AI Advertising, San Francisco & Climate Quitters
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #177 ❤️
This week Amazon lets vendors use AI to make their products easier to sell and Airbnb is using it to stop you throwing New Year’s parties, and while the US continues to be divided on remote work, San Francisco is pushing some people to decide.
Plus, climate quitters make waves on LinkedIn and Unilever throw purpose-led marketing out the window.
Let's get into it.
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#1 - Amazon Introduces AI For Vendors
Last week we talked about the AI tool Remini, which allows you to generate professional photos of yourself looking like you’re hosting a Ted Talk. Our conclusion was, fine, why not. Do what you’ve got to do to get yourself taken seriously on LinkedIn or on your CV. If you can’t afford professional headshots, use AI to fake it until you make it.
However, Amazon introducing a similar feature which will allow sellers to jazz up the photos of items in their listings doesn’t sit quite as well with us.
They’re selling it as a great thing for Amazon sellers – they can easily make their images more attractive and hence sell more products. The example they use is of a toaster on a white background, and then a toaster on a pretty high-end looking kitchen counter with autumnal accents and decoration.
Along the same lines of looking successful if you can afford to get headshots taken, if the company you’re buying an item from has the budget to take high quality pictures, that is reassuring. It sends the signal that it’s a legitimate business – and so it should. It suggests that they’re specialised enough in one area to know what they’re doing, they’ve invested money into their setup, and they’ve actually been in the room with the product – it exists.
With Amazon’s new feature, that becomes more difficult to decipher. If sellers can make their images look like they’ve been taken professionally with AI and one simple product image, drop shipping just got a lot easier to do and a lot harder to spot.
Drop shipping, if you don’t know, is when a vendor sells something online – via Amazon or elsewhere – that they’ve never actually seen. The item is sent directly from the warehouse where its mass produced to your door, with no middleman. The vendor – the person writing the listing – doesn’t know if the item is any good, and nor do they care.
As long as they sell enough, they make a profit. And, if they get too many returns, or too many bad reviews, they shut down the business or simply shut down the listing on Amazon and make another one. It’s a numbers game, and with Amazon’s new tools, the rules of the game just got a lot more lenient.
#2 - AI Doesn’t Want You To Party
Well, Airbnb doesn’t, anyway.
Parties have always been a problem for Airbnb hosts. Holding a party in your home is risky enough, a bunch of strangers doing it while you’re not there to put coasters down is enough to give you nighmares. But since Covid, the problem has actually gotten worse.
During lockdown, while bars and clubs were closed, young people turned to Airbnb to host group celebrations, with lots of alcohol, and no cleaning up after themselves…
Airbnb fought back, announcing a “global party ban” and saying they would do everything they could to prevent them – including banning offenders from booking again and restrictions for users under 25 who didn’t have great reviews to back them up.
This brought the number of parties down by 55%, and Airbnb are hoping that an AI powered software system will do the rest.
The software works by looking for “red flags” in your profile and your request. Such red flags include how recently you created your account, whether you’re trying to rent a listing in the same town or city that you live in, and the duration of your stay.
I.e. someone who’s created an account that day to book a spacious apartment in their own city on New Year’s Eve – they’re setting off the party alarm.
If the AI thinks the party risk is too high, they’ll prevent the booking, or send the person to the site of one of their partner hotel companies. AI is, famously, not perfect, so some perfectly innocent youngsters will probably get their bookings rejected.
As a customer, you might be a bit peeved, but Naba Banerjee, head of safety and trust at Airbnb, wants the people renting out their homes on Airbnb to be as reassured as possible.
It’s a two-way street – Airbnb need customers to stay in their listings but they also need homeowners to list their homes for rent on their platform just as much, if not more…
#3 - Back To The Office? It’s A War Zone Out There
Big names in the US work scene have made a lot of headlines recently by speaking out against remote work.
Elon Musk went on an unprovoked rant about working from home when asked about the price of Teslas, calling it morally wrong and a delusional approach to work, Zoom famously aren’t into it anymore despite helping everyone else do it, and the latest person to bash the WFH crowd is Martha Stewart.
81-year old ex-con Martha Stewart boomered pretty hard when she asked if America should go down the drain just because people don’t want to go back to work. Obviously as she spent most of her life in an era without laptops she doesn’t understand that nowadays a lot of corporate work can be done, well, on your lap… But we digress.
Going against the grain, the almost equally elderly Shark Tank (the US version of Dragon’s Den) judge, Kevin O’Leary recently spoke out against Martha Stewart in support of remote working, and he made a pretty interesting point.
O’Leary, a technology software company founder (already, we know he knows about laptops) and judge on the aforementioned Shark Tank TV show, insisted that companies will not be able to hire the best talent if they rule out remote working completely, noting that the corporate economy has radically changed in the last few years, but also pointing out the way city life has changed.
Talking about increased crime in cities like San Francisco, equally famous for being the tech office capital of the US as it is for currently being one of the meth and opioid capitals of the US, he’s quoted as saying “Nobody wants to work in these places. They’re war zones”. And from what we’ve heard about the city, where the real estate market is currently in freefall thanks to the drugs epidemic, he doesn’t seem to be far wrong.
If you’re an experienced tech worker who climbed the corporate ladder in the city of San Francisco, which may be the case for a lot of people considering the Bay Area is home to the largest concentration of tech companies in the US, you might be reaching an age where you no longer want to live near bars and coffee shops so badly that you’re willing to risk getting on the wrong side of a meth head.
To catch this talent, companies will have to stay up to date with the changing market, and listening to Martha Stewart, who also insists her employees should be available for calls on the weekends, isn’t the way to do that.
#4 - Climate Quitters
Forget Quiet Quitting, Climate Quitting is here and it’s turned up to full volume, especially on LinkedIn.
A former employee at one of Shell’s subsidiaries who swiftly quit his fulfilling job of eleven years, with no other issues, following their announcement of a strategy abandoning their climate promises, shared on LinkedIn that he didn’t want to be part of a company which prioritised short-term profit over social and environmental responsibilities.
An established safety consultant at Shell also walked off the job after a decade over their “disregard for climate change risks”. She posted a resignation video on LinkedIn that has gotten over 17,000 reactions and nearly 2000 reposts.
These two examples are part of a wider trend, surprising in that it doesn’t only apply to the younger generations.
Of 4000 workers surveyed in the UK and the US, two thirds of people were anxious about climate change, and would like their employers to take a stronger stance, and 50% were actually willing to leave if their ethics on the subject didn’t align. While that figure does increase for Gen Z, they’re clearly not the only ones willing to live by their values, as proved by LinkedIn.
Public quitting on LinkedIn is obviously a PR nightmare for brands like Shell, and can also be seen as a powerful form of lobbying. Experts believe that public climate quitting can make problematic companies move faster in bringing their policies up to date.
And for companies who don’t want to play the game when it comes to climate commitments, the talent pool is only going to get smaller. With experienced employees willing to quit, and the generation entering the workforce more than willing to boycott companies with a bad rep, the best talent is drifting further and further out of reach.
#5 - Should All Brands Stand For Something?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, this week The Drum are asking, do all brands really need to stand for something for consumers to buy them?
The replacement of Unilever’s CEO (we’re not going to bother giving you their names, we know you don’t care, we don’t either) signals a move from purpose-led marketing to a focus on profits.
Unilever’s previous approach, beginning in 2019, set the tone for a marketing trend where all products had to align with consumers values – including mayonnaise and stock cubes. Any brand that took a value-led approach to their marketing strategy would have higher sales and more customer loyalty, apparently.
Shareholders didn’t agree, however, describing it as useless virtue signalling, with one going so far as to say that any “company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellman’s mayonnaise has, in our view, clearly lost the plot.” Fair enough. Not to mention they think the previous strategy was losing them money.
Unilever’s new CEO has decreed that a social mission simply isn’t necessary for all products, and for some he even thinks it’s an “unwelcome distraction”.
Certainly, if Unilever really cared about the environment, they’d probably close up shop all together and stop cluttering up our cupboards with a hundred different types of shower gel. Until then, in terms of profit, the less we think about the environment when we’re picking their plastic up off the shelves, the better, probably…
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
Family Tinder
Tinder has introduced a new function where you can actually ask for opinions on your matches from your family and friends through the app.
We’re not sure what the point of making this an in-app option is, other than to get Tinder in the news.
If that was the idea – it worked. We’re talking about it, the BBC are talking about it, and anyone looking for a date is probably downloading it.
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