The Beat: Last Christmas

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a 3xCMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hi,

Thank you for opening this email, it is Christmas Eve, after all, I hope you are enjoying the holidays so far, and if Christmas is your tradition, I hope you are all set for the big day.

As it’s my habit of naming these emails after song titles, there was only one to go with - Last Christmas by Wham, which rather surprisingly is #1 in the UK this year for the first time, now that they count singles purchased and downloads.

If, like George Michael, we reflect on last Christmas and think about this year, the big unavoidable and much talked about gift to marketing has been that we now have generative A.I. in all of our hands, I quite like the term “synthesised content” for what they produce.

You might have to forgive me for this, as I dive into this tune and this topic. The opening lines:

“Last Christmas, I gave you my heart // But the very next day you gave it away”

This line could describe how big tech engines have gobbled up all of our content to train them and, for a small fee, give it away, synthesised as its own.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an interesting exchange on LinkedIn with a journalist chum of mine. Who, when I shared something, I liked that ChatGPT had “written” for me, his comment was simple as he corrected me to say “plagiarised”, and he made a good point, and this year, that debate will surely heat up.

Aside from the huge issue of copyright, should we be anthropomorphizing these engines and, like me referring to ChatGPT as having “created” or “wrote” something? Plagiarised seems a bit harsh, but maybe “assembled” or “synthesised”?

“This year, to save me from tears // I'll give it to someone special”

We’ve covered predictions in this week’s episode of the podcast, my regular collaborator Jeff Clark and I chose 3 of our favorites each from various sources.

In my research, I saw a lot of predictions that our application of generative AI will turn to us giving to someone special; ourselves and our content. As we start to explore more use cases and we create our own applications based on our content.

Of course, the obvious use case is customer support, but in my couple of decades of experience in content management, internal knowledge has always been a difficult thing to corral.

We’ve had various approaches to this with Intranets, internal portals and do you remember the Google Appliance? We were going to give up trying to manage content; we would index it all and make it findable.

Recently, I worked with a document management vendor with a big presence in legal, and this is the huge use case for this industry and any that are based on knowledge, like professional services firms. Train our own AI beast to serve us our own content.

Not sure it will save us from tears, but we’ll be giving our content to someone special.

Yeah, I said you’d have to forgive me for this 😃 and I haven’t even started on the egg nog yet.

I’d better change that, grab a glass, get the Nat King Cole on, get those presents wrapped and wish you a very merry, happy holiday!!

Cheers,

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Now on Threads, be great to connect there, if you are on - https://www.threads.net/@iantruscott

Street Knowledge

Just a couple of things this week, shamelessly keeping it in-house, hopefully, you’ll indulge me as it’s Christmas! I’ll share plenty of links next week….

Get your Monday Morning Marketing Mojo Working

This Monday, I don’t think any of us will be getting our Monday marketing mojo working, we’ll all be listening to this:

The copy is totally human the promo image used on the web page was partially created using A.I. through NightCafe Studio