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In this episode, host Jay Schwedelson discusses the latest news and trends happening this week in business, marketing, and pop culture. Hear about Pommel Horse Guy, Google’s controversial ad, and Europe’s latest regulations on AI.

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Best Moments:

(00:55) The viral “pommel horse guy” Steven Nedorozic from the US men’s gymnastics team and brands capitalizing on his newfound fame

(02:01) Google’s controversial “Dear Sydney” ad involving AI content generation, which was ultimately taken down due to backlash

(03:30) The rapid growth of Meta’s Threads app, now reaching 200 million monthly active users

(04:13) The EU’s AI Act, considered the first legislation attempting to regulate AI based on risks, goes into effect this week

(05:26) The upcoming release of the highly anticipated movie “It Ends With Us,” based on the popular novel by Colleen Hoover

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Transcript
Jay Schwedelson:

Foreign.

Jay Schwedelson:

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schedelson. Let's do this. Not that.

Jay Schwedelson:

We are back for what's up this week. This is our short episode.

We break down what is going on this week in business and life and marketing and then we still have our short ask us anything later in the week in our big tips episode at the end of the week. So what's happening this week? Well, I'm sure we all know who the pommel horse guy is.

If you've been watching the Olympics at all, you know that the U.S. men's gymnastics team got the bronze medal for the first time in a really long time. We got a medal. And it all really came down to this guy, Steven Nedora Sick, who was really just there for the pommel horse.

He was wearing glasses, he looked a little nerdy. Then he took off the glasses and he crushed it on the pommel horse.

And the guy went viral and everywhere because he went from kind of like this Clark Kent looking dude to Superman looking dude. And of course, brands are already jumping onto it.

Apparently he's getting reached out to for a lot of campaigns and there's an eyewear brand called IBOBS that has already renamed its pair of glasses that Steven wore. They are now called the Steven and they've planned a big marketing push around the Steven. So if you want his glasses, you can go to IBOB's.

What else is going on this week that's interesting? Well, sticking with the Olympics theme, I don't know if you saw but Google put out an ad that they had to actually take down and get rid of.

I saw the ad. You could actually still find it on YouTube. It's called Dear Sydney. So if you want to look for that on YouTube, you can.

But the ad was really not great. It was all about AI and using Gemini and what the storyline of the ad was that this guy and his daughter trained a lot for running. A young daughter.

And she loved running and she idolized one of the athletes that was in the Olympics. And the dad was like, you know what, why don't we write, why don't you write a letter to this athlete saying how inspirational she's been to you?

And the door's like, great, I want to do that. And the dad says, okay.

And he goes on to Gemini and he says, gemini, write me a note from my daughter to this athlete saying how inspirational she's been.

So the reason it got so much pushback, the reason it had to be taken down, even though it was viewed like 12 million times on YouTube and all over the place, it got so much pushback because it's really the thing that we all are fearful of with AI that we're not going to AI saying, hey, I wrote this thing. Can you edit it for me? Or what do you think about it? It was going to AI for original content generation.

And really it's even worse that it was original content generation for a little kid writing a letter to, like an athlete saying, you're so great. So I think that was really interesting, the pushback I got, because it shows our collective kind of fears of AI.

So that ad was called Dear Sydney, if you want to check it out. Other things going on this week is Threads continues to grow.

I've been talking about this for a while, but in the latest report that Meta just put out, Threads is Now up to 200 million monthly active users. And in just the last four weeks, they've added 25 million monthly active users. So it's growing very fast.

I think it's a little bit of them playing with the numbers, not playing with the numbers, but if you use Instagram, then you have seen them embed thread posts, Insta, Instagram, and sometimes I wind up on Threads and I don't even know what I'm doing there. So, yeah, it's growing, but I think they're really using Instagram to create that growth, which is fine.

And also this week, the EU AI act, that is the first, basically widely considered to be the first piece of legislation in the world that attempts to regulate AI based on risks that it poses. And the AI act, which was voted into law in the EU a while back, goes into force this week. And so what does that really mean?

Not a lot, because it's still going to take at least a year.

Right now it's in this period where, yes, it's in force, but now it's what's in this call transition period of compliance, where companies are now supposed to start to try to comply, but there's no penalties yet. And basically there's going to be four categories that you fall into in terms of if you're using anything in your business.

With AI, the four categories of risk are no risk, minimal risk, high risk, or prohibited AI systems. And about 85% of AI usage falls under minimal risk and there's very, very little regulation required. But the law is on the books, the law is enacted.

So I think it's important to be aware of the EU AI act, which is now a thing thing, and then in totally useless information. But I see it everywhere. The big movie coming out this week is It Ends with Us.

This is the Blake Lively movie where she stars in this adaptation of Colleen Hoover's bestselling novel and Blake Levy plays Lily Bloom.

Okay, it's this whole romantic and childhood traumatic thingamabob, but the reason that I'm even talking about it is that this thing is going to be huge. I always know something big when both my wife and my 16 year old daughter want to actually see the same thing because that's very, very rare.

And when you look at the pre Sales of It Ends With Us.

If you go back and you look at where the Crawdads Sing, which is kind of the same idea, very popular book that a lot of people want to see the movie, It Ends with Us. Their pre sale tickets are 400% higher right now than where the Crawdad Sings. That's kind of bananas.

And their trailer that they released in just the first 24 hours, it had 128 million views. So this thing's gonna be big. I'll be probably eating popcorn this coming weekend watching that.

And hey, listen, make sure to check out our other episodes later this week. And if you have registered forGuru Conference gurucom.com It is free. It is virtual. It is the world's largest email event.

We have only a few virtual seats left. We only buy so many. I hope you register for it and leave this thing.

Review or follow the show or tell me I'm a big nerd and go see, go see, go to a movie, whatever movie you want to go this weekend. All right, take it easy.

Jay Schwedelson:

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers and hook us up with a five star review. If this wasn't the worst podcast of all time.

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