Good morning. This is Megan Graham filling in for Nat Ives. WSJ Leadership Institute's Katie Deighton reports on a new way to optimize.
At CMO Today, we've covered all manner of online optimization tactics that have emerged in the AI era, from thwarted attempts at manipulating Reddit threads to Mailchimp's plans to improve the "crawlability" of its sites. Last week, a newer one crossed the threshold of my inbox: Creator-first answer engine optimization.
It's an offering peddled by Influencer, the creator marketing agency, and Profound, an AI marketing company. The two firms on Wednesday announced a partnership that aims to wield creator content to influence the brand and product recommendations that show up on platforms like ChatGPT.
Profound's software will analyze which creators are already showing up in LLM results, as well as the types of conversations they're having in videos, posts, podcasts and other content across the internet. Influencer will then take that information and use it to help develop clients' influencer campaigns, according to Ben Jeffries, the company's co-founder and CEO.
"In every conversation that we were having with brands-whether it be at the CMO level, or at heads of social or heads of influencer marketing level-they were all asking us to help them understand the impact the creative campaigns that we were running would have on how they were being actually showcased on LLMs," he said.
Creator-first AEO will be an iterative process, with Profound checking back again and again to see how the LLMs' preferred creators change over time. An advertiser off the back of the recommendations may choose to hire influencers they've never worked with before, Jeffries said. But small tweaks could also have an impact, he said.
"It might be the way that the title is written on a YouTube video, or the caption of the YouTube video," Jeffries said. "It might be what the subtext of the YouTube video actually is."
The announcement comes after influencer platform Later introduced a similar offering, Creator AEO, in May. It serves as a reminder of the sheer amount of strategizing that organic marketing now demands. Brands must continue to service the ever-changing algorithms and trends of social-media platforms in order to reach their desired group of consumers, while at the same time keeping an eye on where AI engines are scraping information from, a factor that's constantly in motion. (My LinkedIn feed briefly went into meltdown last week when reports surfaced that Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations had plummeted.)
Marketers will also be watching for whether LLMs will preclude paid-for social media endorsements that are badged with #ad or similar disclosures in their results. If they do, I predict we'll see the veil between entertainment and advertising grow even thinner than it is now.
Foot Locker Fumbles
Dick's Sporting Goods on Tuesday warned of lower profits for the year, saying consumers weren't spending on footwear, The Wall Street Journal's Katherine Hamilton reports.
Dick's acquired Foot Locker last fall for $2.4 billion, with footwear accounting for most of its sales.
Ed Stack, Dick's executive chairman, said the sneaker market is awash with inventory and rivals slapping on discounts, which has pressured Foot Locker to keep pace.
"What changed is a number of brands got very promotional on their sites, and those promotions spilled into the broader marketplace," Stack said. "We expect that unfortunately to continue through the balance of the year."
The Magic Number
The proportion of Gen Z adults who identified as "die-hard" sports fans who regularly watch full games, according to a recent survey.
Dolly's Legacy
Country music legend and cultural icon Dolly Parton died Tuesday at the age of 80. One of the most prolific songwriters who ever lived, she wrote more than 3,000 songs-more than 1,000 of which were recorded and released. She put out more than 50 studio albums, resulting in 27 gold and platinum albums and total sales over 100 million worldwide, including 113 charting singles.
"There are few finer songwriters, male or female, that have ever lived," said the pop singer Pink in her 2022 speech inducting Parton into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She called her "one of the greatest storytellers of our time, of any time."
She was also "at least temporarily," in her words, "a full-fledged movie star," she wrote in her autobiography "Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business." Her film career yielded classics like "9 to 5" and "Steel Magnolias." And her philanthropic efforts were many; she started the Imagination Library, which donated more than 200 million books to children around the world. In 2020, she contributed $1 million to Vanderbilt University for virus research, helping kick-start Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine.
Also: Rewatch Dolly Parton's iconic ads over the decades over at Adweek.
Quotable
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