The Raffi Report - w/c 23th June 2025
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
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ONE (if you want to understand the deal with Apple CarPlay, read this one)
Per the FT:
98 percent of new cars come with CarPlay, according to Apple. Americans use the feature 600 million times per day, with McKinsey finding that 85 percent of car owners prefer it (or a similar service) over their built-in system.
I’ve never really thought about how ubiquitous it is, and the release of their new CarPlay ULTRA has got carmakers pushing back.
There’s a fierce debate internally as to whether they can make better software than Apple (if they could, it would represent an exciting new revenue stream) and/or if this affects their differentiation (if everyone has CarPlay, how do mid-premium brands especially provide an elevated experience?
TWO (if you want to see where Decentralised Discovery is going, read this one)
A huge part of the narrative in Marketing-land right now is how ChatGPT is taking over from Google. That is really only part of the story…
Search is getting split in two ways (per the graph below) but more than that, challenger Search engines themselves are launching: Kagi, for one, is having a bit of a moment. For $10 a month, it’s fully private and ad-free…
Tailwinds for this, at least in the UK, are growing as the UK competition authority pushes increased entrants in the space.
THREE (if you want to see how OpenAI’s go-to-market motion is working for students, read this one)
Per the article in NYT:
OpenAI’s campus marketing effort comes as unemployment has increased among recent college graduates — particularly in fields like software engineering, where A.I. is now automating some tasks previously done by humans. In hopes of boosting students’ career prospects, some universities are racing to provide A.I. tools and training.
California State University announced this year that it was making ChatGPT available to more than 460,000 students across its 23 campuses to help prepare them for “California’s future A.I.-driven economy.” Cal State said the effort would help make the school “the nation’s first and largest A.I.-empowered university system.”
It’s a Catch 22 in my opinion, the recent research that over-use of AI makes you less smart means that we might be diluted the impact of college education, but equally without AI fluency these graduates are losing out…
FOUR (if you want to see an emergent TikTok channel, have a look at this one)
I can’t explain why these are so visually satisfying to watch but no surprise to me that these AI-generated videos are gaining steam (literally millions of views on most of them…)
What’s doubly smart is how the creator behind the videos is using their virality as a top-of-funnel play to sell access to his Gumroad course on how to make them.
This is a simple but highly effective form of social commerce — and a playbook that is only going to expand as tooling like Linktree spreads its wings.
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FIVE (if you want to see Streaming taking over from TV, take a look at this one)
For the first time ever, traditional TV has been outweighed by the streamers… What stands out most? YouTube’s dominance… As I’ve written about before, YouTube is the channel to track right now…
To give you just one stat: In H1 2024, for all UK audiences under 35 YouTube pulled in more watch time than all broadcasters combined! (BARB)
