Speaking My Language
Duolingo is getting half-serious about advertising.
The language learning app has a base of 47 million daily active users and plenty of attention to harvest. However, Duolingo has been standoffish toward advertising, which Adweek reports makes up less than 7% of its $748 million in revenue last year.
Duolingo hasn’t been cautious and selective, mind; it’s just defaulted to open programmatic and Google’s AdMob network. What came over the transom was “low-brow advertising that essentially are the bottom feeders coming through at very low CPMs,” says VP of ad sales Andrew Guendjoian.
Duolingo is now moving upstream from programmatic. It will pursue more direct deals, particularly with major partners in travel, which is a natural adjacency for a language app. And it will build custom campaigns featuring its own cast of in-app characters (apparently there are more than the green owl).
But Duolingo still isn’t serving ads beyond the app or monetizing its data, such as by allowing a travel company, say, to target people who are learning Japanese. That would be an easy revenue unlock, though the inevitable user blowback is a real trade-off.
Blame The Bots
“Imbotster Syndrome” – meaning, the fear of being accused of using a large language model (LLM) to generate text – is on the rise in the business world, reports Business Insider.
Part of the problem is that many “telltale” signs of AI use, like em dashes and parallelistic contrasts (“It’s not X, it’s Y!”), were already common PR and marketing clichés. To borrow another cliché, the LLMs quite literally learned it from watching us.
Meanwhile, the social networking spaces where business leaders spend much of their time are, in fact, filling up with AI-generated content. More than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn were likely generated by AI, according to what the platform told WIRED last November.
All this confusion is causing corporate communicators to question their own writing styles, sometimes deliberately adding slang and even spelling mistakes to prove their humanity.
Unfortunately, if enough online text is reshaped to stand out against LLM-generated content, then AI models can absorb and incorporate that into their own responses.
More Like WhyBox
Microsoft will launch a free ad-supported version of its Xbox cloud gaming platform, The Verge reports.
Players will view two minutes of preroll ads before a game is available to stream for free. The company has also tested one-hour session caps and up to five hours of free play per month.
The launch comes as Microsoft shakes up the Xbox franchise by adding in new subscription tiers and upping subscription prices by as much as 50%.
Some of the new offerings, like the ad-supported free version of cloud gaming, are meant to pick up people who essentially won’t pay for a subscription to Game Pass.
At the same time, Microsoft has been doing massive layoffs at its gaming divisions.
But by switching to a streaming mode that includes even top-tier new releases, Bloomberg reports that Microsoft’s internal estimates are that the company has lost $300 million in sales of “Call of Duty,” a blockbuster franchise under Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard. Instead of paying $70 for a game, a player could theoretically subscribe to Game Pass for a couple of months and then cancel the service.
All of this pricing turmoil explains why the free service is testing two full minutes of pre-roll ads. Microsoft needs to squeeze all the juice it can out of Xbox online.
But Wait! There’s More!
Paramount SkyDance is officially acquiring The Free Press for $150 million and putting its founder Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News’ editorial direction. [release]
How marketers are using AI personas as guides – and why they should be careful about doing so. [Digiday]
America saw “essentially no job growth” last month, according to several private sources. [Fortune]
TikTok avoided a recent shutdown in Indonesia by handing sensitive user data over to the country’s government. [Bloomberg]
NBC already sold out all of its NBA ad spots. [Adweek]
“Call Her Daddy” podcaster Alex Cooper is launching a creative ad agency. [WSJ]
OpenAI is partnering with chip designer Advanced Micro Devices to further develop AI data centers. [WSJ]
What AI bubble? Investments in AI account for 40% of US GDP growth this year, and AI companies accrued 80% of this year’s gains in US stocks. [FT]
What’s going on with Bluesky right now? [TechCrunch]
You’re Hired!
TripleLift and AppNexus vet Andrew Eifler joins The Trade Desk as VP, Product. [post]
Geico’s next CMO, Arianna Orpello, comes from Goldman Sachs. [Ad Age]
