DoorDash's social-native Super Bowl campaign, "narrative engineers," and the AI content economy

DoorDash skipped its Super Bowl slot this year in favor of a social-native campaign. Titled “The Big Beef,” DoorDash recruited 50 Cent, Rob Rausch, Boston Rob, and Dorinda Medley to teach fans the art of trash talk as rivalries play out both on the field and online. The shift was intentional to reach Gen Z, who spend more time engaging and scrolling online, even during live sporting events. The campaign is designed for multi-screen viewing and for additional content to roll out after the game ends, extending the narrative's life. This was a smart play from DoorDash, and something I could see many brands pursuing who want to participate in the Super Bowl excitement without the price tag. 

We’ve seen The Times, Business Insider, and Wall Street Journal publish pieces about how the storyteller is the next big job in corporate, especially in tech. And it’s trickled down into the startup world. Founding teams are adding “narrative engineers” to their lineup to create infrastructure around capturing attention. Translation: These are the people responsible for translating complex narratives into market hype, focusing on category creation, distribution, and architecting belief around the product. As the barriers to creating software have decreased, capturing attention and demand will be key to the growth of these companies and to securing funding. 

Cloudflare bought AI startup Human Native to help publishers get paid when AI uses their content. This is the latest in a string of moves Cloudflare has made to address the imbalance between publishers and AI companies that have ripped off their content for free to train their LLMs. Without licensed content, models risk low-quality training, regulatory backlash, and strained relationships with the very publishers and creators whose work powers their products. This move aims to make AI training fairer and build a new economy where creators and AI companies both benefit. We’ve already seen companies like Disney license their content to OpenAI, so it’ll only be a matter of time before IP-rich brands (think product-based or media brands) start exploring how they will license their content to LLMs.

If you’ve been on X this week, chances are you’ve probably already seen this article, essentially fearmongering AI. The piece emphasizes how AI is advancing rapidly and will affect many jobs, especially those that involve reading, writing, or analysis. To stay ahead, people need to learn and use AI actively every day. My thought on this is less about “AI will replace your job,” and more about “someone who knows how to use AI will take your job.” Whereas a few years ago everyone was bullish on generative AI, now it's shifted toward human-generated ideas with AI-assisted workflows. The value of human input is still here (as we see with all this storyteller talk), but people are getting smarter about how they use AI, whether through prompting, optimization, or agents to create the best possible output.

In a letter originally posted on X, Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team lead, Mrinank Sharma, announced his resignation. The letter hints at tensions over the tech’s safety and at decisions the company has made that run counter to its values. Additionally, Zoë Hitzig, a former researcher at OpenAI, shared this opinion piece in The New York Times about why she left the company, arguing that OpenAI is making the same mistakes Facebook made with user data control and access. The common thread in both stories is concern about the safety of these AI tools, whether it's their ethical use or the collection and use of user data. I anticipate we’ll start to see many of the same issues with these AI platforms as we’ve seen with social media platforms, because why learn from your mistakes?

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