Why Today’s Smart Marketers Are Cozying Up To The CIO

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The world’s newest beauty pageant is about to crown its queen, but the honor and glory will go to her support team. The pageant is called Miss AI, and seeks to recognize AI-created female influencers. It’s organized by the World AI Creator Awards and sponsored by social subscription platform Fanvue, Forbes contributor Leslie Katz writes. The contestants are judged on their looks and poise, the technical skill that went into creating them, and their online pull—measured by engagement with fans, audience growth and utilization of different platforms.

The 10 finalists were named this week. They include India’s Zara Shatavari, a brand ambassador for a women’s supplement; Morocco’s Kenza Layli, who wears a hijab and promotes skin care and women’s rights; and Romania’s Aiyana Rainbow, a voice for LGBTQ+ pride.

AI models can mean big business for brands seeking influencers. And while the creators who have designed some of them say they aren’t designed to replace human influencers, they can do the work without the hassles. An AI-generated influencer will always post what you want, when you want it and how you want it. It won’t miss photo shoots or get things wrong. But, even if these pixelated influencers’ bios clearly state they are AI-generated, they can be deceptive. Katz reported that a Latin American actor texted an AI influencer to ask her out, not knowing she wasn’t real.

In a statement, Fanvue co-creator Will Monange said these awards have helped uncover talented creators who nobody had heard of before. “That’s the beauty of the AI creator space. It’s enabling creative people to enter the creator economy with their AI-generated creations without having to be the face themselves.”

The World AI Creator Awards plans to host other contests in the future for AI-generated fashion, diversity and computer-generated men, meaning the spotlight will remain on AI creators and influencers. Two real people and two AI-generated influencers’ teams are judging the pageant. It has a total of $20,000 in prizes for the top three, with the winner getting $5,000 cash, promotion on Fanvue and a dedicated publicist. These awards are significantly less than the winner of better known pageants for real women, but Miss AI so far also appears to be skipping the controversy and challenges that have been seen in human pageants recently.

In the past, CMOs rarely worked with CIOs, but that relationship has been changing. Zensar’s Chief Business Officer Anup Rege said that the CMO-CIO partnership is the most important driver of long-term business success now. I talked to him about how these two leaders can work together. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

IN THE NEWS

As Donald Trump’s guilty verdict came down last Thursday, more than 10 million viewers tuned in to cable news. Forbes senior contributor Mark Joyella writes the largest audience came to Fox News Channel, which drew 4.426 million viewers between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET. But MSNBC had the second-largest audience for that hour of news, with 3.422 million viewers. And CNN came in third, with 2.379 million.

Compared with regular cable news viewership, this is a sizable bump. In the entire month of May, according to Adweek’s reports on Nielsen data, leader Fox News got an average of 2 million viewers in primetime, with 1.29 million viewers throughout the day. Second place network MSNBC saw 1.16 million at primetime, and 816,000 throughout the day.

However, TV news viewership is skewed toward older demographics, so most people may have gotten the news about the conviction in some other way. Eighty-five percent of people 65 and older use TV to get their news, Statista found, more than twice the amount of those aged 18-29, 41% of whom use it for that purpose. In December, the Los Angeles Times wrote that median ages for CNN, Fox and MSNBC audiences are 67, 68 and 71, respectively.

TECHNOLOGY

Many companies have built their own advertising networks, giving marketers the opportunity to target specific audiences, like streaming viewers interested in reality TV, or members of a hotel’s loyalty program. Forbes contributor David Doty writes about a company that’s coming onto the scene with highly valuable data for marketers: U.S. banking company Chase. The financial institution has access to a wealth of data about how much money people are spending, what they are spending it on, and which people actually have money to spend. Through its Chase Media Solutions, consumers who opt-in will be served ads based on their previous or likely purchases. And Chase Media Solutions will only charge companies for their ads when consumers make purchases.

Doty writes this could be a win for marketers seeking to take advantage of first-party targeting data as third-party cookies are becoming less valuable. Chase’s strategy, he writes, “lays bare the latent strategy for revenue streams that credit card companies and financial services haven’t figured out how to monetize ‘bigly’—until now.” And it’s highly likely that other banks will be likely to soon follow with their own advertising networks.

BRANDS + MESSAGING

Major League Baseball is popular with Latin Americans. Some of its greatest stars come from Spanish-speaking countries—on Opening Day this year, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba and Puerto Rico were the top four countries with foreign-born players —and there is a dedicated fan base among those with Latin American heritage. Forbes senior contributor Maury Brown writes the league launched a campaign last week that highlights those players and fans, called “El Béisbol es Otra Cosa,” which translates to “Baseball is Something Else.”

“MLB’s depth of internationally born players provides an enormous opportunity to reach fans with cultural connections globally and domestically,” said Karin Timpone, Chief Marketing Officer for Major League Baseball. “The League is committed to celebrating the diversity of the sport in a way that resonates with the unique cultures that represent our game.”

ON MESSAGE

Zensar’s Anup Rege On Why CMOs And CIOs Need To Work Together

In many companies, walls between departments are coming down so once-siloed groups can work together toward a common goal. Zensar Chief Business Officer Anup Rege has noticed the key partnership in businesses today: Bringing together the CMO and CIO, who both rely on data. The relationship between these two positions and their departments, he said, is key to the success of every company going forward. I talked to him about this partnership, why it matters, and how to keep the relationship strong.

This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A longer version is available here.

What made everyone realize they needed to start taking inventory of data and start working together to use it?

Even if you go back 30, 40 years, the holy grail of every marketing campaign is what they call one-to-one personalization. That’s not very easy to achieve. What has happened is social media and some of these things have accelerated the need for that one-to-one personalization, that hyper-personalization. The only ways companies are able to get closer to that is data. Knowing about who their customers are, who their target is, what are their behaviors, what are their patterns, all of those. If I get something which is relevant to me, I’ll consider it. I think it is the culmination of all of these aspects which has made organizations really focus on data in a big way.

Simplistically put, whatever product and service I have, that has to be marketed effectively. For me to market it effectively, I need to know who to market it to. That marketing would generate a set of data. It will generate a set of expectations with customers. Once that set of expectations of the customers is generated, then when the customer starts interacting with the organization, that experience has to be carried through in the applications, the platforms, whatever interface points that you have with them.

That is where the CIO organization comes in. That CIO organization relies on the same data because they need to be relevant to the customers who are now using their platform to experience what was marketed. That experience generates data. Whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience, it generates data. And that data is relevant for the other two arms because the marketers would want to know what the experience was so that they can correct whatever is required to be done. The product and services team would need to know that data because they can then build the next version of their product or service based on that data.

If you think about it, this is like a continuous loop. Wherever it works perfectly, those organizations are really successful because they are always connected to the customers. They know what the customers want. They’re doing what is relevant. They’re reacting, they’re engaging well with the customer.

Where this thing is broken, it doesn’t work. Most places it [had been] broken because of the silo, now the organizations are coming together. A lot of them have a long way to go to get the data infrastructure working very well.

Going forward, how important is the CMO-CIO relationship going to be?

That one relationship is going to determine the success of every company. As a fellow peer of mine once said to me, the worst thing you want to do is run a brilliant marketing campaign and then fall flat on the execution, because then people lose trust in the brand. If I’m a CMO, it is in my interest to keep my CIO organization and the platform’s organization completely in tune. If I want to have subsequent successes in whatever marketing I’m doing, I need to make sure that whatever is being followed lives up to the promise that we have made in marketing. That is the common ground for all of them. I see this behavior changing and I see that working really well with mature organizations.

What advice would you give going forward for CMOs and CIOs to keep their relationship strong?

Align on the common outcomes. These outcomes have to be business outcomes, because then all the conversations become easier. You’re talking a common language which everybody understands: the CEO understands, finance understands, the board understands. The outcomes have to be something which is very simple, something that is measurable. It should not require somebody to scratch their head to think, what does this really mean? Affecting your revenue, your number of customers, your profitability, your service parameters, one of those things.

For both of them to be successful, they need to identify quick wins. What are these small things we need to do, which, in a matter of weeks and months, rather than years, can start showing material changes? These changes could be not just in terms of outcomes, but also could become the ways of working together. How can you get the two teams to work together to deliver a common outcome?

[There’s] this new term: creative technologists, which almost bridges the gap between the creative and the tech teams. The creative technologists are these experimenters who use technologies in the creative world to see what works, what doesn’t work. How can you try these different things to see what resonates with the customers? How to use a lot more of test-and-learn approaches, whether it is marketing, whether you’re building platforms.

These very basics—having a common set of outcomes, trying test-and-learn approaches to ways of working and having quick wins—will help set the foundation of building a long-term relationship and a long-term joint successful partnership.

FACTS + COMMENTS

Spotify stock has been up more than 6% this week, after the audio streaming provider announced it would be increasing subscription rates starting in July.

$11.99: New monthly price for the individual ad-free premium subscription, up from $10.99. The Duo plan will cost $2 more per month, and the family plan will increase $3 each month.

239 million: Spotify subscribers in Q1, a year-over-year increase of 14%

‘In the near term, monetization remains our top priority’: Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek said during April’s earnings call

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

Comedian Kevin Fredericks, also known as KevOnStage, has become successful by focusing on his target audience: people who have attended Black churches. His commitment to that audience, and the way his content spreads, can be applied to marketers.

Are you new to AI and trying to figure out the lay of the land? Here’s a useful primer on the tech, the terminology and what it can do for your business.

VIDEO

QUIZ

Pop star and beauty mogul Rihanna is adding a new product line to her Fenty brand. What is it?

A. Hair care

B. Jewelry

C. Dental care

D. Shoes

See if you got the answer right here.