Bonus Post: Exploring Meta Earnings with AI
How I wrote part of yesterday's post
Going forward I plan on four posts per week. But in the process of writing yesterday’s post I utilized AI in a new way (for me) and I thought it worth sharing. Reminder, this is your last chance to get “50% off forever” on Marketing BS subscriptions.
When writing yesterday’s post on Meta and reach vs frequency I was reading the Meta Q1 earnings call transcript (available here). At one point I was about to search the transcript for the key metrics, but then I stopped myself. Generative AI should be able to do this for me. ChatGPT and GPT-4 do not have access to the internet (without API access, which I do not have), but Bing does. So I opened my Edge browser and asked Bing: “Please read the Meta Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript, and summarize the main takeaways, especially with respect to revenue, users and profit”. The response (Substack won’t block quote the bullets, but this is all Bing):
Sure, I can try to summarize the main takeaways from the Meta Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript. Here are some points that I found:
Meta Platforms reported a strong quarter with revenue of $38.6 billion, up 31% year-over-year, and net income of $11.2 billion, up 17% year-over-year12.
The company’s community reached a milestone of more than 3 billion daily active people across its apps, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger12.
The company’s advertising business grew 29% year-over-year, driven by higher average price per ad and higher number of ad impressions12.
The company’s other revenue, which includes Oculus and Portal devices, grew 71% year-over-year to $1.9 billion, reflecting strong demand for Quest 2 and increased content sales12.
The company’s operating margin was 35%, down from 37% a year ago, mainly due to higher costs related to infrastructure, content and security12.
The company expects revenue growth to decelerate modestly in the second quarter and more significantly in the second half of the year, due to tougher comparisons and headwinds from regulatory and platform changes12.
The company also expects operating margin to decline in the coming quarters, as it continues to invest in innovation, content and safety12.
I went one step further: “What are the most interesting quotes from Mark Zuckerberg on the call?” and Bing responded:
Here are some interesting quotes from Mark Zuckerberg on the call:
"Our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency’ and we’re focused on becoming a stronger and more nimble organization."123
"We’re also making progress on our long-term vision of building the metaverse, a set of interconnected virtual experiences that span gaming, social, entertainment and work."2
"We’re seeing strong growth in our commerce business across ads, Marketplace and Shops. We now have over 1.5 billion people visiting Marketplace each month and over 300 million Shops across our apps."2
"We’re also investing in the next wave of computing platforms that will deliver new types of experiences and enable people to interact in ways that aren’t possible today. This includes our work on augmented and virtual reality, which we believe will be the successor to the mobile internet."2
"We’re also working on generative AI, which is a new type of AI that can create realistic content like images, videos and audio. This could unlock new forms of creativity and expression for people in the metaverse and beyond."2
If you want to read more quotes from Mark Zuckerberg or other participants on the call, you can find the full transcript at index 2 or 3.
Not bad. Although the quote I ended up using, “For the first time, we surpassed 3 billion people using at least one of our family of apps on a daily basis in March and approximately 3.8 billion people use at least one on a monthly basis.” does not appear on the list it generated. So I guess my job is safe for now.
Keep it simple,
Edward
p.s., I also pushed the model to estimate the impact on the stock price from the call. It was hesitant to give me a number, but finally settled on a 5-10% increase. In actual fact it jumped about 15%