Ads that perform well on TV have only 50% chance of performing well in digital
Kantar’s fourth edition of Creative Effectiveness Awards India revealed that 65% of Indians will buy brands that stand for something they can identify with. Furthermore, only 28% Indians (vs Global average 75%) have watched any ‘foreign’ content. From what is understood from the report, brands are now refreshingly taking on the challenge and opportunity of engaging the southern consumers differently from Hindi-speaking markets. Considering the digital landscape, the report states that ads that perform well on TV have only a 50% chance of performing well in digital. It further states that emotional resonance significantly enhances digital advertising’s impact on brand building which implies that ads that evoke strong emotions are 3.3x more likely to drive long-term brand equity and 2.75x more likely to generate impact compared to those with weaker emotional connections. One of the growth accelerators for building strong brands is to pre-dispose more people. Great advertising builds pre-disposition and loads the dice in favour of the ads.
After Zomato, Swiggy launches UPI services
After Zomato, online food and grocery delivery platform Swiggy has rolled out its own UPI (Unified Payments Interface) service in a bid to drop dependency on external apps, minimize payment failures and simplify the checkout experience. The new in-app payment service is being launched through the UPI-Plugin in partnership with Yes Bank and Juspay, unlike its peer Zomato which had applied for a Third Party Application Provider (TPAP) license to offer the same service last year. This comes at a time when Swiggy arch rival Zomato has toned down its fintech play, surrendering Payment Aggregator (PA) license and withdrawing its application for Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC).
Swiggy launches ‘Eatlists’, a global-first feature in food delivery
Swiggy said that it has launched ‘Eatlists’ – a ‘global- first’ feature in food delivery, to transform how users discover and share food recommendations. The company said like creating and sharing music playlists, Swiggy’s Eatlists feature will enable food enthusiasts to curate and share their favourite dishes directly within the Swiggy app. According to Swiggy’s in-app insights, 58% of users need help with indecision when selecting meals. Additionally, 68% of users rely on recommendations from friends and peers, navigating multiple platforms for reviews and orders, resulting in a ‘fragmented’ and ‘time-consuming’ process. Through the new feature, users can create themed lists of their favourite dishes for easier browsing, share curated Eatlists with other food lovers, and access lists created by users or others, ensuring a stream of food recommendations.
Another text-based app aims to storm social media: noplace
A new, more colourful text-based app – noplace – has arrived on the social media scene, taking on established networks like X (formerly Twitter) and just-turned-one Threads. Mainly geared towards younger users, the app aims to put ‘social’ back into social media. The noplace app, launched out of its invite-only design is now available for all to download, and has already surged to the top charts of Apple’s App Store. The app is attracting attention due to its feature that allows users to customize their profiles with different colours. Founder and chief executive Tiffany Zhong hassaid that GenZ (i.e. those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s) is looking for a new type of social media. “I think that part of the magical, fun part of the internet is gone now. Everything is very uniform,” she said, adding that due to highly personalized content, there is no sense of community online anymore. “We’re watching different content and [following] different interests than our friends, so community is harder to find as a result,” she said. The app positions itself as a platform to express oneself and connect with others with similar interests. Users can gain levels, earn badges, and find friends through customisable profiles to share what they are doing at present, not to chronicle what they have done.
YouTube’s new eraser tool removes copyrighted music without affecting other audio
YouTube released a new eraser tool that lets creators remove copyrighted music from their videos without impacting other audio like dialogue or sound effects. The new tool uses an AI-powered algorithm to accurately remove copyrighted music without affecting other sounds in the video. However, YouTube’s support page warns that sometimes the tool might not work perfectly. If it fails to remove the song, creators can mute all sound in the affected segments or trim them out. The feature is accessible on the “Video Copyright” summary page in YouTube Studio. Creators can choose to either “Erase Song,” which targets only the copyrighted music, or “Mute All Sound,” which silences all audio within the specified timestamps.
China leads in genAI patents, US in advanced AI
China leads the world in generative AI patent requests, significantly outpacing the United States, according to the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The technology, which has surged in public awareness since late 2022, was linked to approximately 54,000 inventions over the past decade. More than a quarter of these were filed just last year, highlighting the rapid growth and interest in generative AI. WIPO’s report, the first of its kind, aims to track trends in generative AI development through patent applications. Over 38,200 generative AI inventions originated from China in the past decade, far surpassing the nearly 6,300 from the USA. South Korea, Japan, and India followed with significantly fewer patents. Generative AI, which includes tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Baidu’s Ernie, is utilized across various industries, including life sciences, manufacturing, and telecommunications. Despite the many patents, WIPO cautions that quantity does not equate to quality. It remains uncertain which patents will hold market value or have a transformative impact on society. While the US and China are often seen as rivals in AI development, US tech companies currently lead the production of cutting-edge AI systems. In 2023, US-based institutions produced 61 notable machine-learning models, compared to 21 from the EU and 15 from China. The US also leads in AI foundation models and private AI investments.
Google emissions up 48% amid data center and AI growth
Over the past five years, Google’s emissions have surged by 48%. In its annual environmental report published in July, Google disclosed that its greenhouse gas emissions reached 14.3 MN tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2023. This marks a 13% increase from 2022 and a 48% rise compared to 2019. The company attributes the rise in emissions primarily to higher energy consumption at data centers and supply chain emissions. Google acknowledged that as AI integration into its products deepens, reducing emissions may become more challenging due to the escalating energy demands of AI computations and the associated emissions from increased technical infrastructure investments. Notably, in 2021, Google committed to achieving net-zero emissions across all its operations and value chain by 2030. To achieve this, the tech giant plans to cut 50% of its total emissions and invest in both nature-based and technology-driven carbon removal solutions to neutralize the remainder. Google has also pledged to the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to validate its absolute emissions reduction goals.