Seth Godin: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you know, ChatGPT is sometimes described as the most rapidly growing or most rapidly adopted consumer product ever. As with Taylor Swift, people must like it, but in terms of marketing, how do you think about what they’ve been doing? They don’t seem like a marketing company, right? It’s a bunch of engineers. There are so many things to talk about with ChatGPT. I would first say, I’m not sure people like it. I think people are fascinated by it. They are afraid of it. They’re curious about it. But there are things people like that deserve that word. ChatGPT is on the forefront of what many people believe is going to be our future, and so it’s worth touching and playing with. ChatGPT became a marketing problem, not a technology problem, the day they decided to open the beta to more than a few thousand people. The same way — and I’m sure you remember this — when Google came along — I was at Yahoo at the time — when Google came along, if you took Google results and results from Bing or Yahoo, and just switched the logos at the top, people would say they prefer the Google results, even when they were looking at the Microsoft results, because Google didn’t have a technology problem. They had solved a marketing problem, which is that Marissa Mayer figured out that by taking off 180 links on the homepage, the way that Yahoo had 183 links, and just taking it down to 2, they sent a message. When you think about how people use ChatGPT, one of the brilliant things they did was, when we first started using it, it typed slowly. It didn’t just sit there waiting until it had the whole sentence figured out. It typed a few words, then it typed a few more words, then it typed a few more words. There was no technical reason for that. That was a marketing decision because it made us imagine that there was a little man or woman inside the thing typing back to us. They intentionally created personification. How happy are you with your own bot of you, the Seth bot? That’s personification. You created it. Now you’re immortal in a sense. Does that feel good, or you’re scared?…

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