Welcome to “Tech & humanity: a love story #2”, your go-to source for insights, strategies & stories to understand and master the ever-evolving relationship between technology and humans in the world of business and brands.

Join me as I delve into the power of collaboration in the AI age, how to enhance your personal brand, and lead with purpose. I will also explore the shifting values of the new customer, the future of work, and how sustainability can become a competitive advantage for businesses.

👀 INSIGHT: Don’t be fooled by Google’s u-turn — cookies are still dead.

Google recently announced that it is not killing third-party cookies in Chrome after all. But ad-tech companies who think they can return to the “good old days” are in for a rude awakening. 📰 In my latest blog, I explain why cookies are an outdated technology that will be far less relevant in the years ahead. 

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🤡 Google is officially a monopolist — now what?

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What would you say if I offered you $20 billion a year to do nothing? This was the compelling proposal presented to Apple by Google in 2022 to maintain its place as the default search engine in Safari. In return, Apple earned a 36% cut of all Google search advertising revenue generated in the browser. The details of the transaction were revealed in recent court filings in a US competition lawsuit against Google. 

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“Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly”
- US federal judge Amit Mehta

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A critic might argue that $20 billion represents quite a significant barrier to entry to the search market. And they would be correct. Indeed, even for a massive company the size of Apple, these payments represented 17.5% of its total operating profit in 2020. Ultimately, the largesse of the payments proved to be central to the decision of US federal judge Amit Mehta this week to classify Google as a monopolist. 

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The judgment could scarcely have been any more definitive in tone, bluntly stating that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly… if that’s what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine [$20 billion], wouldn’t the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?”. 

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The search giant has already announced that it will appeal the decision, as it did after similar competition rulings in the EU. It is also not yet clear what impact this ruling will have on its operations, as the remit of the court was only to judge liability, not fines or remedies. One possibility is that browsers like Safari, Firefox and Chrome may need to introduce a choice screen to enable users to pick their preferred search engine after installation. Microsoft was mandated to introduce a similar browser choice screen in the EU in 2009, following a case which ruled that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows was hindering competition.

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This case is about much more than just search. It’s about Google’s $238 billion ad business. A huge number of companies rely on Google search ads to reach consumers, while many website owners and publishers rely on Google ad revenue to pay the bills. Don’t expect changes to occur overnight: In Europe when Android users were given a search engine choice screen in 2021, 90% chose Google anyway. This is unsurprising given Google’s size, dominance and name recognition among consumers. But with the emergence of AI and regulatory headwinds gaining speed, we may be seeing the first chinks in Google’s armour. Just as when Microsoft failed to transfer its dominance in software to the web 20 years ago, if Google’s power is eroded, we may not see the results immediately. But in the longer term, it could reconfigure the economic model of much of the internet. 

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😱 X-citing Times Ahead? Reflections on the first year of X Hiring

There has been so much happening at X over the last few years that you might have missed its move into the recruitment market with the launch of X Hiring. Organizations that verify their accounts for a monthly fee of $200 can access the service, which enables them to post unlimited “job cards” on the platform. The expansion into the jobs sector is part of X’s strategy to diversify into a broader range of services and become an “everything app” amid falling ad revenue. It followed X’s purchase of the job-matching startup Laskie in 2023.  

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In terms of pricing, X Hiring is definitely competitive. A LinkedIn Recruiter account currently costs $835 a month, and that doesn’t provide unlimited free listings. X’s offering is very basic at the moment, but an advantage could lie in its plans to expand the number of paid verified accounts. Inauthentic accounts have been a problem for LinkedIn. In December 2023, it went as far as filing a lawsuit against two companies, TopSocial24 and SocialBD24, for creating more than 400,000 fake accounts to generate inauthentic engagement. If X could guarantee engagement with real people, that would be an advantage. 

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However, for X, this is all future potential, not the current reality. Recent estimates suggest that it only has about 950,000 verified X Premium users globally. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is stepping up its efforts to nudge users into voluntarily verifying their identity for free through a partnership with Persona. In addition, the fact that X Hiring is still officially in Beta a year after launch raises questions about the company’s commitment to the platform. X would not be the first social media network to dip its toe into the recruitment market before making a hasty retreat shortly afterwards. 

So should you start hiring on X? For the moment, my advice would be to give X Hiring a try as a cheap option if you are already paying for organizational verification, but there’s not yet enough there yet to recommend subscribing for that service alone. 

For more guidance on how to do this (it's simpler than it seems) in a more “Traditional-Linkedn-Way”, take a look at my Job Hunting Course. Register now to benefit from my Newsletter offer and save CHF 50 with the discount code NL50.

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🤔 AI or Nay? Advertising’s love-hate relationship with GenAI

While investors are becoming a little more circumspect about AI stocks, that hasn’t stopped the advertising industry embracing the technology, for better and worse. In the plus column, Burger King engaged consumers by launching an online competition that enabled people to generate their own burger that would be produced in real life under the tag “Have it your way”. Conversely, Toys "R" Us launched an ad spot entirely generated with GenAI which was supposed to showcase childlike wonder, but the glitchy graphics, mutated toys, and inconsistent character models made it the stuff of nightmares rather than dreams. As companies rush to generate buzz on the back of AI, four categories of AI campaign have emerged:

- Humor: Some of the most effective ads about AI have made fun of the technology. Inter Miami launched a new retro-inspired kit with AI generated images of what their players would have looked like in the 1980s, complete with mustachioed rendering of Lionel Messi. 

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- Engagement: Other brands have tried to use AI as a serious tool to engage their customers. Similar to the Burger King example mentioned above, CocaCola turned over all of its brand assets to OpenAI and Dall-E to create a custom AI generator for CocaCola visuals. Social media users were then invited to “make magic happen” by creating visuals with the editor and submitting their entries for a chance to have them showcased in iconic locations such as on a billboard in Times Square, New York. This is the type of glitzy and expensive campaign that only a brand the size of Coke could pull off. 

- Regionalization: Rather than trying to generate hype based on the underlying tech, some brands are just trying to drive efficiency savings with AI. One of the major costs of TV advertising is to create regional variations for each market. Trivago used AI to create 10 ads all featuring an identical actor, but localized in 10 separate languages. To be honest, I feel that the tech is not yet good enough to pull off this use case. Localization is supposed to convey familiarity and authenticity. But if there’s any element of “uncanny valley” in the character model, or if the words are not fully synced with the actor’s lips, that message is undermined. That is the problem with these Trivago ads, as evidenced in the comments below the video.

Authenticity: Finally, another way to use AI in a campaign is to publicly reject it. This is the approach taken by Dove, which has publicly committed to never use AI to represent women in its advertisements. It warns that the use of AI could pressure women into aspiring to “unattainable beauty standards”. For a company that has centered its messaging around “real beauty”, this is a stance that perfectly syncs with its core brand.

Overall, unless you want to make fun of AI or have pockets as deep as CocaCola, it’s probably advisable to use it for ideation rather than finished assets until the technology matures.

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🐐 From GOAT to Gold: Djokovic’s Olympic Win

Like many sports fans around the world, I got a bit swept up in Olympic fever over the past two weeks. For me, it was also great to catch up with sports that don’t usually enjoy the limelight — from pursuits like sailing and volleyball which I have played myself at amateur level, to completely novel events like breakdancing and modern pentathlon. Some of the viral moments, such as Snoop Dog trying dressage or Chinese gymnast Zhao Yakin learning the medal biting tradition in real-time on the podium, brought a smile to everyone’s faces and provided a bit of relief from the markets and news headlines.

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While cheering on my fellow Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz in the tennis final, a part of me couldn’t help but admire the perseverance and longevity of his adversary, Novak Djokovic. Despite a storied career which has put him firmly in the conversation to be the tennis GOAT, this is the first time he has ever claimed Olympic Gold. What makes it even more impressive is that at the age of 37, he is the oldest man to win a tennis gold since 1908. This type of sports story reaffirms the belief that with enough will and determination, there is still time left for all of us to do something special.