It’s been nearly 45 years since MTV launched, making music videos a part of how people experience music. The craft, messages and distribution of music videos have changed dramatically over the years, but one thing remains constant: People enjoy watching them.

Through the years, marketing has intersected with music and music videos. There’s been product placement, marketing campaigns, and worth-watching-once brand sponsorships that felt like a long commercial. Today, marketers and artists are getting more sophisticated, partnering for sponsored music videos that people actually want to watch—because they don’t feel like commercials. I talked to two Vevo executives—Vice President of U.S. Sales Melissa Sofo and Vice President of Music and Talent Jordan Glickson—about this trend. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Friends and followers aren’t the only ones reading your social media feed. AI is paying close attention, too—and increasingly surfacing posts from different platforms into its answers. In an analysis of 300 million Google AI Overviews, BrightEdge Technologies found Facebook posts were cited in 19.5 million of them, while Instagram saw 877,000 citations. One in 15 overviews cited one of Meta’s big social networks, the research found.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu told me AI is looking for expertise—and finding it on social platforms. Facebook tends to have a lot of information about what’s going on in a local area: businesses, deals, events, topics of interest. This social network, he said, is second only to Google as a collection of what’s happening nearby. Meanwhile, Instagram is seen as a source for information on culture. TikTok is viewed as a source for trends. And Reddit, which has been a common source of information pulled by AI from the beginning, is a source for opinions.

So even though fewer people are enthusiastic about Facebook nowadays, Yu said these findings make the social network important to your strategy in a different way.

“The big ‘aha’ here is you should think about: How does it play in the AI strategy, especially as it relates to … community-oriented, local-driven type of information,” he said. “You take even something like sports—things like the World Cup or where to watch specific baseball games. It clearly has volume and there’s a local community aspect, but [AI] also knows this is one of the sources of information to rely on.”

AI is also pulling social media content in e-commerce situations at the bottom of the funnel, BrightEdge research found. Social media helps people find where to go to get the best deal and buy what they’re looking for. About 90% of lower-funnel Instagram citations from Google are at the........

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