Mash­able Founder and CEO Pete Cash­more says tech­nol­o­gy is chang­ing con­tent cre­ation and can help brands bet­ter reach – and cater to – their audi­ences with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and native adver­tis­ing.

The last decade has seen huge advance­ments in dig­i­tal and social, includ­ing the launch­es of Face­book, Red­dit, Twit­ter, Maker­Bot, Bit­coin and Kick­starter.

But, dur­ing a Social Media Week pan­el, Cash­more said it is the debut of the iPhone that is like­ly the sin­gle-most sig­nif­i­cant moment of the last 10 years, call­ing it “a thing we’ll nev­er see again in this life­time.”

Smart­phones have clear­ly had huge impli­ca­tions for both pub­li­ca­tions like Mash­able and com­mer­cial brands alike. And while Cash­more notes that con­sumers alive today may nev­er again see any­thing as big as anoth­er smart­phone launch, oth­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments to look out for include self-dri­ving cars and AI.

Predicting The Next Big Story With AI

Mash­able has been using AI for sev­er­al years, which Cash­more said is “very big in jour­nal­ism now and what helps us stay ahead.”

Specif­i­cal­ly, Mash­able uses AI in its Veloc­i­ty algo­rithm, which, per a blog post, “scours the social web, col­lect­ing lots and lots of data around how peo­ple engage with pub­lished arti­cles.”

Accord­ing to Cash­more, Veloc­i­ty can actu­al­ly deter­mine what will be the next big news sto­ry eight hours in advance. Per the post, it debuted in 2013 and coin­cid­ed with a site redesign. And, over the next few years, Cash­more said data sci­en­tists did nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing to enable Mash­able to look across the entire Web to get a bet­ter pic­ture of what’s going to be big next:

“The audi­ence wants to not nec­es­sar­i­ly know what just pub­lished, but what’s the next big sto­ry,. So it goes from real-time news to pre­dic­tive news – ‘This will blow up.’”

And now brands can ben­e­fit, too, which comes in handy for mar­keters look­ing for their own Oreo Super Bowl moment and/or who want to give their real-time social media war rooms a lit­tle extra fire pow­er dur­ing big events.

“We’ve licensed the plat­form to brands, [so they can deter­mine what] is going to be the big sto­ry at the Oscars, so they can tweet about it or have a reac­tion ready,” Cash­more said.

Veloc­i­ty tack­les “the accel­er­a­tion in the news cycle and the trend toward more algo­rithm use in con­tent cre­ation,” which, Cash­more said, is par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful for teams that need to do video pro­duc­tion so they “can be on the trend rather than behind.”

How­ev­er, jour­nal­ists and brand ambas­sadors wor­ried about los­ing their jobs after fur­ther devel­op­ments in AI needn’t fear, at least per Cash­more. He said it’s unlike­ly the entire con­tent cre­ation process will ever be ful­ly auto­mat­ed as humans are still best to write because they pro­vide an actu­al voice and can instill ele­ments like humor:

“You have the algo­rithm do the grunt work that you wouldn’t want to do any­way. Edi­tors are con­sum­ing and mak­ing big deci­sions, but it comes back to the human voice. There’s noth­ing worse than ser­vices where a robot voice reads news or it is writ­ten in a voice that isn’t human.”

Going for­ward, Mash­able plans to con­tin­ue improv­ing the algo­rithm and to spin out new ver­sions, which includes deter­min­ing not only what news will go viral, but who it will go viral with, he said.

This, he said, will be use­ful for brands try­ing to appeal to spe­cif­ic demo­graph­ics as it will show what’s going to be big for 18- to 25-year-old males in the UK, for exam­ple.

Telling Stories With Native Advertising

In addi­tion to pre­dic­tive algo­rithms, Cash­more said native adver­tis­ing is also a grow­ing part of Mashable’s busi­ness as the indus­try moves into an era of video con­sump­tion and media com­pa­nies make more video.

“I think there’s been a lot of con­fu­sion around the word­ing [of native adver­tis­ing] and around what it is and there were some ear­ly exam­ples of [brands and pub­lish­ers] not doing it right, but we’re kind of past that stage,” he said.

For exam­ple, a hotel brand can spon­sor Mash­able’s trav­el chan­nel, but that hotel doesn’t dic­tate the con­tent that goes into it, Cash­more said. How­ev­er, as the indus­try moves more into video, he says it’s like­ly there will be more spon­sored chan­nel-spe­cif­ic con­tent.

“I think that in the broad­er spec­trum, what we do is tell sto­ries and brands want to tell sto­ries and in a way that is clear they want [con­sumers] to like them and don’t want [con­sumers] to feel tricked,” Cash­more said. “The con­ver­sa­tion on native will keep grow­ing and will be a pos­i­tive thing and a bet­ter thing for con­sumers and adver­tis­ers and, as we move into the video era, it will be eas­i­er to say, ‘Brought to you by this group,’ and pro­vide more clar­i­ty.”

Develop A Broad Base Of Traffic Sources

Cash­more warns against rely­ing too heav­i­ly on cer­tain social net­works for traf­fic.

“Some com­pa­nies are com­plete­ly opti­mized for Face­book, which sets them up for a fall if they com­plete­ly rely on a cer­tain type of head­line,” Cash­more said. “If humans aren’t enjoy­ing that, Face­book takes note of that and Google takes note and will stop show­ing it. It’s impor­tant for us to have a broad base…some of it is search, some of it is Twit­ter. We’re able to grow Pin­ter­est and oth­er net­works in a big way.”

Cash­more said he does­n’t want more than 20 per­cent of traf­fic from a spe­cif­ic net­work.

“We don’t know where the winds might blow,” he said. “It’s key for any pub­li­ca­tion to have a broad base of traf­fic sources. You nev­er want to be 100 per­cent reliant on one site.”