AI

Martech holding company The Brandtech Group acquired Pencil, a generative AI platform for ads, on Thursday.

Google made six AI-related announcements in one day, including the ability to use images in Bard prompts, additions to its Search Generative Experience, a virtual clothing try-on feature and two new AI-powered video campaigns for YouTube.

The dynamic creative company A Million Ads, which focuses on the audio market, launched a new personalization product Wednesday that changes creative elements like voice, sound effects and companion images based on who the customer is.

New startups are starting to use generative AI to flip the script on in-video product placement, including Rembrand, a new venture launched by ad tech vet Omar Tawakol in February.

Who needs friends when you can converse with your data clean room, chat with your ad platform and, uh, talk to your marketing cloud?

Forget Skynet. The robot revolution will be fought between large ad platforms (mainly Google, Meta and Amazon) trying to woo advertisers with generative AI and promises of better performance.

It’s up to technology and media companies to decide whether AI will be an atomic bomb that annihilates countless jobs or if it will power the workforce’s next leap in productivity.

Meta is allocating an increasing percentage of the billions of dollars it spends annually on its infrastructure toward building the company’s “capacity for artificial intelligence,” says John Hegeman, Meta’s VP of monetization.

Historically, AppLovin made most of its revenue from its portfolio of apps. Now the company appears to be nearly finished with the bloodletting necessary to transform itself into a primarily software-focused business.

Trebel Music has released a ChatGPT-powered product called Trebel AI, which instantly generates personalized playlists in response to natural language queries. Advertisers on Trebel AI can target users in the moment based on their intent.