Plus: Marketers Love Data But Can’t Always Use It, Google’s Likely Precarious Mobile AI Search Dominance, ABC News Live Goes All In On Diddy, Affluent Travelers Stay Grounded

Marketing is a creative discipline, attracting people with outside-of-the-box ideas, a flair for writing and design, a desire to build connections with customers, and enthusiasm for a brand or product. Those on this career path often aren’t the people drawn to programming, data, math and technical aspects. Yet in today’s world, AI and other new technologies are coming to the marketing department, offering applications that can make a marketer’s work more effective—if only they would use it.

A new study from Canva shows that marketers know the value of data and tech, but they are still hesitant to use it. Two-thirds of marketing and sales professionals are anxious about data, with 3 in 10 going out of their way to avoid using it. Canva’s survey, which includes more than 2,400 marketing and sales professionals worldwide, focused mostly on basic data use, including spreadsheets. Nearly 9 in 10 marketers work with data and spreadsheets on a weekly basis or more, but only 44% feel confident when starting a data-heavy task. More than half often make spreadsheet errors, like misusing formulas and struggling to analyze what the spreadsheets can say.

However, more than three-quarters of marketers want to get better at working with data, and hope to improve their effectiveness. A total of 76% think that AI might be the solution, improving data work by automating tedious tasks and suggesting data visualizations. AI certainly can be an aid, but it isn’t the whole solution. More effective and easier-to-use tools could help, as well as continuous practical training that clearly shows how to use the available tech and why the processes work. The data also needs to be explained and fully accessible to marketers, meaning there might be some work to be done on the enterprise system as a whole. The tech and training should be fairly intuitive as well. Marketers are willing to take some time to learn, but they still want to focus on their actual jobs. Canva found that just over half of respondents are willing to invest up to three hours learning new solutions.

For years, marketers have known that YouTube is an important platform, but its impact is just now coming into focus. YouTube is now the most-watched TV channel in the U.S., and trends of what kinds of videos people watch and who those viewers are can determine messaging success. I talked to Evan Shapiro, a longtime media professional who calls himself the Media Universe Cartographer, about some recent research he’s compiled on the video streaming platform. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

On desktop computers, Google dominates search of all kinds—both traditional and AI-enabled. The tech giant is leading on mobile right now as well, but that could soon change. New research from BrightEdge shows that 54% of all AI searches come from mobile. Other AI search engines get just a sliver of their traffic from mobile: ChatGPT sees just 6% from mobile devices, and Microsoft’s Bing gets only 4.5% from phones.

While it looks like Google dominates this field, it doesn’t have the same search foothold as it does on computers. BrightEdge found that 58% of Google’s mobile search traffic to brand websites comes from iPhones, which makes sense considering they default to Google Search. If Apple were to change the default to another search engine, or a partnership with another AI provider for search, the percentages likely would change immediately.

AI search is getting better all the time, but so are AI videos. Columbia Journalism Review launched a public service campaign—cleverly named PSAi—to help the public distinguish real video from that generated by artificial intelligence, Forbes senior contributor Leslie Katz writes. The video features a catchy rap song with several AI memes—Pope Francis in a designer puffer coat, Will Smith eating spaghetti, Shrimp Jesus and a boat crew rescuing a polar bear—displaying some of the telltale signs of AI.