Welcome to Ad Age Datacenter Weekly, our data-obsessed newsletter for marketing and media professionals.

Americans don’t trust AI tools (sorry, ChatGPT)

“Marketers may need to slow their roll when it comes to adopting AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E 2,” Ad Age’s Asa Hiken reports. “Two-thirds (67%) of U.S. adults agree they are concerned about the safety of generative AI technology, a new Ad Age and Harris Poll study found.”

Essential context: “Lack of familiarity does not appear to be the issue,” Hiken notes. “Some 54% of U.S. adults are familiar with generative AI tools, and nearly 20% have used one. Only 29% of respondents said they have not used generative AI and are also not interested in doing so.”

The bottom line: “More than half (52%) of respondents simply don’t trust the tech, the study found,” Hiken adds.

Keep reading here.

Ad Age Best Places to Work 2023

In his introduction to Ad Age’s Best Places to Work 2023 package, Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson writes,

The best practices at the Best Places to Work turn out to be pretty straightforward:

Fair pay. Solid benefits.

Recruit and retain a diverse workforce. Keep staffing levels adequate so team members and teams can do their best work.

Provide good training and keep employees in the loop on how the business is doing. Tilt work-life balance a bit more toward life.

Easy to say—and hard to do. Ad Age Best Places to Work 2023 honors 50 companies for a job well done last year amid the challenges of a tight talent pool, uncertain economy and ongoing effects of the pandemic.

Keep reading—and dive into the full list—here.

The social video content that younger audiences watch

Social video analytics firm Tubular is out with its latest Tubular Audience Ratings (TAR), and one key takeaway is that young audiences are largely getting served by small, newish content makers vs. massive, established media companies. Check out the top 5 most-watched social video creators (as ranked by total minutes watched) in the U.S. in December among the 13-to-24 age group:

1. CoryxKenshin / 850.4 million minutes watched / 6.7 million unique viewers
2. MrBeast / 762.9 million / 29 million
3. Markiplier / 732.5 million / 5.4 million
4. MSA (My Story Animated) / 375.5 million / 3.8 million
5. SSSniperwolf / 348.6 million / 5.2 million

Topping the list is gamer Cory DeVante Williams, aka CoryxKenshin on YouTube. You have to dip further down in the rankings before you start to see video content from big legacy brands—including “Dance Moms” (born of the Lifetime reality TV franchise) at No. 15 and “Disney Junior” at No. 17.

Macroeconomic news and data in a nutshell

• “U.S. weekly jobless claims fall to lowest level since April,” per MarketWatch.

• “U.S. GDP rose 2.9% in the fourth quarter, more than expected even as recession fears loom,” from CNBC.

• “Have economists misunderstood inflation?,” from The Economist.

ICYMI: “Ad business cut 3,500 jobs in December as market goes cold,” from Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson.

Don’t miss: “Layoffs and budget cuts—tracking economic moves and news,” Ad Age’s continually updated blog covering how the marketing industry is bracing for a recession.

Disney data ‘clean room’ sees major traction

Ad Age’s Parker Herren covered Disney’s Tech & Data Showcase event on Wednesday, and one key takeaway is that the media conglomerate is seeing major traction for its data clean room solution, which it first unveiled 14 months ago. “While Lisa Valentino, Disney’s executive VP of client and brand solutions, admitted the company thought it would be ‘in the insights phase of a clean room for a year,’ she said it has already been adopted by every major holding company—including Dentsu, Horizon, IPG Mediabrands, OMG and Publicis,” Herren notes. “Over 70 advertisers have also utilized it in planning, buying and measuring advertising with Disney, and the company has expanded access to mid-size agencies.”

The big picture: “Executives throughout the showcase emphasized the importance of this privacy-forward tool as many brands nervously seek solutions to crackdowns on cookies,” Herren adds. “The Mouse House flaunted the scale of its solution supplied by a decade of data from Disney’s Audience Graph, which hosts 235 million audience IDs across 110 million households.”

Keep reading here.

See also: “Disney outlines measurement strategy for streaming TV future,” also from Ad Age’s Parker Herren.

Plus: “Unilever and Mindshare test Disney’s cookie alternative with Trade Desk,” from Ad Age’s Jack Neff.

Just briefly

• “Ad spending on Twitter falls by over 70% in December,” per Reuters.

• “Apple’s privacy policies under fire from ad tech industry,” from Ad Age.

• “Updated Covid boosters cut the infection risk from XBB.1.5 subvariant by nearly half, CDC finds,” NBC News reports.

+ ICYMI: “Relationship marketing company CM Group rebrands to Marigold, Kantar unveils Vivvix,” from the Jan. 20 edition of Ad Age Datacenter Weekly.

The Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2022 report

“For the first time, the world’s two biggest advertisers are internet companies—one from the U.S., the other from China,” Ad Age Datacenter’s Bradley Johnson writes in the introduction to the Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2022 report. (Find out which companies he’s referring to here.) There’s a lot to WLA 2022, but the Datacenter team has come up with a bunch of entry points to help you begin your own deep dive:

• “WLA 2022—What’s inside”
• “WLA 2022—10 key stats”
• “WLA 2022—Category, region and country”
• “WLA 2022—25 biggest advertisers, ranked”
• “WLA 2022—Ad spending growth over time”
• “WLA 2022—Cautious growth as a recession may loom”
• “WLA 2022—Big spending gains and cut”

The newsletter is brought to you by Ad Age Datacenter, the industry’s most authoritative source of competitive intel and home to the Ad Age Leading National Advertisers, the Ad Age Agency Report: World’s Biggest Agency Companies and other exclusive data-driven reports. Access or subscribe to Ad Age Datacenter at AdAge.com/Datacenter.

Ad Age Datacenter is Kevin Brown, Bradley Johnson and Joy R. Lee.