So much this. Are ads still a measurably good investment for businesses? I'm assuming they wouldn't run them anymore if not, but they feel so out of touch these days that it's really hard to imagine them really working on anybody.
Sorry for the side-tangent, just felt like that last bit of the post really drove home the point best - at least for me.
> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.
>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.
Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.
I've seen this pattern a bunch:
1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.
2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.
3. They post the content
4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up
5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.
6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.
There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.
(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)
Feels like an article generated using GPT-1.
Perhaps you need to read it again a little more carefully?
my anecdotal experience in this is that getting back X (customer delight / curiosity etc) once you’ve ruined it will usually take longer / be more costly than having just not ruined it in the first place.
also, at some point you will ruin it. at that point it’s a question of by how much and if you choose to un-ruin it.
sometimes doing nothing is a more useful skill than doing something.
If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.
But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.