✅ Monday briefing: Council papers, BBC local strikes, Fox false news, green claim, PDF AI, AI For Marketing, PR slow on AI, Twitter slow death, LinkedIn crowdsourcing, and more...
Media, good and bad practice, artificial intelligence, social media platforms, and tools
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom, and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join.
We became big fans of Les Mills workouts during lockdown. This week Sarah Waddington CBE spoke to CEO Clive Ormerod about the company's mission to create a fitter planet, its new partnership with Adidas, and making diversity, equity and inclusion part of company culture.
Subscribe to listen for free where you usually get your podcasts or visit the Wadds Inc. website.
Media
🗞️ COUNCIL PAPERS: Council-run newspaper are among top circulation performers according to the latest ABC figures for 2022. The Stevenage Comet (37,233), Ham & High Express (6,433), Love Hackney (100,756), Waltham Forest News (112,290), and Newham Recorder (6,025) all increased their circulation. Spotted Alan Morrison.
🗳 BBC LOCAL STRIKES: BBC local journalists are striking on 14 March to coincide with the Budget in protest at staff cuts. The BBC has announced plans for its 39 local stations to share more shows in afternoons, evenings and weekends. Spotted Julian Christopher.
⛔ FOX FALSE NEWS: Rupert Murdoch has admitted that some of the network's presenters endorsed false claims that the 2020 US election was stolen. Dominion is suing Fox News for $1.6bn (£1.3bn), claiming that it broadcast false rumours about voter fraud that harmed its voting machine business. Source Stephen Waddington.
Good and bad practice
✈️ GREEN CLAIM: The ASA has banned a Lufthansa poster because it included a link to a marketing website that made misleading claims about the airline’s environmental impact. The airline claimed to be cutting carbon emissions by half by 2030 and zero by 2050. The ASA ruled this was aspiration and misleading. Spotted Slavina Dimitrova.
Artificial intelligence
📚 PDF AI: ChatPDF is an AI integration for PDF documents. The tool creates a semantic index of a document enabling it to be interrogated using a chat bot. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🔐 AI FOR MARKETING: Google has shared an interesting perspective on privacy. It is proposing AI modelling, content creation at scale and real time analytics as a response to privacy concerns. Could this be the post cookie and post SEO future? Source Andy Barr.
🐌 PR SLOW ON AI: A quarter of public relations leaders say they will never use AI tools according to a Confidence Tracker published by ICCO and the PRCA. 15% say they are using it frequently or fairly frequently. Copyright and ethical concerns have been raised as issues. Source Andrew Bruce Smith.
Social media platforms
😵 TWITTER SLOW DEATH: The performance of Twitter is sluggish. It has fired another 200 engineers. Consumer audiences are moving to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Business audiences are heading to LinkedIn. Mastodon remains a niche platform for the tech savvy. Source Stephen Waddington.
👥 LINKEDIN CROWDSOURCING: Collaborative articles are a new feature on LinkedIn in which users are invited to contribute on topics. Topics are matched to LinkedIn users based on professional expertise using the LinkedIn Skills Graph. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
📂 LOCKDOWN FILES: The dump of WhatsApp messages sent between UK ministers and officials during the pandemic has reignited the debate about whether WhatsApp should be used for internal communications. Legal issues aside, you can't stop it, at least among informal networks and it should be addressed by crisis plans. Source Stephen Waddington.
Tools
🔢 GA4 AUDIT TOOL: Up to 90% of Google Analytics (GA) 4 configurations have flaws. Paul Koks has updated his free GA audit tool to automatically check a GA4 property set up. It provides a score on 30 variables including domain, traffic, funnel stages, and revenue. Source Andrew Bruce Smith.
📊 ATTRIBUTION FALLACY: Digital attribution or econometrics is a simple and relatively cheap answer to a complex problem. It is also wrong. Modelling customer journeys offline and online is a challenging task. Source Andrew Bruce Smith.
📰 PRESS RELEASE PRAISE: Public relations is locked into content and workflow that is more than 100 years old. Everyone knows how press releases work irrespective of their training or background. It's a common format created through a process of iteration and approval. Source Stephen Waddington.