Daniel Rolls (0:00)

Welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by targetinternet.com My name's Daniel Rolls, and in this episode is the first of our digital marketing AI news updates. Okay, so this is a bit of a new format. It's a solo episode. You just got me. And what we're going to do is we realize that the pace of change, digital marketing, is such that it's very, very hard to stay up to date. And hopefully the podcast is helping with that already. However, what we tend to do in each episode is we tend to deep dive into a particular topic, whether that's something about SEO or social media or AI. But what we're not necessarily doing is updating you on the various latest bits of news. So the idea is that we're going to do these episodes on a regular basis. They'll just update you on a few items of news, updates, software changes, changes to algorithms, all those kind of things, and it'll give you a way of staying up to date. They won't be particularly long episodes. We're doing them as audio, but we're also doing them as video on our YouTube channels. There's a podcast and there's a YouTube video. And the aim is that they will keep you up to date. So let's go to the first few stories. So one of the most interesting development the last weeks is the rollout of the new chapter, extended ChatGPT connectors. So if you're not familiar, what it allows you to do is to connect ChatGPT up to some external tools to give it access to that knowledge. So a lot of organizations have created their own versions of ChatGPT using some sort of proprietary technology to give it access to their internal documents, frequently asked questions, processes, all those kind of things. Well, now you can actually do that out of the box. There's two different ways of doing it, though. So we've been playing around with this. You've got things like Google Drive, SharePoint and Dropbox, where you can give it access to a knowledge base and it will go through and it will learn what's in there and it will basically build that into its model. Now, it's doing that in a private way, meaning that just because you give access to your SharePoint or Google Drive doesn't mean that knowledge is going to be shared to everyone. It's actually private to you or your team, depending on how you've got it set up. The other side of this is when you enable deep research, so you might be familiar. Deep research is when you enable ChatGPT to go off and to look up insights on websites. It goes and looks at a load of different places and brings that data to go together into one place. Essentially they're allowing you to connect things like Outlook, Gmail, Google Calendar up to deep research, meaning that you can inquire about your calendar or conversations you've had in email with people and actually at the moment you can connect it up to some CRM systems. And in fact HubSpot is one of the first that they've rolled out. Now it's limited in terms of what it can do because it's limited by what HubSpot will give access to. But this is a real game changer because suddenly what you're able to do is to give it a knowledge base that is unique to your organization. You can give it access to things that you're using on a day by day basis, like your email and your calendar and so on. And it brings ChatGPT to be that central point of access into your data, your insights, your platforms and so on. The reality though is imperfect. If you're doing deep research, it takes a while to get the responses, just as it does with any deep research query that you do as well. So really interesting development and actually fairly game changing in terms of if you give it the right documents, it's going to be outputting content that's much more reliable for you in your particular scenario. So definitely one to take a look at. They're expanding the number of connectors over time as well. And as ever, we'll put all of the details into the show notes over targetinternet.com podcast. Right on to just a quick one around online advertising. And it's a result that came out from meta talking about their Advantage plus campaigns. So this is the kind of equivalent performance max. So it's, it's meta using AI across their ad platforms to help people create ads. And what they've said is those Advantage plus ads are getting better results than human created ads. And therefore in early next year, so in early 2026, AI driven ads will be 100% the Meta offering. So the idea that you'll be go in and you'll have 100% AI created ads, essentially meaning that you just give it your website URL and it will go off and do all the rest of the work for you. Now that's kind of in line where Google have been going with their performance max campaigns. And we're seeing this across all of the advertising platforms as well. Then we're also seeing things like LinkedIn have just announced that they're going to be integrating with Adobe Express. So there's a load of free tools from Adobe that you can use to create videos, and they're going to allow you to create video ads in Adobe Express and then roll that and kind of automatically put that in to your LinkedIn ads. Now, the key thing to think about here is that if you're running paid campaigns, whether it's search or social media or display, what does it mean in terms of the agencies and the partners that you're working with? Because actually now, if all you're going in and doing is saying, here's the URL, you go off and optimize it. How much do you need other people or internal teams to be running that? But what I would do is test and say, okay, we've got these AI generated campaigns versus ones that we've done more manually. Which ones are performing better, what's our return on advertising spend as well. But you need to take a little bit of a step back and look at those different platforms and try and work out which ones are giving the best performance. And as they move more and more towards AI, can you really justify that agency fee or to have that particular person work there? So we're getting into an area where we're starting to think about roles and responsibilities within our organizations. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in the next story. Okay, next up, really interesting. Google has rolled out AI mode, which is basically Google Gemini baked into Google search results. Now, at the moment it's in the US only and they've been rolling out more broadly. So it was a test first of all. Then they're rolling it out to all US users. And if you're not in the US and you want to access this, actually we've tested out if you use a vpn, so we use private Internet access, I'll put the link into the show notes and you connect up to Google and it looks like you're in the us you're going to get AI mode, so you can play around with this. Now be careful because if you're doing some of these things, you may be against Google's terms of service, but what's really interesting is it's very, very good for things like comparisons. So, for example, if you want to know what's the best E bike or what's the best place to go during this particular period of time, it's really good at going a whole different series of sources and bringing those together. But it will bring together websites, maps and other web results into one place. If you ask the best route to get from one place to another, it will go off. Not just do what Google Maps does, but it will go off and give you some hints and tips and bring together different insights that you might not have got within Google Maps. However, if you go in and ask it to do something like help me build a digital marketing strategy, which you might have done In Google Gemini ChatGPT, it doesn't respond there and then in the results. It'll actually just give you a list of web results. What's quite interesting then is they're changing the search experience, but actually they're not doing full kind of Gemini results in there as well. So there's still a reason for you to go off and subscribe to that as a service. And also, so from a processing point of view, the amount of time it would take to do all of this stuff for everyone, they're obviously kind of limiting the access to the full AI. What's interesting though is they've rolled out AI overviews. So when you're just getting it in a standard Google search result to 200 countries now in about 40 different languages. So we're seeing that rolled out, and what was interesting to us is if Google still make 40 to 80% of that ad revenue, depending on the stats that you believe from ads within Google search results, when they're not giving those, because you've got these AI overviews, what does that mean? And we've read a few press releases and so on from Google, and what it looks like they're going to start to do is roll out ads into AI overviews in particularly commercial searches. So if you're looking for particular products or those kind of things, you're more likely to see this. So we've got AI overviews in way more places, and then we've got AI mode being baked into Google search results. You can specifically ask. So rather than just doing a web search or going up and looking for news or looking for images, you can do this AI mode and it's going to give you quite different results. What that really means is we're needing to rethink SEO search engine optimization. Now, all the evidence points at the moment to the fact that all those traditional approaches to SEO still work, but the two things that are really standing out are advocacy, getting people to say nice things about you online in various different places, and therefore brand sentiment rolls into that. So look at how many people are speaking about you, where they're speaking about you, what they're saying about you, and the more you can encourage that, the better. So looking at discussion forums like Reddit and Reddit becoming way more important in the search results and it's being picked up by all the large language models, so ChatGPT, Gemini and everywhere else as well. So thinking about how you can engage with that and thinking about online reviews as well, and actually making that part of your active SEO strategy as well. AI mode is going to be rolled out globally over the coming months, but as I said, if you access it via vpn, you can see that anywhere as well. Okay, our final news update for this session is ChatGPT operator is being rolled out more broadly. So if you're not familiar, Operator is basically their first real move into agent based AI. You can use a web browser or it can use a web browser and essentially it can do things. So not that it can just search for stuff, but actually what it can do is go off and carry out tasks within the browser for you, whether that is looking something up and booking something for you. But equally that could be creating some content, then posting it onto a social media website. Now, I've been saying for a long time that AI is not going to replace jobs in the marketing industry, it's going to augment them. You're not competing against AI, you're competing against people that are using it. The reality is now in these more junior kind of roles, it is going to start replacing jobs. It's already having an impact on agencies. But if you think about the fact that you can now create a piece of content that's on brand, you can post that to social media, you can look at the analytics and you can iterate that content all automatically. With AI, some of those junior roles are going to disappear. So I think what we need to be really careful of is, is we're thinking about that in a conscious way. We're going about thinking, okay, how do we change what people are doing? How do we bring those tools in and up people's skills? But in the longer term we're really needing to think about talent pipeline, which is kind of saying if there are people not in those junior roles anymore, are we expecting people's knowledge just to leap or what's, what's going to work? How are we going to bring people up and kind of mentor people and bring in those, those junior roles? So I think it's a really important time to step back and say, are we adopting AI? Are we doing that in a timely fashion? But also what does that mean to our people and their skills and then really think about what that means for the talent pipeline going forwards as well. So I hope that you found this first news update useful. We're going to be doing these on a really regular basis. Give us your feedback targetinternet.com podcast and just a couple of other reminders as well. We have got that live agent based AI session coming up. So those live update sessions, one hour each session, they are free if you're a newsletter subscriber. So get over targetinternet.com/forward/newsletter and get subscribed. You'll give access to those. And remember that our members have those half day master classes that we run all the time as well. They get access to those. 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