Royale without Cheese.
· Make-Speak-Read AI · B2B Pulp Fiction · Live Sports on Youtube · Only One Wimbledon · One Tight Slap ·
Some things are unique. Some seem uniquely familiar. Others uniquely common. Wordplay aside, these are cute things to ponder, yet in some cases the power of AI begs the questions how much of what we do, see, create and use is its own thing; and how much is derivative or a copy. (Neither necessarily with inherent virtue.)
This question might pop in your head a few times as you go through The Colour Bar this week, in stories about using generative AI across ideation and development, through to writing a book for you. Or when you think of advertising pitches, streaming, licensing and, erm, pro-wrestling?
Or in ▶️ Curated/Cuts, where you’ll find clever B2B take on a classic Pulp Fiction scene, an attempt to get inside the intensity at Wimbledon, and a ridiculous but brilliant slapping frenzy!
A slew of entertainment nuggets include a Youtuber buying Live sports rights, non-siblings Warner & Discovery giving up the pretence, Youtube’s pitch for premium advertisers, Scorsese’s actor-director tussle and a bunch more.
Then there’s an AI round-up that includes sneaky authors, expressive text-to-speech, another studio’s foray into Gen-AI, and the continuing worry about AI taking our jobs.
This is The Colour Bar- where all of these magically co-exist!
🎬 Curated/Cuts.
1. B2B Pulp Fiction
Dapper is a growth agency, they “build, optimize, and scale marketing engines that generate pipeline and improve marketing ROI.” While you decipher that, you could do worse than to check out the latest piece of content featuring their CEO. Clearly, someone is a big Pulp Fiction fan.
This is good stuff!
“Vincent and Jules are both marketers. Vincent just took a little trip into the world of B2B marketing. He’s back with stories. Jules can’t believe what he’s hearing.”
· Actors from Dapper- CEO Tycho Luijten and Steven van Marle
2. There Is Only One Wimbledon
This is Wimbledon’s spot for the 2025 tournament. An eye-catching start, great energy and power… even though I felt the promise of the ‘monster grass’ was not quite fulfilled.
Beyond the strawberries and cream, this is meant to capture “not only the moments of triumph but also the psychological intensity that defines The Championships. This is not merely tennis. It is Wimbledon.”
· Production : magna studios · Director: folkert verdoorn · Editing Stitch Editing / Richard Woolway- Video Editor · Post : Black Kite Studios · Audio Post : Factory Studios · Music: Siren · Composer: Rebekah Fitch ·
3. One Tight Slap
One part bizarre- slap! Two parts mockumentary- smack! Three parts hilarity, freedom, head-shake- slap!
This is the kind of fearless creative liberty that I love to see a brand embracing. Needless to say- watch to the end.
Enjoy, and slap/thank me later!
PS- Slap facials are a real thing, in case you were wondering and or/curious to try!
· Creative Shikha Gupta · Production MOTHERSHIP PRODUCTIONS · Kashif Memon · Directed by Suktiti Tyagi.
Entertainment +
Live Sports on Youtube.
Youtube stories rush by every week, and often make us pause. Well, here’s one that stopped me in my tracks. Youtube may not be making major plays for Live Sports, but trust their users to do it instead!
"Suddenly there’s an increase in interest and I looked around and went well ‘hold on a minute there’s nowhere to watch it’.”
A Youtuber has secured broadcasting rights to French rugby’s second division. That’s right, for fans in Britain & Ireland who want to watch the league (which features some former England players), they’ll be able to watch it on Youtube, courtesy Tim Cocker, of Eggchasers Rugby.
Warner & Discovery: not Bros anymore.
Warner Bros. Discovery will split into two publicly traded companies next year, one focused on its film and TV studio businesses and the HBO Max streaming service, and the other on its cable networks. This has been on the cards, of course, but is final confirmation that the cable businesses we are all told are actually still meaningful, are… well maybe not so much after all. Plus, the resulting organisational uncertainty and restructures are the last things beleagured WBD staff would want. But buckle up we must.
This is but a few days after WBD shareholders, in a (symbolic) vote on Tuesday, rejected the pay packages for several company’s execs, including CEO David Zaslav’s package of more than $50 million.
In ‘Zaslav retreats from grand ambitions’ Dave Folkenflik says what many think “The break-up represents a collapse of Zaslav's ambitions and aspirations for the mega-media company.” Evan Shapiro is less generous in his take, “let’s be VERY clear. Ambition is not vision. Aspiration is not strategy.”
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A glimpse into the nascent world of pro-wrestling in China. This struck me particularly, “The sports-or-entertainment quandary has baffled Chinese regulators. Wrestling’s ‘theatrical elements’ mean that sports authorities often punt responsibility for events to the entertainment bureau, while the entertainment bureau often wants to punt it straight back.”
YouTube’s recent pitch to advertisers is to link moments or events in culture with Youtube creators. Kinda like TV. The thinking: cultural events are when people tune in. Even if those events are not Youtube events (think sports, awards etc), “why not align creator content with those moments to offer brands a more premium, relevant, and timely ad experience.”
Canal+ & Netflix have signed a first-of-its-kind distribution deal, where the French pay-TV player will carry Netflix content for countries across Sub-Saharan Africa. Netflix is estimated to have fewer than 5 million subscribers on the continent.
Marketing with creators “The rationale is clear. People trust people more than they trust faceless corporations.” Kian Bakhtiari outlines some challenges for brands to tackle in a Forbes piece, addressing the ‘Deinfluencing’ trend, Creators running their own brands, and very notably, in my mind, Influencer Fatigue.
Disney+ has lunched a loyalty program in the US. ‘Perks’ will give customers the chance to go for movie premieres, get discounts at resorts, give a bunch of free trials to (non-Disney) services, game token, and, erm, free emojis. Some might call this a belated move to get the flywheel going for Disney.
Scorsese the actor couldn’t help think like a director but controlled himself anyway. If you watched Apple’s The Studio (a fun show that I thought was a bit too overwrought for my liking), you would have seen ‘Marty’s’ quite excellent cameo in Episode 2.
AI roundup
AMC, meet Runway.
AMC is the latest studio (and likely first cable company) to join hands with a generative AI provider. Their deal with Runway, seems low stakes enough to not raise too many eyebrows, yet meaningful enough to make progress and aid in some key elements. In this case, AMC plans to use the generative technology in some internal processes-visualisation and storyboarding; and some consumers facing efforts- marketing materials.
Say What?
Eleven Labs announced its latest version, an Alpha of v3. The expressions, moods, reactions, narrative abilities and accents are excellent. Have a look.
Write like AI, read like a machine.
Readers of a fantasy novel were aghast to find an AI prompt in the published version of the book... accidentally left by the author. What’s more, it showed a request to copy another writer's style. Welcome to this world. And no, this is not the first time its happened either.
"I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements,"
This is a potent (or useless) combination of self-publishing, ebooks and Chat GPT- authors churning out books like they’re Linkedin posts. When will readers stop gobbling them? Worse, what happens to the real wuthors doing some real writing, their work being drowned by the surrounding AI slop? Sample this, left behind in another book, "Certainly! Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori.”
“The internet at large is also facing an existential threat in the shape of an AI slop tsunami. Do we really need to extend that trend to 300-page fantasy novels to read on the subway to work?
Maybe we could ask sexy Grigori.
AI will take our jobs, rinse & repeat.
Recently a couple of the enthusiastic AI-adopting companies were in the news for taking a moment with their AI deployment.
Klara was a poster-child, tom-toming its use of AI in place of real humans, with all the efficiencies and cost savings that came with it. Not so much now.
“As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality,” Klara CEO Siemiatkowski said. “Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us.”
Relatedly, in the USA, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates is unusually high. One theory on why, is that white collar jobs are using more AI than grads.
“When you think from first principles about what generative AI can do, and what jobs it can replace, it’s the kind of things that young college grads have done,” Harvard economist David Deming told Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.
More confusing data points in the constant “AI is replacing jobs” worry.
You could do with reading this take some time back- a good balance of how to look at AI with skepticism or hype, in The Phony Comforts of AI skepticism “It’s fun to say that artificial intelligence is fake and sucks — but evidence is mounting that it’s real and dangerous.”
Super grateful for clients who still buy inane ideas & don't even put up a fight when you say, "Please don't make me put the logo in the film from beginning to end.”
_Shikha Gupta, writer of the Slap Therapy ad.