It's been more than a month since I wrote -- er, actually I used Google's new NotebookLM to write -- a "Media3.0" column explaining why a presentation about it at the Association of National Advertisers' Masters of Marketing conference was relevant to advertisers and media planners and buyers.

So I'm doing it again to explain why a new collaboration between GoogleLM and Spotify should be relevant to our audience (see below).

To do that, I uploaded a 30-minute recording of an embargoed press briefing held Tuesday morning as the source material and prompted it to explicitly address its relevance and newsworthiness to you.

Honestly, the result is pretty flat and doesn't actually convey the significance of the rapid evolution of generative AI applications between big media companies and how it is transforming both consumer and advertiser experiences.

Interestingly, the Spotify team did not answer the only question I posed during the briefing -- what potential ad opportunities might be related to the AI-generated podcasts -- but they did allude that the uniquely personalized content would be available to both free, ad-supported and premium Spotify subscribers. So presumably, yes, there will be some unique advertising opportunities related to it.

Still, I have to wonder, because based on earlier innovations in music and audio streaming platforms never really manifested the same way for advertising.

And by that, I'm going back a quarter century to the first significant breakthrough in personalizing the relevance of music and audio streaming, Pandora's development of the Music Genome Project, which is what powered the algorithms contextualizing the relevance and recommendations of music based on subscribers' listening habits.

I always thought that was genius, and maybe the the technology was too rudimentary and aged out, but the biggest question I've always had, tried to ask, but never got properly answered, is why Pandora never incorporated the genome as an advertising targeting feature? I mean, tons of scientific research -- especially neuromarketing studies -- have shown that there often are strong correlations between music and the contextual relevance of advertising.

So now, a quarter century later, Google and Spotify are teaming up to create uniquely personalized AI-generated podcasts for subscribers and I wonder if advertising is even an afterthought, much less a thought at all?

Anyway, what follows is what NotebookLM had to say about the relevance of the new feature for all of you:

A New Kind of Personalized Advertising: Why Spotify Wrapped's AI Podcast is Big News for Advertisers

The collaboration between Google NotebookLM and Spotify for 2024 Wrapped, specifically the creation of personalized AI podcasts powered by NotebookLM’s Audio Overview technology, is a major development for advertisers and media planners. This new format presents a unique opportunity to reach audiences in a highly personalized and engaging way.