Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / AI Slop Is Flooding Retail Media — Why Human Judgment Matters More Than Ever
Transcript
- AI Slop, But Make It Retail Media Commentary === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: I launched my first podcast way back in 2017, and at the time I thought that I was too late, that I would get lost in a sea of podcasts that already existed [00:00:12] Looking back, of course, 2017 was [00:00:15] still early. A great number of people have started podcasts even just this year in 2026, and most of them probably wish they had started much earlier. By the way, that podcast was [00:00:30] called Ecommerce Braintrust, and it's still going strong today under the expert hosting of my former colleagues at Acadia, Jordan Ripley and Julie Spier. [00:00:40] You'd probably enjoy that one too. Well, today, as a media [00:00:45] company of one, I am existentially aware of changes and trends in media consumption, but I'm also aware that what is trending in the consumer space might not always translate to a B2B [00:01:00] audience. Hello, short-form video. In 2017, I wondered if I'd picked a format that was too competitive, and nine years later, I'm still second-guessing myself [00:01:12] But now I'm wondering if the format question is [00:01:15] really the right one to be asking. This is a bit more of a meta episode today, but there is some practical advice at the end. Let's jump in [00:01:23] [00:01:24] Kiri Masters: A year ago, I ran a poll on LinkedIn asking my network how do [00:01:30] they like to keep up with retail and e-commerce trends and news [00:01:35] And I ran the same poll again a few weeks ago to see what had changed over the year [00:01:41] And the short answer is nothing really changed. [00:01:45] Reading news and newsletter took the top spot with 50% of votes, and that was up against 49% of votes last year. So people love to read news and newsletters. Podcasts [00:02:00] and YouTube took 25% this year and 24% last year. The last two options came in, uh, with the remaining 20 to 25%, with peers and share groups coming in at [00:02:15] 15% this year and in-person and web events at 9%. [00:02:21] And so the caveat here is that the samples are pretty small, 143 votes this year and [00:02:27] 67 votes [00:02:30] last year. So these are [00:02:31] Getting pretty small by the time we get down to those last two options. But that top line, that half of people in this space, that at least are seeing my post pop up in their LinkedIn feed, [00:02:45] find news and newsletters their top source of information. So half of you still choose to read even though written content is, at least on the surface, the easiest thing to fudge.[00:03:00] [00:03:00] So this brings us to AI slop. In the last 12 months between those two polls, Text has become the cheapest thing in the world to produce [00:03:12] you might have seen recently a company [00:03:15] called Pangram, which builds AI detection tools. They have estimated that more than forty percent of long-form LinkedIn posts are now entirely AI generated, and LinkedIn has actually stepped [00:03:30] in to add a button to report posts that seem like AI slop. [00:03:38] And so it says that these flags will help to train its detection models and influence how far [00:03:45] a post travels outside of your network. So they are clamping down on AI generated written content At the same time, it also retired this feature which allowed you to enhance your post using AI [00:04:00] writing automation And they replaced it with a proofreader instead, which is kind of an admission that the platform has kind of helped to cause The flood that it's now trying to drain. [00:04:13] But this is [00:04:15] the thing, this format that is the easiest to fake is still the format that we prefer, at least in the B2B space. And some comments from my post last year helped to explain [00:04:30] why that is [00:04:31] said, "Information density wins. Video is linear. Text is nonlinear." Caroline Powell, the event operations manager at tech company People, is efficiency-minded. She says, "I [00:04:45] can read faster than people can say something to me." [00:04:49] Colin Perkins, a digital success analyst at 3M, likens newsletters to a choose-your-own rabbit hole. He can scan the text and, when something lands, [00:05:00] follow it down to the source material. still the fastest route into a busy person's head. It's the only format that you can skim, quote, forward, [00:05:15] read while you're on a conference call, paste into a Slack channel with a line of your own on top your advertisers can't wait [00:05:30] weeks for audiences. GrowthLoop's Composable Commerce Media solution helps media teams turn first-party data into high-value audiences, launch campaigns faster, and prove what's working [00:05:45] across every channel. Learn how retail media leaders at Costco, Fanatics, and Gopuff use GrowthLoop to create highly segmented audiences and deliver stronger results [00:06:00] for their brand partners. [00:06:01] Visit go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That is go.growthloop.com/breakfast [00:06:14] And other [00:06:15] formats aren't safe from slop either. Think of audio. You can upload a PDF to NotebookLM, and you get a plausible-sounding podcast out of it. Video is headed the same way. None of these formats [00:06:30] fully resist automation. So if the format isn't protected, what is left? Where I land is whether the reader knows whose judgment they're getting and whether that person has access to something that these [00:06:45] models don't. [00:06:46] That is, to me, the things that people working at big companies aren't willing or able to share publicly. The vibes at events, the corridor track [00:06:57] The rationale for doing things or not doing [00:07:00] things that don't make it into the press releases. And so what does this mean for you out there as a practitioner, as a leader Probably it doesn't have anything to do with publishing, but it does have something to do with your [00:07:15] job. So for years, one of the more reliable ways to build visibility inside a large organization was to send something like a weekly summary of what was happening in your category.[00:07:30] [00:07:30] You read the trade rags, you pick out what mattered, you add some commentary, and you send it to an internal distribution list. That hack is gone because now anyone can get an AI summary that's personalized [00:07:45] to their interests, personalized to the publications that they trust, and has the added bonus really, of being able to answer endless follow-up questions very patiently and credibly [00:07:58] But what still [00:08:00] works is going to be the note where you say what you think the company should do about it, which is not something that an executive is going to trust to outsource to AI yet. So it's no longer just, [00:08:15] "Here are five things that happened in retail media this week," but it is, "Here are the two of them that change what we should be doing in Q4." [00:08:24] ~So wrapping up here, if I run this poll again next August, I don't expect that top line to move. I still expect people to continue to rely on news and newsletters to cut through the noise~ [00:08:24] ~But the bar is in most ways getting much higher~ [00:08:24] ~But the bar is in most ways actually getting higher, and I think that that is ultimately a good thing~ [00:08:24] So if I run this poll again next August, I don't expect that [00:08:30] top line to move in my poll. I still expect half of people to continue to tune into news and newsletters. Here's the point. If anything, the bar for quality is higher. in 2017, I thought I was too [00:08:45] late with my podcast. I wasn't, but it did get harder to stand out over time Because there's more quantity, the appetite for quality is higher, and that's what we're competing on. [00:08:58] Whether you write a [00:09:00] newsletter like me or you're trying to provoke change in a large org. I hope this has given you some interesting things to think about in your career, inside your company. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow. [00:09:14]