All Hail the Corporate Anniversary

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

Phillip and Brian discuss the forgettable nature of AI music. Corporations' birthdays are an essential thing that we need to care about now. Also, an update on Lammers Law: everything eventually becomes an ad. PLUS: OSHA for the MIND?? Listen now.

The Right to Disconnect

Key takeaways:

- Amazon is scaling back its Just Walk Out technology from its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. Due to technical limitations in grocery stores, it will be constrained to airports and small-format stores.

- JPMorgan's use of customer transaction data for targeted advertising highlights the increasing importance of personalized content.

- AI-generated music, such as that produced by Suno AI, may lack memorability but showcases the advancements in AI technology.

- The "right to disconnect" bill in California reflects the ongoing need for work-life balance in an increasingly digital world.

- Corporate anniversaries are becoming a popular marketing strategy and cultural celebration for brands.

• {00:11:41} - “People want the friction in their local community of chatting with their checker and chatting with people that are in line and living life in their community because they probably bump into people that they know, and it's part of their daily routine or their weekly routine or whatever to engage with the people in their communities as they go about doing their business.” - Brian
• {00:19:32} - “We all hate this idea, but the truth is that ads, good ads, and contextual ads add to a discovery mechanism in many platforms. Good ads heighten the experience of Instagram, I would argue. The good ads on Instagram make my experience of Instagram better. I think Instagram is a little bit worse if it has no ads because I discover things.” - Phillip
• {00:29:35} - “In my mind, this is as good as [AI music] will ever be. It doesn't only get better from here. Maybe the fidelity gets better. Maybe it can create stems. Maybe you can do more editing. Maybe you could go in and tweak things, and you'll have more creator tools, but it doesn't mean it gets more creative over time.” - Phillip
• {00:41:51} - “There's a really interesting amnesiac effect with this AI-generated music is it's incredibly forgettable. There's nothing remarkable or memorable about any of it. And I almost feel the same way about all AI-generated content. AI-generated art, AI-generated writing. There's nothing memorable or remarkable about it ever. The memorable thing is the discourse around it.” - Phillip
• {01:04:29} - “We are getting to a point now where we're hitting Norbert Wiener's prediction around "the world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves." What we're bumping up right now against is pushing our minds further as far as they possibly can go, and there's a lot of burnout that's happening as a result.” - Brian

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