Madano Digital Labs 2023 Round Up

Madano recently hosted Digital Labs, a forum for the communications and marketing industry to share knowledge and discuss the latest changes in digital communications.

In our recent discussion, we welcomed a panel of speakers across communications, spanning advertising, journalism, in-house, as well as agency and consultancy, to discuss the latest digital trends.

Speakers included Cristina Criddle of the Financial Times, James Hutchinson of StackAdapt and Nelly Khumalo of CMR Surgical. Here are some key highlights we heard from the panel:

1. “As the social media platforms get better, so does the public, at recognising some of the paways that we're vulnerable to some manipulation.” – Nelly Khumalo

2. “We're inundated with communications now. You walk down the tube, there's ads all the way down that are digital. Now you get home, you're on TikTok for half an hour. You then scroll X. There are so many opportunities to grab attention.” - Kelvin Morgan

3. “Obviously probably more concerns now than before with regards to brand safety and the types of content that's on X and the type of content that's being actively pushed across the platforms. So naturally, I think brands should be conscious of that.”  - James Hutchinson

4. “[AI] is incredible and so I think these tools are only getting better. You're seeing companies like Adobe moving into the space, taking on the liability for you, so that if there are any copyright issues that are going to be covering you in court. So, I think it would be remiss to not try and use them and tinker with them.” - Cristina Criddle

That wasn’t all though! Our guests were very active in the discussion, asking questions on channel performance and debating what was mentioned as part of the panel too.

It’s clear Generative AI was the topic that was on all our attendees’ lips and as part of our event, we invited attendees and panelists to answer a simple question: “What does Digital look like in 2050?”

Madano’s Creative team used the answers to create AI generated images with Midjourney. It is telling to see the biases Midjourney upholds from the images it generated. Many of the images use human and robotic interactions, but what is striking is that the images are dominated by white male characters. What our event and our campaign creative has shown is that generative AI is incredibly exciting if you work in digital communications, but we still need to use it with care.

See some of the Midjourney results for yourself below: