Commentary

Vox Not-So-Populi: Why T3 Is Shorting Donald Trump

Always love hearing T3’s Ben Gaddis speak for a couple of reasons. One is he seems like a really nice guy and super earnest. The other is I feel like he’s already got one foot in the future. It was where his other foot was planted that sparked this blog post. Gaddis was speaking about the role of voice as the next big disruptive force in media, advertising and marketing to a bunch of brand marketers gathered at the Brand Marketers Insider Summit here in Austin, TX.

Austin, of course, is the home of T3. That aside, I think Gaddis made a pretty good case for voice becoming a more meaningful “input” for consumers interacting with brands. He also said something I truly believe, which is that voice is really just a “trojan horse” for an even bigger play: artificial intelligence.

It’s already happening vis a vis early generations of technology like Alexa, but the next phase will be a whole new era of “conversational marketing.”

Where I differ with Gaddis, is the degree to which actual voice inputs will supplant everything else. I just don’t think people will actually want to talk to every device or brand-related device they encounter. I think AI will be able to achieve what a lot of those voice conversations would do, simply by using metadata to understand what the consumer wants before they even request it.

In terms of actual manual inputting though, I still think people will utilize the ones they’ve used for most of the history of media -- writing text, clicking on buttons and using other digital or gestural interfaces. That’s just my opinion, but I may be a Luddite in that regard.

One unrelated thing Gaddis showed that’s worth mentioning is a digital platform it created following Donald Trump’s election as president, and leveraging the power of his tweets and public statements -- pro or con -- brands.

The aptly named “Tump & Dump Bot” basically automatically hedges stocks of publicly traded companies that President Trump is flaming, shorting positions and taking the profits and donating them to the ASPCA.

“Save a puppy, short a stock,” Gaddis quipped.

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