Palau demands to know the business impact of their investments in influencers and AI helps get them the answers

When Palau via their funding partner Pacific Trade Investments (PTI) last decided on spending money on the creator and influencer channel to get the word out to Australian’s that there was a beautiful beach paradise that was completely unspoiled and (now) only a 6-hour direct flight away - they wanted more surety that their money was well spent beyond just impressions and likes.

In this case, the RFP winner was awarded because PTI found someone who could tell them and all the suppliers who participated in the famil with the influencer, EXACTLY how many people ended up on each of their websites because of the afternoon they spent hosting creator Blaze Lopes on a kayaking, sailing or scenic flight trip. (You can see the case study and live dashboard of results right here).

Exactly 81 people visited the kayak supplier’s website on the back of 2 reels posted by Blaze. 17 of those visited more than once. Every single supplier can see exactly what impact was driven for their business in this campaign.

This gave PTI new metrics on how to judge success and gives the Palau Tourism Board definitive answers to their suppliers and constituents on how money and effort was spent.

Much of this is enabled by AI processes. But AI isn’t the story here. It is in the background doing grunt work and making the process smooth and simple for everyone involved. The story isn’t AI. The story is the long-desired solution to a nagging problem around the opaqueness of measurement in a key marketing tactic and booming distribution pathway.

Before you could never be sure if you got value or not. Now you can see definitively the value you received and the ability to tweak things to get more next time around. Art has become science.

Videreo is the place where creator marketing is being made as simple as other media buying including the dashboarding of results from which you can test, learn and double down on what works.

Contact me to learn how we can make this happen for you.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Suddenly Claude Code is the only game in town

If you spend too much time on LinkedIn (guilty), then you’ll already know the shift across December and January has been to Claude Code, a product from Anthropic.

The secret seems to be around persistent memory which lives is a folder, can be continually updated and is always referenced, so as to personalise AI results.

The problem has been that Claude Code wasn’t just a chatbot you could talk to out of the box. You had to set it up. It was a bit techy and you needed to work with an unfamiliar UI (familiar to coders - foreign to everyone else). Even then, it wasn’t that difficult as Janette Roush showed us in setting up her Chief of Staff agent.

So the Anthropic team spent their post Xmas time changing that to build a version you can just type or talk to, to make it work. It supposedly took them only 10 days to build this version for the rest of us, called Cowork (which is also unfortunately the name for Microsoft’s AI in Windows and isn’t the same thing at all.) They were able to do it so quickly because apparently the machine built the new machine itself.

Claude Code builds agents. Autonomous AI who do certain jobs that you can link together to do other jobs, all whilst you stare at your screen instead of moving the mouse around yourself doing those jobs. As Christian Watts says, work will never be the same again. Maybe that is true. Whilst I had great ambitions to dig in myself over the (Australian) Summer, I instead read books, watched tennis and went to the beach.

Why the 80:20 rule is possibly key to understanding everything you need to know about AI right now

Whilst reading books at the beach, or maybe it was at the cricket or tennis - I’m not sure exactly when - but I had a revelation about the past 2 years of AI.

Someone was talking about the 80:20 rule and it triggered something I’ve long felt about working with AI. The 80:20 rule that we all live in most of our business lives tells us that just 20% of the things we do derive 80% of the value.

That might be your cornerstone customer or your number one distribution path or whatever. In the Claude Code example above they revealed 80% of the code base was written by itself. But why only 80%?

Here is why: AI out of the box I would suggest is about 80% good.

But is any of that 80% overlapping with the high quality 20% that derives the most benefit we are looking for? If so, is it 1% or 15%?

When you ask AI about a subject you know intimately and are a subject matter expert in, you quickly see its limitations and the nuances it isn’t picking up on. These things are not often documented as this is how we, as humans, have kept our own relevance and value inside our companies and industries and which gives our companies a competitive advantage.

Where AI is most useful is in freeing up people from a lot of the spinning of wheels, that happens on the lesser value 80%. In here is a lot of boring process stuff or trial and error experimentation.

Sometimes that stuff is necessary to get us from 0 to 80%. Actually often it is - just like getting the base of a code base written. We need the basic scaffolding. We are seeing that most clearly (in business outcomes) in coding but also in answering the repetitive and basic queries to customer service (chat bots) and a few other areas.

We’ve built Videreo entirely with AI. It has done the 80% extremely well. two non-coders could not have done this 2 years ago. And that is a miracle. But without Adrian Villabruna going in and doing the extra 18% or 19% we’d be in a big pile of mess. It would be slop.

With the destination guides we help creators build, we tell those creators that these are 80% complete and if they don’t add their 20% of knowledge from what they personally experienced plus their own images and videos - well then it’s just more slop on pile.

Where I’ve landed: Understand how far AI can take you and leverage it to take you there. Then get the human experts in to tune that to drive real competitive advantage for your business.

ChatGPT says we can just buy our way in front of those on their platform (and please give them $1M)

This was the other big news over the break.

After months of hand wringing about AEO or GEO or LLM SEO (we never even got to a point where we agreed on the term let alone how to figure out how it works), OpenAI dropped the ultimate short cut - just buy your way your way in.

In their initial limited trial, they have handpicked a few favoured companies who were willing to put down a minimum spend of $1M to get their ads shown alongside the AI output.

OpenAI were quick to point out that you can’t pay to change what the AI might tell someone - because there can be no compromise on the all-knowing black box oracle output - but you can jam your ad underneath when there is a relevant topic match for the query. Those on paid plans can avoid ads. This is the Spotifycation of OpenAI.

“According to The Information sources: "To start off, the company is charging on the basis of ad views as opposed to per-ad clicks that are typical at large sellers of search ads like Google and Amazon."

"OpenAI is asking that small pool of advertisers for less than $1 million in spending commitments each over a several week trial period, with ads launching in early February", so we don't have long to wait.

Of course they used travel in their example.

Mauricio Prieto gives you advice powered by all of Lenny’s Podcast guests but tuned for travel

Many of us have been building custom GPT’s for a while now. These are handy little apps that are geared to offer up solutions within a given framework or by building in a better prompt than that average woman in the street might offer.

I like them. If you signed up to this Newsletter via the BeeHiiv path, you will have been given access to my own one on building an AI strategy for your business as a way to get you started on your AI journey.

Recently my favourite travel newsletter, Mauricio Prieto’s Travel Tech Essentialist dropped a custom GPT that has the base knowledge from every guest from Lenny Podcast. If you don’t know this podcast - Lenny Rachitsky is a famed product manager from the early days of Airbnb and his podcast is one of the most listened to in the tech world (not just the travel tech world).

If you’ve still never opened ChatGPT in your life - click that custom GPT above and ask it the business question that most pains you right now. You’ll quickly get the picture. It’s all free.

A bunch of things you might have missed.

A bunch of papers were dropped in the month you were without your weekly AI summary. Here are some that could be important:

• AI at the heart of tourism and hospitality - PwC

• White Paper: Search and Discovery in the AI Era from Miles Partnership

• The future of agentic commerce for travel: PwC

• How agentic AI in travel will transform operations | McKinsey

• When we chat to AI from Microsoft’s head of AI

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: Get Yourself in the Spotlight

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo). You’ll then periodically show up here or might find your company as ad read in the middle of a Top 3 in Travel Technology podcasts (according to Apple Podcasts)

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Google tinkers more around the edges of travel inspiration

One of my favourite parts of the old Google is their Arts & Culture App. I have a friend who works at the city archives here in Melbourne who worked with this department once and told me about it. There is some great info to be found here.

And now that info is getting an AI makeover as Google this week announced new AI features for the app.

One of those is “City Guide”. “With City Guide, we are piloting a new way to help you connect with the culture around you. We’re exploring how AI can move beyond generic recommendations to surface a mix of landmarks and live cultural events that actually match your tastes.

Rather than offering a static directory, the guide adapts to your schedule. You can set a specific timeframe like "Today" or "This weekend" and select from 12 distinct interest categories ranging from Visual Arts to History and even Hidden Gems.”

There is toggle for live events only, something done poorly across the internet currently IMO. You tend to find the best events in your friend’s social feeds, the day after they happened so this would be a good solution if it actually works.

“A "Show live events only" option spotlights current exhibitions and performances, helping you sample some of the fleeting cultural moments that bring a city to life.”

In my city those events generally show up on random Facebook pages, on MeetUp, in various local gig guides and on council websites. It is VERY fragmented. Google has tended to show a handful of things from Weekend Notes in past versions of this - so pretty useless.

London, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Istanbul, Osaka, Berlin, Madrid and San Francisco are the winning opening cities.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New Everything AI in Travel podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

And in big news - a new podcast is on its way as the Everything in Travel media brand spreads its wings into a new topic that will equally with AI dominate conversations and determine winners and losers over the next decade - social media. Look out for the launch of Everything Social Media in Travel - launching soon.

This week I caught up with the one and only Christian Watts in what is becoming an annual kickoff show. In this pod we look back at the predictions we made at the start of last year and Christian questions my abilities as a parent.

The special FREE education series with Santiago Rodriguez is now fully rolled out. You can now binge it from start to finish. Best to watch this one as it is highly visual so maybe try this one on YouTube.

Partner with Us

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. If you’re thankful for this newsletter - you can always buy me a coffee.

I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think.