As that song from Rent says, “525,600 minutes. How do you measure, measure a year?”
It’s been a heck of a year in marketing. We’re not going to miss a lot about 2023. It started as disruptive and tough. Many colleagues, especially in tech, suddenly found themselves without work, mostly based on the perceived best practices of some numbskull billionaire who played around with his tech company to see how far he could break it down before it broke.
But 2023 did have its moments. The explosive idea that remains generative AI prompted some amazing new startups and innovations. And, of course, the appearance of the predicted recession never happened.
Maybe the biggest thing in 2023 centered on all the handwringing about what to start in marketing, what to innovate, and what to change. If you were in the business of marketing change in 2023, you spent the large part of the year like Notre Dame’s Rudy — on the sideline just hoping that coach would call your name.
Watch CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose delve into 2023 and his hopes for 2024, or keep reading for his thoughts:
Almost one year ago to the day, Robert covered this new thing called ChatGPT. Demand was so high that OpenAI turned off access requests for the app. He advocated for exploring how it would expand your capabilities and fit into your marketing process rather than how it would replace you. He predicted generative AI would extend your capabilities as writers and content creators and close the doors on the need to do other tasks.
What does he think now? He’s still wrestling with which door (registration required) is best to open and which to close.
Is it still a Web3 world?
In January, Robert talked about the precipitous decline of Web3 and the metaverse. He did so by discussing the evolution of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and pointing out Facebook’s brand name change to Meta at the end of 2022. He talked about how NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and the metaverse attracted eye-popping valuations and headlines. Then, he delved into the buzzwords dropping into the conversation even as some of the experimentations continued.
Starbucks got a mention for its new NFT-based loyalty program called Odyssey. It still seems to be doing just fine as the year closes, as is Web3 after the crypto winter. It’s just that thing called AI gets all the type.
Search engines meet AI
As winter ended and spring arrived, AI continued its rumble and started more noise in the search engine market. Microsoft and Google announced AI chatbots that would power their internet search. Google made a big error during its chatbot announcement demo, quickly putting trust as a top issue for generative AI. How many errors would it make? What about hallucinations in which AI just made up stuff?
Robert talked about how searching the internet and generative AI were different use cases, and you needed to explore both. And now, Google tried again with the launch of Gemini, and well, it seems to have failed again with its demo being called fake news.
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