In this week’s Our Take, will Spotify’s latest feature render podcasters lost in transl-ai-tion. Surrealist marketing is the new trend receiving the viral treatment on social media but is the AR/CGI stunt already entering its cringe era? Last week saw the launch of a new Influencer course in SETU and with the influencer market a billion euro industry, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why.
Lost in Transl-AI-tion
Spotify has introduced new AI tech that will allow podcasters to replicate their voices and translate their podcasts to other languages. Experimenting with the proposed feature, a select few podcasts with a global listenership including The Diary of a CEO, Lex Fridman and Trevor Noah Show will get first access to the new feature.
This all sounds glam and gravy, but we’ve all heard some AI replicated voices that are comically subpar to their original. While a glitching Trevor Noah speaking Russian sounds like a Comedy Central special, will the new features allow for nuance and can it really get the message and intent of the podcast across? Or will things simply be lost in Transl-ai-tion.
All things considered, this is definitely an interesting development and we’re intrigued to see how it goes!
Surrealist Marketing: Saturated or Reigning Supreme
The lifespan of a trend when it has achieved viral status on social media platforms is short and sweet. The domino effect happens quickly: the first few brands that jump on the brandwagon get the glory – the latecomers get ridiculed for being mere followers, and in the process turn the trend into a untouchable dud.
The latest (at time of writing) digital trend to go from fresh to flat in record time is all the luxury brands putting giant, surrealist products into our world using Augmented Reality.
The timelines looks a little something like this…
Stage 1 – Sparkling: JACQUEMUS set the marketing world alight with their purses driving around Paris.
Stage 2 – fizzy: Maybelline’s surrealist mascara post goes viral along with a few other quick-off-the-makrk brands.
Stage 3 – lightly carbonated: Every other brand figures out how to hire a surrealist artist and the trend takes hold.
Stage 4 –flat: The NAFF stage, surrealist marketing is EVERYWHERE.
Currently nestled in stage 3 are in the surrealist art trend cycle, the takeaway here is brands need to act fast and act intentionally when it comes to any social trend. You can take a look at the comment section of J Crews recent post with a lot of ‘JACQUEMUS already did this’. And just because surrealist-style posts are “in” doesn’t mean they make sense for your brand.
A level 8 in selfie taking
We’ve all been there – it’s suddenly too warm for the winter threads you’re wearing. You look sh*t hot but you’re drowning in sweat.
Your unlikely fashion saviour is here in the form of Tiger beer, who have developed a new fashion item that will make you both look and feel cool. And all through the magic of beer!
This week, the brewer unveiled plans for a summer puffer jacket, designed in by London fashion icon Izzy-Du.
The jacket’s cat-inspired design includes ear detail on the hood, tiger fangs and of course its vibrant orange colour. And there’s a large waterproof pocket the perfect size to hold a can of beer. Makes sense for a beer brand, right? But it’s the interior where it really gets interesting: when the wearer pockets a can of cold, delicious Tiger Beer, it creates a cooling effect through the whole jacket, via a space-age system of water-filled tubes that are weaved throughout the material.
Set to debut at Paris Fashion Week, fans can try out the new piece at Du’s pop-up store.
Unfortunately, there are currently no plans to mass manufacture the jacket but we had to give both Tiger and Izzy Du a round of a paws for the ingenuity.
AI Girlfriends and the end of the world
The bots have come for our jobs, but it turns out that the first group to be replaced is Imaginary Girlfriends from A Different Town. AI girlfriends are a thing, and they’re bad.
It’s bad for society – more loneliness, less sex, declining birth rates. It’s bad for men – more incel culture, more isolation. It’s very, very bad for women – more objectification, more pressure to conform, more unrealistic expectations.
Unless of course it’s not that big a deal. If you follow the Pessimist’s Archive on Twitter, you’ll recognise the language that has previously been used for everything from novels (distracting our woman and young people, and filling their heads with rubbish), women on bicycles (utterly scandalous) and Dungeons and Dragons (your children are in a cult and will open a gateway to hell).
While it’s hard to see AI girlfriends as a great benefit to society, maybe the millions of people downloading these apps, like the “book readers” of earlier generations, can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. And sure – their AI Girlfriends aren’t very realistic, but there’s over seven billion of us on this planet now; pretty strong evidence that when given the choice, real girlfriends have a pretty strong edge over imaginary ones, every time.
Read full panic mode here (and everywhere else). Rebuttal here.