Promise & Pain
Who can say no to an elderly scam warrior? Not me!
The Colour Bar is where creativity, content, culture, tech, brands & humanity collide.
It has been a while, and this week's dispatch looks at some perspectives on AI- inevitably, there's promise, excitement, curiosity; and questions, concerns, befuddlement, pain.
Stories around Gen AI have the ability to make us pause. There is usually the delight or infuriation on tools and what they can do. Then, we might think of more layered questions. Why do people make music? Why do we listen to music? Why do we want to do things incrementally faster all the time? Who owns ideas and effort? If everything is a commodity, then aren’t we too? What impacts are we looking at in storytelling & culture ten, twenty, thirty years from now?
Some of those might cross your mind as you sift through this week’s stories! There’s an elderly AI ally, a controversial take on music creation from an AI CEO, a copyright conundrum from a music producer and a basic question- why are we doing all this?
Curated/Cuts takes us running in Norway, receiving divine prosperity, getting our printer fixed and imagining daily schedules in dots.
Then there is the Youtube effect on sports in two very different ways. Golf cosying up to Youtube creators, and the Australian Open animating its way to extra relevance?
+ a great take on the Tikok thing, Chapelle Roan on saying what you think, and a typo for Puma.
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But we get the ball rolling with a Quick Look at Netlfix’s stellar quarterly results announced a few hours ago. You’ll find plenty analysis, but here are some quick key takeaways:
Highest ever quarterly subscriber growth of almost 19 million. More than the pandemic era.
Growth spread across regions, all are between 4.2-5m subs. Asia brought in 4.9m.
Global subs base now past 300m. This is, though, the last quarter they will report subscriber numbers.
Highest quarterly revenue ever- $10 billion.
Attributed to big ticket titles like the Paul vs Tyson boxing, NFL games and a very successful second season of Squid Games. Could be seen as early validation of their Live strategy.
Raising prices across plans in territories in North/South America.
Now on to some cool cuts- feel like a run?
Curated/Cuts.
Run! Feel the stress that happens when an impending train departure, something forgotten and running back for it come together in this spot from Norway. Mentioning the brand would be… doing the spot a disservice. So watch it first.
· Vipps ·
Now these have a striking similarity to the RuPay ads in India last year, which is a similar service too. But there are some key difference in the approach, which I happily found were nicely outlined here along with the spots, by Karthik Srinivasan.
Shubh Laabh (or “auspicious gain” in Hindi). Another money related spot, this one from India. It features the Goddess of Prosperity, Lakshmi and brings together aesthetic, insight and relatability quite well.
Writer: Vipul Thakkar · Prod: Zuleikha Gupta · Dir: Rahul Bharti ·
Tech PSA! if. you need someone to come look at your printer (and lets face it, most of us feel like we do, even if we don’t have one), then check out these folks from Genius Division. If you watch the piece through, you’ll get a look at some bonus services too!
Some nifty data visualisation. Raw data transformed into moving dots, each one telling the real story of how Americans spend their day. from James Eagle.
AI Promise & Pain
AI vs Scamsters
First off, this fun and hopefully useful application. Here is an AI grandma rescuing us from scams! Or at least, getting back at those annoying scammers. A creation from VCCP London for O2 in the UK, Daisy is ‘Head of Scammer Relations’ in their fraud prevention team. This genteel old lady will call all those scammers whose numbers are submitted in, keep them on the line as much as possible, away from their scammy pastimes, and hey- annoy the heck out of them. Feels like revenge is coded in too :) Meet Daisy.
On Spec
We have seen brands using AI for their spots or campaigns in 2024. My general sense is that most appear to be in the service of the "hear hear! we used AI!" objective. Think what you will of that.
László Gaál l has featured gifted-neck family in a spot for Porsche. Its so legit it even has a BTS clip at the end! This primarily used Veo 2, which is still only text to video, so the results are really impressive. He has not shared a detailed workflow yet, though.
New York Agency Tool of North America looked at the best way of servicing their idea given a limited budget to create an ‘experimental’ spot, i.e. not an official client TVC. In years past (especially for anything spec like this), stock footage would come to the rescue, effectively but painstakingly, and with compromises. AI now super-powers the stock footage game- I feel this is a less glamorous but highly useful application for Generative AI video in particular, and one that will proliferate much faster than character generation, etc.
In years past (especially for anything spec like this), stock footage would come to the rescue, effectively but painstakingly, and with compromises. AI now super-powers the stock footage game- I feel this is a less glamorous but highly useful application for Generative AI video in particular, and one that will proliferate much faster than character generation, etc.
If music be the food of love, I can’t be arsed to cook.
Meanwhile, in the ‘let’s belittle creative endeavour’ School, we have Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of the AI music generator company Suno AI. He figures musicians don’t actually like making music. “We didn’t just want to build a company that makes the current crop of creators 10 percent faster or makes it 10 percent easier to make music. If you want to impact the way a billion people experience music you have to build something for a billion people,” Shulman recently said on a podcast. “And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now.
It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.
This is a remarkable take from the leader of a self-claimed company that has a “deep love and respect for music”. Though in some ways, once I pause to think of it; its not that odd- he speaks as someone who needs and wants an AI company to inspire more people to use its services to generate output. In his world, I should feel that using Suno makes me a musician, not ‘merely’ a prompt engineer. But it utterly discounts the hundreds of thousands of musicians in the world who do actually put in those hard yards, those countless hours. And without romanticising it too much, their reasons to do it are generally rooted in a love for their craft. Not to mention that its their hours of learning and hours of creating that have enabled the likes of Suno to (without permission) train their models. This virtually acknowledged copyright infringement is smething they are, of course, defending in court right now.
Also interesting is his vision for what music should become. In his ideal future, music should be viewed through the lens of the video games industry. “Nobody half plays video games the same way people kind of put on music in the background. I want to make music more like a video game”.
Ok then.
Good podcast summary here.
This one for Africa
Staying with music, we hop over to Africa. Of the many concerns around AI and LLMs, one is about most models still being largely western-centric, building inevitable- if unintended- biases. In this context, and of music being something that is learnt and nurtured over time, its insightful to look at some of the voices coming out of Africa. Unsurprisingly, there is a divide in the larger music industry about the place of AI.
On the one hand, you have the potential to hand creative powers to those who normally would not have them; harnessing the ability of AI to do justice to the scale and variety of music in Africa (as opposed to a lazy ‘African music’). On the other, there are concerns. Many in music, especially traditional music, may not even have access to laptops and stable broadband; their own music stands to be overwhelmed. Others worry that existing AI tools and companies with primarily Western viewpoints, will appropriate much of the music from the continent and render it relatively shorn of identity. One musician has even challenged that recording and storing traditional sounds for LLMs to replicate could well turn out to be a disincentive for local artists to continue to learn traditional instruments.
A complex topic, no doubt- but much of this is captured in this piece, AI divides African musicians. It takes its cue from newly minted AI musician Mya, who says, “I may not be human but I sing from my soul”. Less glibly and more importantly, is this, from Kenya producer Tabu Osusa.
My problem with AI is the ownership. Once you have taken some music from Ghana or Nigeria, who owns that music? How would you find out where the original creators are and ensure they are credited? It’s theft for me through the backroom.
Copyrighted!
Here is a complicated and not very heartening story of how messy the world of Gen AI music can be, and how everyone playing in it (and not) is
its still unknown who really ‘owns’ AI generated content- the prompter, the platform, the 342 people who contributed to the relevant dataset to generate it, or maybe just Robot Unit XN01DeA?
copyright laws right now are not remotely equipped to manage the complexities
Youtube’s Content ID (useful but not possibly able to cover every angle) is unable to identify false claims
Related to above: YouTube is experimenting with its generative AI music offering, Dream Track, by allowing creators to select “an eligible song, describe how you want to restyle it, then generate a unique 30-second soundtrack to use in your Short.”
Relate this also to above, lengthy piece on copyright and how to attribute credit/payment etc when using AI and content/creator sources.
What are we solving for, anyway?
And finally, do read a short, considered, sincere and non-antagonistic post from Taylor Cox, in which he argues that AI is not simply a transaction.
In a world that has emphasized and achieved convenience and speed to a level already beyond anything we could have imagined a generation ago... what is the result? Are we happier? Less anxious? More capable? More connected? Better compensated? Or are we depressed and angry and divided and overworked and struggling to make ends meet?
Will more speed and convenience fix it?
He touches upon environment, cognition and misinformation in this take.
Sports
The Youtube effect influencing sports in two very different ways.
Creator Golf on the rise
Golf has been having a pretty real conversation about how Youtube golf creators are providing the sports fans with meaningful entertainment. A little different from fans who are creators, because there is a legit playing scene there. Check out Good Good, for example. Last year, the first ‘Creator Classic’ took place at the PGA’s Tour Championship last August. Now, the PGA Tour has announced it will host three creator-centric tournaments in 2025. This follows the creations of a ‘Creator Council’ (is that the opposite of an Elder Council?) late last year, which includes selection creator meeting thrice a year and advising on collaborative content opportunities, fan engagement strategies and more.
Grand Slam Wii ?
Australian Open has been running some animated feeds for the matches. A mix of servicing those who can’t watch the actual match and reaching out to different audience profiles. These are essentially created by “integrating skeletal tracking data with animated characters”. So what we see mirrors the actual action and angles, except it feels like we are watching Wii Sports. Have a look in this video from ACM.
The lowdown is here on NPR, including some of the US examples which are more IP /collaboration-led, such as Spongebob and The Simpsons. A take on AO’s innovative nature over the last few years here.
QUICKIES
Absolutely loved this take on the Tiktok situation last week, from Evgenia Papageorgiou , including “170M Americans spending 2 hours daily watching themselves watch themselves worry about not being able to watch themselves. This isn't just inception - it's the ultimate expression of our attention economy's ouroboros. A platform potentially being banned for addictiveness has turned its potential ban into... more addictive content.”
A Viral Typo: PUMA Group pulled off something clever in India recently when they "accidentally" changed their logo to PVMA across social media and OOH, getting some chatter and meme-ing about the apparent mistake. Of course, it was all planned. The brand used this subtle change to announce badminton star PV Sindhu as their ambassador. Press release and photoshoot? No thanks.
I like Chapelle Roan because she is ok to be the pop star who doesn’t think she’s fair game just because she is one. Her latest? “I think, actually, I’d be more successful if I was OK wearing a muzzle.” Ha! But look at this comment, which could apply to much of modern life
This is what people are OK with all the time? And I’m supposed to act normal? This is not normal. This is crazy.
Till next week, stay a little crazy but too crazy. There’s enough going around!
Thanks for reading!