The walking undead: according to Gallop, trust in the media has dropped to 32% with Edelman’s Trust Barometer showing 64% of people believe the media will “deliberately mislead us.” Well, according to YouGov, 54% still get their news from TV, almost 70% of people 45+. So there.

‘pends on your playground: Group M’s annual global ad spending forecast revised to show 7.8 growth in 2024, a total of $989 billion, leading to the sound of l’appellationchampagne cracking along La Croisette audible from here. Real time comments from Fishbowl, the Glassdoor-owned ad gossip platform: “In this economy, a job is a job”, “is the job market in NYC horrible right now?”, “I have a really good portfolio, big brands, super bowl spot, great references, and I can’t even get an email back from a recruiter these days.”

Privacy, schimivacy: in a 2024 move to mollify governments, consumers, and privacy advocates, Google promises no more delays in its plan to crumble cookies. In a 2024 move to mollify advertisers and the big media buyers, Google again delays its self-imposed deadline to crumble cookies. 

Always gots to pay the piper: Apple is including AI in the forthcoming OS 18 updates for Mac, iPhones, and iPads. To take advantage, pretty much everyone in tech thinks you will need to buy a new Mac, new iPhone, and new iPad. As one of the talking heads put it, “we live in exponential times, and you will need to spend on hardware.”

Gimme da bad news first, doc:  long term, Goldman Sachs economists forecast that up to 300 million full-time jobs could be lost or shrunk by the rise of gen AI. Between now and 2030, though, McKinsey projects a “mere” 11.8 million US workers will be forced to change jobs, with 9 million of them shifting to new industries altogether. If you’re not in the sorry 7% of the total, it’s more Otherguysnet, than Skynet.

Let them eat, uh, cereal: asking Perplexity AI for the biggest contradictions in advertising circa 2024, it spits out “the Kellogg’s incident” ($4.6 annual comp CEO standing in the courtyard of 5-star hotel, suggests consumers eat cereal for dinner) and the “Willie Wonka Experience” (families forking out $44 per ticket to the world of Wonka, find a virtually empty warehouse). Perplexity PS: notes that one of the biggest failures involved the use, of “deceptive marketing using AI-generated imagery

Got your WTF right here: and, hey, you could be Joe Biden with a freight train economy, super low unemployment, wages up, real inflation a point above target %, and everyone hating on your economic record.

WTF, indeed.