For Immediate Release

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From experimentation, ideation, and storyboarding to producing the actual images to be used in an ad, advertising agency creatives are finding Artificial Intelligence image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion instantly useful, saving time and money without sacrificing the end results. Does this spell the end of the graphic arts business?
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Neville and Shel were together in person to record this episode, which focuses exclusively on leadership communication. The recording happened on Neville’s dining room table as Shel and his wife were on a two-week vacation in England and Ireland.
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A lot of the communication with customers for which businesses once used email has transitioned to text messaging — along with communication among friends, families, and pretty much everyone. To some extent, that even includes employee-to-employee communication. Whether it’s SMS messaging or a messaging app like WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram, people increasingly prefer the functionality and speed of response with text messages. Email isn’t going anywhere but its uses may be diminishing.
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Advertising on the Web is two-dimensional, with a consumer on the outside looking in. In the Metaverse, consumers will be active participants in virtual worlds, participating directly with virtual objects and one another. That opens the door for entirely new forms of advertising. In this short mid-week episode, Neville and Shel discuss what advertising might look like in virtual worlds and some of the technical, ethical, and legal challenges that organizations will face selling their wares to denizens of these immersive spaces.
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“Quiet quitting” is all over TikTok, with mostly Gen Zers talking about their disdain for going “above and beyond” at work. Is this really anything new, or is it just the first time a generation has used a label to share their feelings online? Or, as some suggest, is it that most Gen Zers entered the workforce during the pandemic when the boundaries between work and life were not clear and now that companies are getting back to what executives perceive as normal, they don’t agree with the expectations the company has of them? Is this even confined to Gen Z? Neville and Shel look at “quiet quitting” in today’s short mid-week episode.
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According to a new PwC survey of 1,000 senior U.S. business leaders from across industry sectors, businesses have bought into the inevitability and utility of the metaverse. The study also surveyed 5,000 U.S. consumers who are less aware and enthusiastic than executives are. Also in this monthly long-form episode of “For Immediate Release”:

• Gartner has released ins 2022 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies.
• Consumer trend experts anticipate the impact web3 will have on consumer trends.
• Ukraine has perfect the art of advertising in support of its resistance to Russia’s invasion.
• Each quarter, Microsoft adjusts the language it uses to advise the investment world of its ambitions.
• One CEO who had to lay off staff took to LinkedIn to explain how hard it was on him, including a selfie of him weeping over it. Was it effective?

In his Tech Report, Dan York recounts his experience with Reddit’s new social audio tool, looks at “snipping,” a new Twitter Spaces feature, and explains a Google update designed to elevate “helpful content.”
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As news media outlets that traffic in the written word — print and online — economic pressures have led to more repurposed content and less original material. What impact does this have on trust in these media sources, and is there a role businesses and their communication teams can play?
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More and more people are experimenting with a growing collection of Artificial Intelligence-based graphics tools. Some of these tools produce stunning images in a variety of artistic styles, leading some to wonder if art directors will generate their own images rather than continue to pay for graphic design services. Neville and Shel discuss the possibilities in this short mid-week episode.
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Remember Microsoft Tay? The 2016 Twitter chatbot suffered from a concerted effort to teach it all manner of vile things, prompting Microsoft to withdraw the service and apologize. That experience is top of mind for pretty much everyone talking about Meta’s new chatbot, now available in public testing in the U.S. The developers behind BlenderBot 3 insist that they, too, had the Tay experiment in mind when they developed the process for teaching this new chatbot to behave. In fact, the beta is designed so people can report when it says something inappropriate that it may have learned from another user. That information is used to teach it what is not appropriate. Will it work?
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Brands have been tripping over themselves to jump on the Web3/metaverse/NFT bandwagon, but few have articulated a strategic and comprehensive approach at the level Starbucks has. In this short mid-week FIR episode, Neville and Shel look at how Starbucks plans to build loyalty and community using these emerging tools, along with some other organizations that are starting to give Web3 similarly serious looks.
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