What’s News: This week hundreds of digital marketers from companies with roots in traditional media gathered in Miami for the always-informative Borrell conference. And just like every alphabet-soup-conference this year from CES to CRS to NAB, a major chunk of Borrell’s confab was dedicated to AI. There were sessions on advertisers’ opinions and use of AI, media vendors implementing AI, and how-to’s on new AI tech. (I’ll have a more comprehensive write-up of Borrell Miami 2024 in next week’s JacoBlog — sign up here to get it in your inbox.)
One of the highlights of Borrell Miami was the keynote by Paul Roetzer, founder of the Marketing AI Institute in Cleveland, right across Lake Erie from the Jacobs Media headquarters. Roetzer presciently sold his traditional advertising agency last decade to focus on artificial intelligence.
His forty-minute Borrell presentation included sage, concrete advice: The first step in being an AI-thought leader in your company begins with comprehension. Pick 3-4 things you do every day and use Chat-GPT or another AI tool to help complete them. Fail. Don’t give up. Master the tools. He concluded with this, “It is so early in adoption curve right now. The biggest companies in the world don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have people internally that can figure this stuff out.
“There aren’t enough agencies or consultants out there who adapted themselves to help people who can raise their hand now and be a leader in this stuff within their organization. And so you can become that change agent, no matter where you are in your career, because we need more people who are willing to figure out what to do because the future of all work is human plus machine, and that future is happening right now.”
Scroll Down For This in Today’s AI EDGE:
Mount Rich Media owns stations on the Atlantic coast, with Spanish language programming that includes long-form programming from local governments and school districts. With a small staff and multiple broadcast and digital platforms to fill with content, their station manager Glen Motto shares how they’re using AI tools to decrease turn-around time and diversify their messaging in a culturally-sensitive way.
If you have a tip, product, or an AI hallucination you’d like to share, please reach out to me: chris@g5j.8ac.myftpupload.com.
AI EDGE – INTERVIEW – Glen Motto, Mount Rich Media
Glen Motto is the go-to solution maker who’s invaluable at a small radio group. As the station manager at Mount Rich Media, he not only oversees the on-air, web, and engineering operations for a group of Spanish-language AMs serving communities from Virginia to New York City, but he’s also implementing AI across departments to better serve the communities in the stations’ service areas. Additionally, because he is a native-English speaker among a staff of three full-timers, AI tools allow him to expand the stations’ Spanish content when other DJs are not on call. This interview is edited — read the expanded interview at ik9.5f7.myftpupload.com/aiedge.
CB: You utilize AI in both your audio and web initiatives.
GM: We do a lot. Our stations are basically Spanish-Christian-AC-music and long-form talk. We’re a Christian station with more of a built-in full service model. It’s the Guatemalan Council talking about renewing passports, the health department telling listeners where to get a flu shot or a COVID shot, or the local school systems talking about school lunches or that kids are going to be bringing report cards home this week.
CB: And you expand this programming to digital?
GM: About five years ago, we started streaming all of our talk shows and brokered shows on Facebook, anything that’s non-music. We stream on a Facebook page because we quickly learned that if you’re a smaller station you’re going to need more than just radio to stay competitive.
CB: And that’s where the AI fit in.
GM: That’s one place where AI is really helping us out. We were having an issue where on Facebook we would use the title and the description of the video — say “Richmond Public Schools, March 13th.” Well, nobody’s going to watch it unless you had a student there or there’s a particular reason you knew about beforehand. Now I can run the video through Summariz.ing and it will summarize the video and give me a social media description — including emojis — that makes my content a lot more compelling.
CB: That’s great for SEO. You’re also using AI on-air content.
GM: So that’s one thing we’re doing; we’ve been using it for extra voices for spots. You know, on a smaller station, you previously only had three voices or four voices and the same ones on every spot. We use ElevenLabs which is sophisticated enough to make all voices sound like a native speaker.
CB: Have you ever had any listener complaints?
GM: I will run copy though Google Translate, but then run it by a person who is a fluent in Spanish to double-check. We have never had anyone ask if the ElevenLabs voice is AI, because it sounds natural enough.
CB: What does your staff think?
GM: I joke around about the AI voices with our announcers — but my staff know they’re not going anywhere. It’s more to supplement them. And once they saw how good the the voice was with the Spanish, they would say, “Hey, which AI’s doing this announcement?” But they like using it because then they can go do other things. They can focus on the personality aspect of their job and not having to spend all this time sitting in a production room to do a disclaimer for that. It allows them freedom. Plus, it allows us to create more community content.
Let’s say in the afternoon I get some announcement at 5:00. I can have it on the air and I might not have anybody here in the studio. Or our weather warnings, our EAS runs, but it’s in English. Now we could put a weather warning in Spanish.
We can provide better information for the community.
AI EDGE – NEWS FROM THE BIG DOGS
ElevenLabs Begins Text-to SoundFX Rollout
The audio-AI brand ElevenLabs began offering their next text-to-sound-effect tool this week. The reviewers at Tom’s Guide took a spin and said the tool is off to a solid start. Each text prompt yields five results, of which at least two are usable. Watch the video with ElevenLab’s generative sound effects here.
Google Blocks All Gemini Election Responses
Still feeling the political backdraft from its image-generation tools last month, Google announced this week there will be no AI hallucinations with political news. In fact, there will be no political news at all. The Google Gemini AI tool will sidestep questions about this year’s elections around the world. If you ask Gemini a question, it will respond, “I’m still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search.”
AI EDGE ‘WORST PRACTICES’
New AI Taxbots Dish Up Wrong Advice
New AI assistants from TurboTax and H&R Block are struggling like most humans who do their taxes. An investigation by the Washington Post put these so-called “smart” systems to the test, asking them run-of-the-mill tax questions – and the bots flubbed it big time!
One bot told a whopper about having to file in two states just for a kid going to college out-of-state. Another dished out a novel’s worth of mumbo-jumbo for a simple query on AC unit credits.
Fortunately, both companies are saying they’ll cover your keister if the AI leads you astray come audit time, but it begets the first rule of AI results in 2024 — trust, but verify.
Along with his duties at Jacobs Media, Chris develops revenue opportunities for jācapps’ mobile apps clients.
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