Welcome to the Birthday edition of Future Social! Not of, like, the newsletter, it’s my birthday. 37 years old today. Unc status, as the kids would say. My head’s pretty set on making this the best year yet. I’ve set some crazy goals for my personal life, this newsletter, and my hoop dreams—sharing those on my Instagram later today. But I’ve always maintained, getting older’s great, even if my eye twitches a bit at joining the late 30s… wait is the eye twitch just… getting old…

Anyway, let’s talk about

—Jack Appleby

Or for that matter, what’s the best metric on TikTok, YouTube, & every social platform? Are they the same everywhere? Do different platforms value different numbers?

I chatted with Caliber, a media company built on newsroom + social strategy thinking—they’ve got some thoughts on the topic. Here’s a slide I stole from their new report:

Give their whole 36-page strategy guide a read. It’s chock full of good info, like:

You know I love a good whitepaper, so partnering with them for this issue was easyyy. Download it right here & lemme know your thoughts?

As marketers, we’re always looking for new ways to make more & better creative, doubly so if we’re not personally trained. The last decade’s made making things easier than ever: drag-and-drop image design, in-your-pocket video editing, no-code app development—suddenly you can graphic design without being a graphic designer.

Naturally, we’re all AI-curious now, and bunches of brands have heavily integrated AI into workflows and asset production.

But boy, your followers might have some feelings about it. Let’s talk about when AI-created creative works, when and where to use AI to make pretty pictures, and what everyone’s talking about.

Whenever an NBA team signs a new player, they quickly Photoshop the hooper into their new uniform for socials. You’ve seen it hundreds of times—a fresh headshot superimposed onto the team’s jersey, usually with some welcome language on the graphic. It’s a tradition; our first chance to see the new threads.

When Mac McClung signed to the Pacers last week, the team tried something new: they used AI to create a video of Mac in his Indiana fit.

I thought it was cool! Super slick, good use of tech, very dynamic video!

Everyone else completely disagreed with me!

Here’s the first batch of replies… that first one 2x as many likes as the original post…

Now a huge % of replies on NBA accounts come from hating rival fans, but you can’t ignore that ratio-ing. People straight up hated that the asset, just because it’s AI.

This is tricky, especially in the case above.

It feels like two major anti-AI stances are rising to the top of the criticism pile:

There’s a huge sensitivity to Big Corporate slashing their staffing in favor of AI. I wrote about it when fan-favorite Duolingo suddenly fell from grace over one CEO comment about AI. And hey, I get it—we all gotta put food on the table. Personally, I think the fears are silly (If AI can replace you that easily, how valuable were your skills in the first place?), but we’d be bad marketers if we didn’t acknowledge that this feeling’s in the water.

The second point’s more important, even if it doesn’t necessarily apply here. Trust is everything. Authenticity’s the most overused word in marketing, but AI recreations often stray from that coveted authenticity. If you’re portraying a human, or your product being used by a human, if it feels even a little bit faked, your audience is gonna wreck you. Realness is a currency in social media.

The soda brand’s holiday ads are usually Super Bowl-worthy spots, bringing all sorts of charm to our TV screens, but Coca-Cola’s last Christmas caused outrage in the ad industry. Rather than pumping ungodly sums into ad agencies, Coke worked with an AI production studio to create the content, and made that a talking point!

I found the discourse hard to sort through—my feeds are so full of ad agency folks that I couldn’t get a read on how the general public felt—but it must’ve worked for Coca-Cola, because they’re running it back this year with another AI commercial.

It really makes you wonder about internet outcries & whether they’re actually reflective of what most people think. Coca-Cola’s made of money—they’re not using AI to save a nickel here, they’re doing it again because it must’ve generated great results for them last year, no matter what creative directors tweet about it.

While not AI, same goes for the Sydney Sweeney / American Eagle ads. My LinkedIn feed was full of marketers furious about the Good Jeans line… but if the ad wasn’t working, American Eagle would’ve pulled it. Instead, they also doubled down and stood by it. Now we can’t even trust the angry replies are humans, with data showing much of the Cracker Barrel logo controversy was bot-driven. We’re gonna need to have a wider discussion soon about whether we should actually listen to the comments we get on the internet.

This one’s simple. So many social teams are staffed with strong social thinkers, but many don’t have budget, additional staff, or the creative skills to keep up with the expected output and creativity of modern social. AI makes creative faster and cheaper, and can suddenly offer video! That Mac McClung video would’ve cost big time and money to create in the past, and now it’s a couple keystrokes.

That’s a strong package of appeals for social folks, especially in the age of more content, more content, more content.

It’s impossible to give a yes or no answer since AI is infiltrating everything. So many of Adobe’s recent product advancements are AI editing tools—of course those are worth using.

Personally, I wouldn’t recommend any brands make social content that can clearly be seen as AI-created. I don’t wanna deal with the angry mob, even if I think the mob isn’t actually reflective of my customers.

What you absolutely should do: use AI to make your better at your job. AI is a fantastic brainstorming partner, and idea organizer, and outliner, and organizational tool, and intern. AI can scale you as a professional. Spend the time learning the tools.