Marketers claim they want control over creative production, but the moment a new AI tool hits the scene, they’re suddenly all about convenience.
AI video ad platform Airpost, which launched last month, does its best to find that happy medium. Today, it announced $4.1 million in seed funding.
If your company wants to give up its marketing budget, lay off half of its employees and solely use AI-generated content, then Airpost is “not for you,” CEO and Founder John Gargiulo said.
But most brands don’t want to give up control and trust a machine to get everything right from brand voice to product imagery, he said. And even if they were ready to give up control, the AI itself might not be ready.
“Anyone who says AI can be creative and get high performing results,” said Gargiulo, “is deluding themselves.”
The majority of Airpost’s 33-person team – roughly two-thirds – is made up of engineers working on its AI engine. A separate team prompts and shapes the AI video assets, and a broader creative team assembles and refines the final product.
First, brands upload their preexisting assets and audience guidelines. Airpost generates a creative brief for a specific product, which the brand can manually revise. Then, Airpost’s creative team uses the platform to put together video ads, and each client receives a minimum of 10 unique ads per week, plus unlimited versioning.
The videos are a mix of AI-generated and organic content.
The organic content falls into one of two baskets: brands’ own preexisting assets, which the AI analyzes and categorizes based on details like the angle of the shot and the image content, or what Gargiulo called Airpost’s “proprietary library.”
The “library” is made up of stock-like images that aren’t product-specific, like a shot of someone’s home or a couple walking in the park, shot by Airpost’s digital agency, Ready Set. Brands have consented to sharing any of their clips for reuse (so long as they don’t feature a logo or product), rather than generating new AI content or filming a nearly identical scene.
AI on its own is simply “not good enough” to generate full ads, said Gargiulo. People still need to “punch up the copy” or replace a strangely uncanny clip with perhaps a preexisting clip from that library, he said.
For instance, Airpost’s AI was testing out deodorant ads for a personal care brand (primarily geared toward men) that wanted to target women who were seeking out less traditionally feminine scents. One of the lines it generated sounded “a little AI-ish,” said Gargiulo, stating that not all women “want to use women’s deodorant.” Airpost’s creative team flagged that this line sounded a bit dull and clunky, recognizing that it was unlikely to resonate with its audience.
One of the humans on the creative team revised it to say, “I was tired of smelling like a scented candle,” something catchier that ultimately drove better performance, Gargiulo said, that AI “just can’t create yet.”
(But stay tuned. Gargiulo says the plan is to use a large portion of the seed funding to improve Airpost’s AI engine so it can eventually create high-performing ads on its own – which, he noted, is “incredibly hard.”)
Once the content is finalized, brands download their ads to run across channels.
To keep these ads compliant and on-brand, Airpost uses AI to help ensure that each ad meets the brand’s guidelines, Gargiulo said.
One of the first things a brand submits to Airpost is a deck that includes restrictions like settings it wants to steer clear of and words it can’t allow in its ads. Airpost’s AI tools interpret the restrictions (and humans subsequently double-check the AI’s work) to generate an ad that adheres to that brand’s particular standards.
“Legal and compliance is so unsexy,” Gargiulo said, but it’s something that can make or break a brand’s experience – and needs to be done with extreme precision.
To encourage wider use of its product, the company also plans to use its seed funding toward influencer marketing focused on people who “understand the space” and are willing to show their use of the product, said Gargiulo, such as creative strategists with an active social media presence.
Word of mouth, along with networking, is Airpost’s primary way of getting the word out about the product.
“Maybe this is bad to say,” said Gargiulo, “but we’re not spending a dollar on Google ads.”
The company is aiming to go after “really big clients” and win over the “whole” enterprise space, but Gargiulo believes it can be done “without a huge marketing team or sales team.”
“You just need creators, industry folks,” he said, with the product in their hands.
