The Suite Smell Of Success
Publisher C-suite drama has been making headlines recently.
The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times both had high-profile incidents of billionaire owners weighing in on (or outweighing, actually) editorial decisions. WaPo has also reportedly struggled to hire top news room talent in part because of this lack of independence.
But when they’re not throwing their weight around, top executives are a lucrative audience.
As The New York Times reports, top publishers, including The Wall Street Journal, Axios, Semafor and Fortune, have recently launched newsletter and membership programs that target C-suite executives and business leaders at important organizations.
To be fair, this type of news product is often an answer to sponsor demand as much as it is about editorial worthiness. If PwC or Deloitte is eager to sponsor such a package, a hungry news company puts it together.
The WSJ’s current CEO membership program boasts 675 paying members at roughly $25,000 per year, according to the Times. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
“You have an entire professional class that feels more inundated and confused than ever, and they have the resources to pay for content or contact – events – that they find edifying,” says Axios CEO Jim VandeHei.
Copy, Right?
Per Wired, there are 27 different active lawsuits against various AI content generation companies.
The most commonly named defendants are OpenAI (with eight lawsuits), Microsoft (with five) and Anthropic (at three).
Most of the cases revolve around large language models, both regarding the material used to train them and their ability to reproduce existing material when prompted. However, some visual artists allege similar actions taken by text-to-image generators, and a few suits were filed on behalf of voice actors who claim their voices were cloned without their consent.
It’s worth nothing that although many of these suits were filed by publishers – mostly news publications and music studios – more were filed on behalf of groups representing individual creators, including high-profile authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates and George R.R. Martin.
However, so far, none of these cases are anywhere near a trial. Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence is closest, perhaps, and it’s in a period of indefinite delay.
Still, it’s only a matter of time before the US court system has to decide how liable generative AI companies are – or aren’t – for copyright infringement.
Agents Of Chaos
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking last week on the BG2 podcast, which covers open-source software, had fighting words for, well, all of enterprise SaaS.
For example, he predicts that SaaS applications and business apps will probably “all collapse in the agent era.”
By “agent era,” Nadella means a near future where built-in generative AI agents perform software and data analyst duties for a business.
“All the [business] logic will be in the AI tier, so to speak,” he argues. And at that point “people will begin replacing their backends.” Which is to say, their SaaS vendors and point solutions.
“As we speak,” he says, Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s enterprise software business, is “seeing pretty high rates of wins on [backend accounts].” That’s thanks to its custom, built-in integrations with OpenAI, in which Microsoft is a large minority shareholder.
2024 was a tough year for SaaS businesses – and it’s only getting tougher.
“We’re going to go pretty aggressively to try and collapse it all,” Nadella says of SaaS intermediaries, citing customer service tech, CRM services and software for business financial operations.
But Wait! There’s More!
Creator marketing is expanding beyond social as more brands embrace the use of influencer creative in programmatic. [Digiday]
Google plans to add an AI mode option to search. [The Information]
The ICO, the UK’s data protection regulator, calls Google “irresponsible” for a practice that allows advertisers to track a user’s digital “fingerprints.” [The Guardian]
Spindl: How to really do on-chain attribution. [blog]
How RE/MAX plans to build a retail media ad business. [Ad Age]
Snapchat was named in a recent lawsuit for its role in the spread and sale of fentanyl-laced drugs. [Bloomberg]
You’re Hired
Digital ad platform Infillion adds Collin Korab and Jeff Zito as VP and SVP of client partnerships, respectively. [release]
Publicis hires Amazon exec Amy Armstrong as CRO. [Ad Age]
