Magic vs. Machine

🫣 This ad brought me to tears... of laughter 🤣 ~ I was really not expecting to be such a fan of the #Dunkings, but here we are! 🍩 Dunkin' brought back good ol' Boston Ben for a sequel to his wild jumpsuit-wearing ad of #Superbowl 2024 and it crushed... Crushed alll the beans, and the dreams of the #barista buds. 🤣 A not-so-subtle dig at #Starbucks. Despite missing his other half (#MattDamon) because he "doesn't have haaaaaahhht" 🤣 , #BenAffleck seriously delivered with a few cameos NONE of us saw coming. Cue Jeremy Strong's method acting (in a vat of coffee) and Bill Belichick's 24 year old girlfriend in a sassy pink sweatsuit. This ad was the stuff of Super Bowl legends and proves that comedy is making a comeback. Out of 94 ads at this year's big game, "humor was present in 85% of ads this year, up from 71% in 2023" - Raja Rajamannar. I think it's a trend we're going to see a lot more of over the coming months as we experience the turmoils of what the real world has to offer. 🫠 I for one, welcome the escape! If you feel like having some more laughs together, I've reacted to a dozen different ads from #SuperBowl2025 ~ link in comments. 🥰

Here's the deck that an #AI used to raise $8M by itself. 🤖 Boardy AI's CEO Andrew D'Souza released the deck on Monday, after an overwhelming response from the LinkedIn community when the #Boardy team teased it's potential release. D'Souza posted that if #BoardyAI could get to 25,000 followers on LinkedIn, he'd share the deck. As of time of publishing, Boardy is at 32,000 followers and growing at a faster pace everyday. D'Souza says investors committed to the round because they spoke with Boardy, but I do believe that a simple, concise deck always makes a difference. Here's why...

What will be bigger in 2025? #AI Avatars and #AIagents, or a craving for deeper human connection with more face-to-face, direct to camera content that’s authentic, unscripted and more social media driven than polished? There are so many days that I want to film but I don’t want to film, if you know what I mean! I have something to say, perspective to offer; and most often it’s time bound and needs to go live within a news cycle to pack a punch. So what happens? I just don’t film, and I don’t post. And then when I do… it’s such a huge production that I delay the edits for months. This week I woke up and said to myself “every day, I’ll make a piece of content reflecting on top trending b2b news.” But on day 1; I looked like a zombie. So I made myself a cute little avatar with my headshot c/o Midjourney and then brought it to life with real on camera “performances” 😂 in Runway. My first test was good enough that when yesterday’s Sora news hit, I was ready to “film” with my avatar. Today I looked a little more alive; and decided— I should really try the experiment of posting both as my human self, and my avatar self — and measure the results. As the AI gets better and better, I even questioned if the bot I built that speaks like me could become its own, self-operating AI #agent. Could I build an #agenticsystem to compete with my own human authenticity? I’m curious, and definitely committed to the experiment — but I’m not gonna lie… once I found this I got totally freaked out. Lauren "🤖" Vriens posted about an AI agent called #Luna that blew my mind. I haven’t dug into it to the extent I’d like to yet, but Lauren’s summary of what this bot, or self-described “Queen of AI Capitalism” is up to; it is mildly terrifying…and yet, strangely inspiring? What do you think? Are #AI agents and #Avatars going to start becoming a mainstream part of content? Will they be as effective, and is that better than being effecient? I need to set some parameters up for my experiment so I get clean data, but I’m incredibly curious to see if my Pixar-like avatar, or my stupid ol’ face will perform better. (And I guess I need to decide what better actually looks like!) Stay tuned…