefully. Meanwhile, communications that put forth company ambitions, messages and cultural achievements simply fall flat if they are widely disputed in hushed tones around the water cooler. If internal stakeholders don’t believe and feel emotionally involved in plans, policies and practices, they’re far less likely to unite behind your cause.

And so it is with the internal communications from any department, marketing included.

Much of marketing’s internal communications routinely focuses on approvals and successes – i.e. the milestones at the beginning and at the end of any marketing campaign. Once the big bang of the final presentation is over and approvals are secured, participation of other stakeholders can fade away rapidly. Marketing plans, strategies and budgets are rightly presented as business cases for the careful consideration of decision makers. Far less effort tends to be invested in making sure that plans are easy to understand, highly useable and appeal to the ‘hearts and minds’ of other departments.

‘People just don’t understand marketing’

A common complaint of marketing heads the world over is that their work is so little understood by the rest of the organisation. There is scarce appreciation for all the work that goes into research, product positioning, creative concepts, or running effective campaigns. As a result, marketing successes are not always met with the thunderous applause that the marketing team believes is due! However, if your full year of internal communications consists of approvals and successes, then surely this is to be expected?

Accelerated by digital transformation and the breaking down of information silos, marketing and communications today not only maps to almost every part of the organisation, but also now shares data with it. All the more reason to have key internal stakeholders not only invested in approval and success milestones, but also emotionally and intellectually invested in the strategy and marketing activities themselves.

So then, am I trying to tell you that everyone in your organisation should be constantly referring to your marketing plan? No, but I am saying that your marketing plan should be a thoughtfully crafted communications tool that informs and supports marketing’s internal narrative throughout the year.

It should be something that helps frame marketing leadership’s communications with senior management, department heads, internal stakeholders, business partners and agencies. For this, your plan should be structured in a way that makes it easy-to-use, a valuable reference, useful to abstract from, and relevant to your wider audience of stakeholders.

Review your plan like it’s ‘external’

Ideally, your marketing plan will be pyramidal in structure – or a pyramid of pyramids – that presents key goals, findings and strategies towards the start and cascades more detail afterward. Ideally too, those top-level goals and strategies will be written in a self-explanatory way that is easily understandable by non-marketing professionals. If you strive to make your goals and strategies memorable and to clearly show relevance to the other functions in the organisation, so much the better. Anything that helps promote greater understanding of your goals, challenges and strategies has got to be a good thing, right?

A useful way to review your marketing plan is to imagine that you’ve written it for an external audience. Marketing content for external audiences normally goes through a very different process to internal communications. There tends to be a great deal of scrutiny of key messages and what perceptions will be formed by customers, partners, the media and other key audiences. The form, style, colour and simplicity of external communications are brainstormed, ideated, iterated, tested and optimised. In contrast, internal communications are often deemed as good enough if they are honest, free of typos and don’t over-commit!

Your annual marketing plan is a core document for marketing planning, budgeting and approvals. However, it’s a valuable communications exercise, helping to frame marketing’s internal messaging for the year. The more effectively your plan communicates your goals, plans and strategies, the more key points both marketing and non-marketing stakeholders are going to understand, retain and refer to later. Beyond the simple benefit of ensuring that everyone’s reading from the same manual, you may find that focusing a little more on ‘hearts and minds’ could even turn your internal critics into advocates. And wouldn’t that be something?

This article was first posted on Linkedin.

Also read: Is your marketing plan presentation the best it can be?

November 5, 2020

Legendary marketing pioneer and author Philip Kotler defines brand positioning as ‘the act of designing the company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market’. Positioning is a critical component in the promotion of any venture, from advertising and public relations, to sales and customer relationship management (CRM), even having an impact on the structure and policies of growing companies. Founders tend to work hard on positioning their ventures, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

In these days of Internet learning, it’s easy to read about the role of positioning, see examples of what it looks like and find out how to go about developing your own positioning statement. It’s something that’s top of mind for all founders, whether they realise that it’s positioning or not. Finding a process that works for you can help you crystalise your value proposition and create a clear positioning statement.

Nevertheless, developing strong positioning that differentiates your brand from competitors and aligns exactly with your business strategy, is easier said than done. Our end result in developing brand positioning is defining how we could like our customers to think and feel about our brand, but for this actually to be the case, positioning must work well across every aspect of our brand, marketing and communications.

If your business proposition is not receiving the recognition that it deserves, internally or externally, this could be due to a weak point in your positioning strategy. Here are five reasons why your brand positioning may not be working for you.

Continue reading this story on SME10x.com.

March 16, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic seems to have cancelled ‘business as usual’, however this could present an opportunity to refocus your marketing effort.

These days, it doesn’t matter where you work or what you do for a living, business has changed as a result of Covid-19 and the response of governments, companies and the public to the new viral threat. In fact, some may feel that their business has been turned upside down!

While you naturally put the health and safety of your customers, employees and other stakeholders first, you’ll also be mindful that every business needs to take measures to ensure productivity, revenue and profit. However, the reality is that your customers are probably grappling with changes to their own lives at the moment. So, simply calling them up to find out if they would like to buy more of your new product or service could prove to be highly counterproductive.

In the meantime, recognise that your regular day-to-day business has changed. This doesn’t mean that people won’t be buying at all, just that they may not be buying what they normally buy in the same way as they normally buy it. This also means that the demands placed on your marketing team will change. So, could this be the perfect time to review and refocus your marketing effort?

If you believe that your marketing team could have time on their hands during the next couple of weeks, here are five ideas to take advantage of the current disruption to ‘business as usual’ and refocus your efforts.

1. Review goals and refocus your team

The media and marketing environment has changed dramatically during the past few weeks. This means that what your marketing and communications teams are doing has changed too. Some tasks simply won’t get done, while others will take more work. This is the time to double down on those tasks or campaigns that you know can be productive, perhaps take another look at those projects that you previously weren’t able to spare resources for or experiment by trying some new ways of doing things.

2. Learn more about your customers

Although this may or may not be a good time to sell to all your customers, that doesn’t stop you updating your company’s knowledge of their needs, challenges, preferences and behaviours. In fact, their circumstances may have changed during the past few weeks, making it timely to check your marketing assumptions. You may even find that some customers have more time to answer your questions than they did a few weeks ago.

3. Find new ways to engage your stakeholders

In general, people are spending more time at home, which impacts their day-to-day routines, consumer behaviour and media consumption. As a result, there may be opportunities to engage with customers differently (and I don’t mean just doubling your online advertising spend). The same goes for employees, business partners and other stakeholders.

4. Create new customer offers

There’s no reason not to use the changes in business environment to help inspire some marketing innovation. Are there ways that you can create value-added offers, reward customer loyalty or otherwise differentiate your offerings now, or in the future? In addition, are their any ways, taking into account the current health emergency, that you could make it easier for customers to do business with you?

5. Audit your website content

When was the last time that you reviewed your website content from a customer engagement point of view? Does your website engage effectively with customers throughout the buying cycle, from discovery to post-sales? A review could be especially timely in the current environment where customers may defer some purchases and so spend more time in the learning and consideration phases of the marketing funnel. If you can keep them returning to your website in those phases, then you are more likely to increase your chances of selling to them.

As anyone reading the news will know, the business environment is constantly changing and adapting as the world adjusts to the new pandemic. For sure, this throws up lots of new obstacles for business and will affect some companies more than others. It will also present opportunities for some businesses to do things differently. Taking the time to review and refocus now, could put your marketing team in a position to identify and take advantage of those new opportunities.

This story was first published on SME10x.com.

January 6, 2020

Now that the New Year has arrived, I’m not about to tell you how to develop your 2020 marketing plan. I’m guessing that this is, at least, completed in draft and perhaps already approved and has been used for other 2020 briefing and planning. However, could you improve your marketing plan’s presentation?

Although you may well have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, you may still be in the process of improving it before sharing a final version with your wider internal audience. Perhaps you intended to add a few tweaks over the holidays, or maybe you’re creating a shorter version of your plan in slide format to help communicate your plan internally. Whatever you choose to do, it’s important to have a marketing plan ready that is easy to understand for internal stakeholders across your organisation. We’re all ‘in marketing’ these days, so making the effort to improve your marketing plan presentation is time well spent!

Continue reading this story on Linkedin.