Vincent Grippi

May 238 min read

The Toilet Theory: Are Marketers Flushing Substance For Convenience?

Updated: Dec 18

Essential news and insights for bold healthcare marketers, brought to you by Grippi Media.

Memorial Day Weekend is upon us and I know I’m not the only one who is excited for a few days of fun times in the sunshine (a rarity here in the northeast - the sunshine part, that is).

I also know that kicking off a long holiday weekend with a newsletter isn’t exactly festive, so I decided I would publish this week’s issue of The Grip a day earlier to avoid any potential of being a buzzkill.

Speaking of buzz, we have a handful of stirring stories to share with you in issue #004 of The Grip. Here’s what you can expect:

👉 The Toilet Theory: Are Marketers Flushing Substance for Convenience?

👉 hims & hers Will Offer Compounded GLP-1 Drugs, Despite FDA Warnings

👉 Google Hints at Improving Site Rankings in Next Update

👉 YouTube Unveils New Content and Ad Offerings at Brandcast

👉 OpenAI Rips Off Scarlett Johansson and Dissolves Ethics Department in Same Week

All this and more in issue 4 of The Grip. Go ahead and give it a read - and don't forget to subscribe!

- Vincent Grippi, Founder/CEO, Grippi Media

I Can’t Believe That’s a Keyword

Using Semrush, we hunt down bizarre (and totally real) search queries and try to answer them.

This Week’s Keyword: Do Platypuses Glow in the Dark?

Avg. Monthly Search Volume: 340

Answer: As if platypuses couldn't get any weirder, it turns out they actually glow in the dark.

Top Stories We’re Tracking

Essential marketing and healthcare headlines of the week.

The Toilet Theory of the Internet

In this thought-provoking piece for The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel proposes his "toilet theory of the internet," which essentially suggests that much of our online activity—such as scrolling, clicking, and commenting—occurs during idle moments like bathroom breaks or waiting in line. This in turn leads to distracted and hurried content engagement.

The need for instant gratification pressures content creators and marketers to prioritize capturing audience attention more quickly, over all else. Google's new AI search overviews, which provide summarized information directly in search results, cater to this “distracted user” by offering quick answers without additional clicks or context.

This raises concerns for publishers, content creators, and marketers because these zero-click searches could reduce web traffic for them. Google's integration of AI overviews aims to please users' desire for immediate, accessible information, reflecting the hurried engagement described by the “toilet theory,” but it also threatens the traditional web ecosystem by prioritizing convenience over substance.

My two cents…

It’s no secret our attention spans have been shrinking. The omnipresence of smartphones, with their relentless stream of notifications, social media updates, and other attention-grabbing distractions, are key contributors to our dwindling focus. Short-form content both appeals and contributes to thinning focus. It’s a vicious cycle, but it’s poised to burn out soon.

Meta has stopped giving bonuses to short-form creators because it costs them $500 million per quarter. TikTok is also extending the maximum video length from 15 seconds to 10 minutes. YouTube’s Shorts pays creators an embarrassingly small amount compared to its long-form videos.

Google stuffing AI overviews into its traditional search engine experience is a messy attempt to satisfy both “distracted users” looking for quick answers and those looking for comprehensive information. That said, I just don’t see it working out. If anything, AI searches should be treated as a separate function within Google’s search engine, similar to Arc, which allows users to toggle between AI and Google search (in addition to other major search engines).

As we showed you in last week’s issue, Google users have not been very receptive to AI overviews. This isn’t surprising at all, since many of the AI overviews share inaccurate information and/or miss the mark entirely. But this is commonplace with gen-AI, as the technology seems to be in a perpetual beta mode.

📄 Read Article (Source: The Atlantic)

Hims & Hers Health Says It Will Offer Compounded GLP-1 Drugs, Despite FDA Warnings

hims & hers has rapidly grown to nearly $1 billion in sales by providing affordable, generic versions of popular drugs and is now entering the weight-loss market with a discounted treatment. The company offers a $199 per month treatment using the same active ingredient as Wegovy, significantly undercutting the $1,350 monthly cost of Wegovy and Zepbound™ (tirzepatide) HCP.

Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are protected by patents until 2032, preventing the availability of generic versions. However, Hims has found a workaround: due to widespread supply shortages, the FDA allows compounding pharmacies to create copycat versions of these drugs. Although compounded drugs lack FDA approval, Hims ensures production at an FDA-licensed facility. Hims plans to introduce compounded tirzepatide (sold under the brand names Mounjaro® (tirzepatide) HCP and Zepbound) soon and eventually integrate branded drugs when available.

📄 Read Article (Source: Morningstar)

Google Hints At Improving Site Rankings In Next Update

John Mueller, Google's Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced that the Search team is actively evaluating how to improve the visibility of such sites. This initiative follows the overwhelmingly negative feedback from the SEO community regarding the significant impact of the March core update, which aimed to prioritize genuinely user-centric content over content designed solely to rank well.

Mueller stressed that while recovery from past updates can be slow and complex, sites committed to producing high-quality content should see improvements in their rankings with the new update. In the meantime, details around how Google will define, detect and weigh “high-quality content” remain unclear at this time 🤷

As I noted above, reactions to the March algorithm changes have been largely negative, as it resulted in many sites seeing dramatic shifts in keywords rankings and traffic, with a great deal of sites getting de-indexed from Google altogether, which is akin to being uninvited to the cool kid’s birthday party forever.

It’s important to note that all of the sites that were deindexed contained high-levels of AI-generated content that was created specifically to sway rankings.

📄 Read Article (Source: Search Engine Journal)

YouTube Unveils New Content and Ad Offerings At Brandcast

YouTube unveiled a range of new content and ad offerings at its 13th annual Brandcast event, emphasizing the platform's strong viewership metrics and the growing influence of creators.

Here’s what was announced…

Creator Takeovers: An expanded feature of YouTube Select, this program will enable brands to take over a creator's channel for a specific period, ensuring that the brand's message reaches the creator's audience/subscribers.

Branded QR Codes: Introduction of branded QR codes to drive interactivity and enhance ad engagement.

Non-Skips for Video Reach Campaigns: Launch of a new AI-powered format for connected TV, using non-skippable assets across in-stream inventory.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube made it a point to over-emphasize AI throughout the event. The platform said that AI-optimized ad campaigns were nearly four times as effective as manually optimized ones.

YouTube remains the leader in streaming watch time, with significant increases in views on connected TVs. Over 1 billion hours of YouTube content are watched on televisions daily, with substantial growth in views of Shorts on connected TVs.

Per a study by Wyzowl: 85% of marketers intend to maintain or increase their video budget this year. With video being the most popular form of content on the web, the medium’s value to marketers is simply too big to ignore. That said, these new updates from YouTube are welcomed additions to an advertising offering that was feeling stale.

📄 Read Article (Source: Search Engine Journal)

Scarlett Johansson 'Shocked' by AI Chatbot Imitation

Scarlett Johansson was upset after OpenAI debuted the voice assistant feature of GPT-4.0 (aka “Omni”), named "Sky," with a voice very similar to hers. Johansson accused OpenAI and its founder, Sam Altman, of deliberately copying her voice. She revealed that Altman approached her in September, claiming her voice could bridge the gap between tech and creatives.

Remember in last week’s issue, when we joked that this new voice assistant reminded us of the 2013 film, “Her?” Well, Johansson provided the voice for the operating system that Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with. Life imitates art, I guess!

OpenAI apologized and paused the use of the "Sky" voice. This issue highlights concerns about AI, copyright, and consent, similar to past disputes in the entertainment industry over the use of actors' voices and faces by AI without their permission.

It’s worth noting that last Friday, an anonymous OpenAI insider reported that the company had disbanded its Superalignment team, the internal group focused on the long-term risks of artificial intelligence. I’ve seen enough sci-fi movies to know what happens next…

📄 Read Article (Source: BBC)

Our Latest Podcasts

Recent episodes of the podcasts that we help produce.

Should Nurses Feel Threatened by AI?

Both nurses and doctors have raised valid concerns about the unforeseen risks associated with integrating AI into health systems.

Last week, the IHI Lucian Leape Institute released a report highlighting several potential challenges and risks of AI in healthcare.

These challenges and risks include the depersonalization of care, dissemination of inaccurate health recommendations, operational difficulties in integrating AI into existing workflows, the potential for biased outputs, and workforce deskilling.

The recent protests by nursing unions, particularly the California Nurses Association targeting Kaiser Permanente's AI initiatives, underscore persistent worries about the potential adverse effects of this technology.

In our latest episode of CareTalk Podcast: Healthcare. Unfiltered., David E. Williams and John Driscoll explore the critical role nurses play in patient care and how AI can support them in more ways than one.

📲 Listen to the full episode

Reconciling Conflicting Data for Coherent Patient Journeys, with Karim Galil from Mendel

Mendel.ai enables life sciences to index patient journeys at scale and learn from them at the speed of real-time dialogues. The journey started in 2017 from a two-person office in Silicon Valley with commitment to building novel technology and not to be another “Boy Who Cried Wolf” AI company.

To do that, we have invested 4 years and millions of dollars in R&D before launching our first model in 2020. Today, Mendel is the most-funded clinical NLP startup with a team of 100+ members, blue chip investors, and some of the world’s leading life sciences companies as customers.

In this episode of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health Innovation Podcast, Karim Galil joins host, Alex Merwin, to explore how Mendel’s AI deciphers clinical data with clinician-like logic. It indexes structured and unstructured data and replaces the complexity of querying with the simplicity of chatting.

📲 Listen to the full episode

What We’re Listening To

New music that has been inspiring us.

Hovvdy - Hovvdy

Listening to Hovvdy’s self-titled double album (their 5th LP overall) feels like reading a stranger’s diary. It’s intensely personal and nostalgic in a way that is comforting, yet bittersweet. “Jean” is hands down my favorite song of the year so far. That track alone makes this entire album worth listening to - it’s that good! I’m usually mixed on soft music, but this album is truly beautiful in both its sound and sentiment. I couldn’t recommend it enough.

🎧 Listen on Spotify