People in the marketing business know that the true power AI unlocks has more to do with improving strategies and targeting, and less to do with content creation. Pharmaceutical and consumer health giant Bayer has been partnering with AI-powered ad tech company Chalice for about a year, seeking ways to better target potential customers for some of its over-the-counter health brands. They exclusively revealed to me the smashing success they saw with a pilot program using display ads in Amazon’s demand-side platform to get new customers to purchase One A Day vitamins.

While the campaign ran on Amazon, it wasn’t just to win over new e-commerce shoppers; many consumers still buy these products in physical stores. Bayer Vice President and Head of Media and Digital Platforms Maria Givens said the company is interested in powering the entirety of the consumer journey—something that Chalice can help with given their array of data from a variety of sources.

Through the partnership, Chalice uses data to determine which people are the most likely to be receptive to One A Day online display ads, then its AI negotiates prices for the ads with Amazon’s DSP. Givens, Chalice cofounder and COO Ali Manning, and Bayer Senior Manager of Media Strategy Alexis Gossard talked me through the process. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Artificial Intelligence

As AI gets better, it’s appearing more and more online—and aside from a few blatantly obvious examples, many users can’t readily identify content that was computer generated. This week, Anthropic announced it will begin adding an invisible digital watermark to text and images created on its Claude platform, a move required by the EU’s AI law. For images, the move brings Anthropic in line with other AI and digital image editing companies, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Adobe.

But the proposal to digitally watermark AI-generated text and code created by Claude has many users up in arms. People commonly use AI to proofread human-written text, come up with ideas, make suggestions, or draft simple forms and basic text. The new watermark will stay on the text—regardless how much AI was involved in the final product. As it stands now, a short story generated entirely by AI will have the same marking as one written by a human and proofread by AI, calling its usefulness into question.

Meta was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in fines by a New Mexico judge, who ruled the social media giant created a “public nuisance” over its handling of child safety on its platforms, and was a “significant” contributor to the state’s teen mental health........

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