Pricing Power
If a marketer has a buck to spend, do they knock $1 off the price or spend $1 more on media?
Sometimes, price can itself be promotional marketing. One famous example includes Costco hotdogs. The CEO notoriously (semi-jokingly, we hope) said he would be dead before raising the hot dog prices from $1.50 without sacrificing sales.
Beverage brand AriZona Iced Tea requires essentially zero advertising. A can has cost 99 cents for 30 years. Price and promotions are intrinsically related.
And one of Amazon’s innovations in ad tech is that its bidding logic and product rankings incorporate both price and promotion (two of the four Ps of marketing, for any marketing majors out there).
Which brings us to Warby Parker. The glasses brand and data-driven digital-native bellwether has offered a baseline $95 pair of glasses for 17 years. And they’re fighting like heck to keep it that way, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Relatedly, the company hasn’t had a CMO for more than a year.
Investors are pushing for higher prices. Similar glasses have gone up everywhere else. But the company doesn’t want to touch its signature “P,” price.
“We may have to increase that price at some point, but we’re going to do everything possible for as long as possible to not” raise prices, co-CEO Nate Blumenthal told investors last week.
An Archive of Whose Own?
Reddit is no longer playing nice with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, The Verge reports.
The Wayback Machine is a forensic library of online URLs. So users can see exactly how those pages looked on certain dates. It’s useful for accessing websites that have been edited, censored or shut down.
But all that content makes the Wayback Machine a common target for AI scraper bots. As a result, the Wayback Machine will now only be granted access to Reddit’s homepage. More granular access would provide a backdoor for LLMs to scrape Reddit data without a licensing agreement.
Reddit has taken a hard line against AI scrapers, but it said last year that its bot-blocking efforts would not affect “good faith actors” like the Internet Archive.
Of course, that was before AI licensing deals became a double-digit part of Reddit’s revenue, according to an estimate COO Jen Wong shared with Adweek earlier this year. (Based on their latest earnings call, it sounds like ad sales make up the rest.)
Anyway, if third-party archiving efforts keep getting caught up in the fight over AI scrapers, we might have to rely on publishers and platforms themselves to keep their own records. Which, as any journalist who’s seen all their clips disappear overnight can tell you, is not a great long-term solution.
Read The Script
AI scrapers are reshaping the web in another way: They skip over JavaScript.
For one thing, all the LLM operators aside from Google (like Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity) don’t index JavaScript, as confirmed and elaborated in a blog post by SEO consultant Glenn Gabe.
That sounds innocuous, but it’s a major wrench in the online publishing machine – and a huge miss for the non-Google AI chatbots.
JavaScript is how most visual or interactive elements are rendered online. This New York Times article on persuasive delusions based on ChatGPT convos, for instance, is heavy on JavaScript elements. Without JavaScript, key context goes missing.
Google’s AI bot knows JavaScript because the Google Search crawler knows JavaScript.
The net result is, in the new world of AI-based SEO, sites must package their site text, metadata and displays in basic ways that are most digestible to LLM bots.
It’s sad that AI chatbots are missing so many of the fun videos that were hits on the early web.
Also, notably, ads often render in JavaScript. Google’s AI bot might thus incorporate the ads that appear on a page into its model – ads appear in the Wayback Machine, too, for example – whereas other chatbots don’t see ads on pages, only empty white boxes.
But Wait! There’s More!
With hundreds of millions of hours of streaming content to sift through, Olyzon.tv uses AI to classify and target CTV inventory. [AdMonsters]
Wall Street investors are thinking about downgrading The Trade Desk’s stock due to the platform’s future growth being threatened by Amazon and AI. [WSJ]
Here’s what building new data centers – even though we don’t use the ones we have – is doing to us. [Fortune]
Meta updates its brand rights protection tool for businesses. [Adweek]
Conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who successfully lobbied some brands to drop their DEI policies, will advise Meta on removing bias from its AI products. The role comes as part of a settlement to his defamation case against Meta over an AI chatbot that falsely claimed Starbuck participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. [WSJ]
Social media consumer trends are getting more inscrutable because they’re increasingly driven by algorithms, not culture. [Bloomberg]
AOL finally discontinues its dial-up internet service. [NBC News]
You’re Hired!
iHeartMedia hires Lisa Coffey, formerly of Amazon, for the newly created role of chief business officer. [Variety]
