The Ominous AI-Generated Pizza Commercial
Welcome to Part II of Edition No. 54 of my weekly newsletter, providing practical analysis in the world of digital content strategy.
I’m on vacation next week and there will be no newsletter. Please send recommendations for Asheville, N.C.
I. (Fake) AI-Generated Pizza Commercial is a Look Into the Future
II. GA4 Adds Funnel, User Purchase Journey Reports
III. TikTok Opens the Door for Publishers To Make Money
IV. Less Than 2 Months To UA Doomsday
V. Other Notable Headlines
Some of my favorite lines:
“Are you ready for best pizza of life?”
“Your tummy say thank you.”
“It’s like family, but with more cheese.”
🛠 Why does this matter? OK, so the people’s faces are weird and they don’t know how to actually eat the pizza.
But is this not the type of content that was unthinkable five years ago? Or maybe even in 2022?
I’ll repeat a phrase I believe I used one other time in this newsletter: AI won’t take your job, people who use AI will.
One of the things Hollywood writers are concerned about as they strike is the use of AI tools in entertainment. I don’t think this fake commercial, in its current state, presents an existential threat to their future. But I can certainly see how technologically savvy creatives who not only use AI tools, but also have a sense of what makes a good script and video, will be producing some incredible content in the coming years.
As I have shared before, I use AI to assist me with blog posts and headline ideas, but I never post anything as is. I still spend quite a bit of time editing, rearranging and generally improving the tone of the rather stiff robot. And we’re just talking about text here. Not something more complicated like photos and videos.
In the same way that a good writer is needed to edit AI text output – whether for a blog post, a commercial or a Netflix movie – so is a talented video editor needed to make sure whatever an AI tool might help them produce actually looks good.
At the rate we’re going – and it sounds crazy to say – there probably will come a time when AI can write better text and create better videos than 99 percent of humans. But I don’t think we’re there yet. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should ignore AI. Instead, we should learn them just like any other new tools and make them work for us in a collaborative sense as opposed to in a replacement sense.
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You can now create custom funnel reports, enabling you to see the steps users take to complete a task and evaluate how many users drop off between each step. This update gives you the flexibility to create relevant funnels for your specific business purposes and reference the information in Reports.
Additionally, Google Analytics provides a new User purchase journey report. The new report shows how many users drop off between each step in your purchase funnel, from starting a new session to completing a purchase.
🛠 Why does this matter? This is useful if you have a specific path you expect users to take to complete an action on your site.
The obvious use case is for ecommerce sites that want users to go through the journey of finding a product, adding it to their cart and purchasing it.
But content creators can also use this for things like newsletter and account signups or subscription purchases or donations.
The “User purchase journey” report is complementary in that – designed specifically for purchases – you can see where users drop off at any point in the closed-funnel process. So if you have a five-step funnel and users tend to drop off most frequently on the page where they have to complete a purchase, it may be because there’s a UX flaw in the purchase process.
You can access this report by clicking the Reports tab on the left, then clicking Library at the bottom of the left pop-out menu then adding the report to one of your collections.
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