The Drink Cart: Bow To The Machines

It's 2025, many of us are just 3 or 5 work days into the new year. Still full of turkey, and pickled from holiday excess, while AI is putting its feet on the gas pedal to chase us.

Dear Drink Carters

If this week’s headlines about AI are giving you the feels of working at something like the weird Lumon corp from Apple TV+’s Severance, you’re not wrong. It’s hard to keep up. Sure, Lumon is a biotech company with a nostalgic-core aesthetic, giving your the feels of an office that needs less humans, and more robots.

Netflix adds fuel to that dystopian narrative with some terrifying new content like Cassandra. This is the story of “Germany's oldest smart home awakens its AI helper Cassandra after decades when a new family moves in. Cassandra, determined never to be abandoned again, manipulates events using the home's resources to become part of the family.” She seems fun.

Or maybe it will all be fine. “In a world flooded with derivative automated drivel, human writers will allow readers a breath of air, like a green park in a polluted city. Instead of being wiped out by AI, in 2025, we will see a recognition of the inherent value in quality human writing.”

So grab yourself a hot drink from the cart and contemplate our AI overlords:

• AI betting slop, AI supercomputers and AI making ads while you sleep

• See how far AI has come, how to frustrate your GPT and AI in social

• AI Spice

1. We’re In Our AI Slop Era

Having worked for over 20 years in marketing and advertising in the gambling space, reading this article about what some gambling players are doing is fascinating. Basically the AI’s octopus tentacles are already, writing copy, helping problem gamblers, tracking people and even optimizing casino layouts. Betting is always a first mover in how tech can help. And AI is no different.

“Working with major industry players like 888 and Betway, Narrativa uses large language models to pump out everything from automated summaries of sports games to SEO-friendly reviews of online casino games and promotional social media posts. With no humans required, the 20-person company's AI tools produce 10 million words a month for gambling clients — the effective output of 170-odd full-time writers producing a grueling 3,000 words a day. It's all in service of enticing gamblers to place more bets.”

All of this is designed to make users bet more, bet bigger and stay on the site or in the casino even longer. Read this and try to tell me you are totally ready for 2025 as a marketer now? This is what we’re up against.

2. The AI Super Computer Is Here

Nvidia is making AI super computers now. The new Project Digits, and this is where it gets intersting offers A petaflop of computing power. Now, I was today years old when I learned that a petaflop is 1,000 trillion (or one quadrillion) calculations per second. This seems very powerful for me making little AI graphics.

So this little Mac mini looking computer comes with 1,000x the power of your laptop handling AI models up to 200 billion parameters.

3. AI Is Making Your Ads While You Sleep

Increasingly you are seeing this type of content run amok in your feeds. You’ll note that its content that serves the AI-as-a-service at the end of the flow that will allow you to enjoy the no back talk from your creative or creator team.

And you can tell the website also was written by AI as the headline is missing the “to”. Interesting that people are arguing over if these are just workflows vs. true AI agents (like that kind of semantics really matters - only a nerd would fight about that).

Basically this tool sets up AI to scrap competitor ads from the Facebook Ads Library, repurpose those scripts and create new UGC ads for you. Or it can go through all your customer reviews, find the best one and then turn that into a new UGC ad, all while you sleep. Which is exactly the same value prop we had with offshoring things, but with worse spelling.

4. Look How Far AI Video Has Come In Just A Year

Just a very quick reminder of how far this tech has come in a year.

5. A Little Bit Of AI Fun

This one had me cracking up as a user infuriates ChatGPT. If you can’t laugh at the Skynet, who can you laugh at?

6. The Social AI

Meta launched, then unlaunched a series of AI-generated profiles on Instagram. The profiles had actually launched in 2023 as a test or some sort of Netflixian experiment along with their celebrity Ai profiles. These wonderful human-esque cringe profiles were actually managed by humans and may have already been a failure. But they sure riled up everyone for a few days and Meta is saying that better, newer AI profiles are likely going to show up soon enough. Then they cleaned up that PR mess by doing away with moderators and going the route of X’s Community Notes.

7. Even More AI

During CES this week, Disney kept the AI party rolling with a bunch of new announcements. They announced all the fun ad formats from pause ads which unlock shoppable, gamified and trivia based ads - those will be a fascinating to see in your decks this year.

The company is also fine-tuning something they Call Magic Words which uses AI to pair ads with relevant scenes in shows and movies based on their emotional or visual content. “Brands will be able to serve the correct variant of an ad when there’s an upset in a football game, for example, or when a particularly moving speech is given at the Oscars. AI selects the correct ad to run in the context.”

8. Breakout Your Draper Cliches

The Economist had a depressing summary just before the holidays. Leading with the takeover of Interpublic by Omnicom and then folding in the other pressures brought on by tech juggernauts and AI on creative and yes, AI is probably coming for Don Drapers. But if you work daily in this industry and don’t already feel that pressure, you aren’t paying attention.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to erode their role further. Generative AI can write copy and draw images; on December 9th OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, released Sora, its video generator,” the Economist suggests. “AI is also making it easier to target consumers with the right ad. The technology could eliminate 7.5% of America’s advertising jobs by 2030, predicts Forrester, a research firm. Moreover, AI tools are making it easier for clients to take advertising in-house, or give the work to smaller agencies.”

It’s comforting that at over half of those surveyed say that AI generated ads turned them off. So we got that going for us.

9. AI Still Searching For It’s Key Value Prop

It’s also interesting in the wake of CES, that just like all new tech flails away, even with AI in the year 2025. So yes, having AI help Disney serve up some alternative ads during streaming programming is revolutionary. But let’s not forget when the big new thing was that it was mission critical for your fridge to be connected to the internet and the “Internet of things”.

“It’s 2025, and companies still don’t know what AI is good for,” writes Kyle Wiggers in Tech Crunch. “That’s the impression I got from this year’s CES, which featured AI-powered kitchen appliances, baby cribs, and other products that really weren’t calling for AI.”

I had to look up this AI spice dispenser. No really. Don Draper is out. AI spice is in.

10. Hat of the week: The Erie SnowWolves

Because it’s cold here in Toronto, so this hat caught my eye. This is the Erie SnowWolves. This is the cap the Erie SeaWolves wore during a Christmas in July promotion last year. They are the AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers. They do a good business on theme hats. The Frankenwolf version is very cool, as is their Howling Dead version.

Last call: The Drink Cart Irish Coffee

It’s January. It’s not warm. With all that AI talk what your drink cart needs is a little warm up. AI wouldn’t understand. The classic Irish Whiskey is dead simple. Coffee. Whiskey. Sugar. Some lightly whipped cream.

I’ve been fascinated by the ones they seem make in high-volumes at the Buena Vista Cafe in San Fransisco - and i’ve always wanted to pour them like that. Probably not practical in your agency or workplace. It’s intersting, that this is a drink that was made in 1943 in Ireland, but made famous by that very bar in San Francisco.

So here’s your January Pick Me Up Irish Coffee:

• 4-6 oz hot coffee

• 2 teaspoon brown sugar (cubes are obviously the best)

• 2 oz Irish whiskey

• Freshly whipped cream

3 Bonus Drink Cart Approved™ agency discussion topics, quick clips, ads or random links to chat about plus a word from Styx:

• The consolidation of streaming content is as hilarious as this reaction to Hulu and Fubo merging. “It's on Poodee with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on Weeno. Dude it's on Gumpy. It's a Pheebo original. It's on Poob.”

• This UI to printed receipt interaction is the coolest.

• Nothing to see here, just that the crocs have learned how to “pretend to drown” to lure humans into the water. Who has the movie rights to this?

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Drop me a comment below, ask me a question or give me a reco. Or just tell me how your drink turned out.

The Drink Cart is a weekly newsletter of advertising, pop culture, baseball and cocktails from Jackson Murphy.