On everyone’s mind this year is generative AI (of course). But the focus for the ad industry isn’t just about the large language models creating quick videos that general consumers of products like ChatGPT or Google’s Sora are familiar with.
The killer application for generative AI tech in TV advertising right now is very simple: auto-creating videos that small and local businesses can use to run CTV and streaming TV ads. They form the backbones for Google and Meta.
Comcast Advertising took the opportunity at CES to announce a product called Universal Ads that tries to make everything – from producing creative to serving ads – very simple for even SMBs with little marketing know-how.
Meta has more than 10 million such SMBs on its ad platform, NBCUniversal Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships Mark Marshall told CNBC. NBC has only some thousands.
So I decided to speak with one interesting local brand, a coffee seller called Trident Coffee, which a few years ago switched from distributing in retail stores to a DTC model with a handful of their own stores (“tap rooms” is their term) in San Diego.
Trident works with Streamr.ai, a startup that auto-generates and optimizes streaming ads. And the company is leaning way in on platforms that can dynamically generate and target creative for the brand, according to Founder and CEO Eric Johnson.
AdExchanger caught up with Johnson to discuss how his company uses auto-generated creative in its new DTC-focused model.
AdExchanger: Did the switch from retail distribution to DTC sales and your own stores change the media mix for ads?
ERIC JOHNSON: The media mix is different now because, with retail, it was extremely difficult for us to figure out who our customer was who was buying off the shelf.
It was very expensive to buy the data from retailers. So it’s important to be able to finely target our advertising, for us either through geolocation and key metrics or local searches, as well as [targeting] health and wellness consumers for the DTC move. Streamers have some great stuff that we can dial in with our ad spend to target the right customers.
What do you mean?
For instance, for the three tap rooms, we really want to make sure we can promote in the ZIP code to make sure we’re getting people within a three-to-five-mile radius of our stores.
There’s a logical limit. People may not want to travel 10 miles to get their coffee, but we can really own our local backyard. With these geolocation ads, if someone’s in our ZIP code, the streamer will pick that up and be able to target those individuals directly and/or based off what they’re watching on the platform.
It really helps us keep advertising costs down. We’re not reaching a broad brushstroke of people that may not come to the stores.
Do you use Streamr.ai to generate creative for CTV ads, as well as the targeting and campaign management?
What we’re able to do right now is have our content in Streamr, and their AI system can create more engaging content based on that. They also hyperlink it, add tags with the geolocation, a QR code, the targeting info for our key consumer demographics, like age or lifestyle traits.
We can provide content that’s in the ballpark of what we want, and their platform can shift and edit it a bit to make it more engaging or add in the captions and other elements that consumers can go through. So instead of just a photo, Streamr will create a kind of animation or something more engaging, instead of a still photo.
How do you feel about an ad platform dynamically creating a CTV ad on the fly that wasn’t preapproved?
We’re actually working through that right now for the DTC side for Amazon Prime Video. We’ve gotten all the tutorials behind it and the screenshots of how things will look.
The last pieces of content we did was through March Madness for our tap rooms. And we saw a lot of great local impressions with that campaign. We’re very excited to be able to get [dynamic generative CTV ads] going for Amazon Prime, because that’s where we see a lot of our customers coming in from with the new DTC model.
Do you feel that auto-generated creative is superior, or just more efficient compared to producing your own ad?
I definitely feel it is superior.
For one thing, a lot of the opportunity with generative AI creative is the potential for that media to go from still to video.
With Streamr, we haven’t seen issues, like people with seven fingers or that aren’t lifelike. And it uses our content, so it is more extrapolated an image to be a video that’s in line with how we want the final ad to look.
How much of the focus is on Amazon?
For us, Google works more for like SEO purposes and maybe taking you to the website. But we’ve seen consumers basically searching Amazon for products now and Google.
We’ve seen on TikTok Shop, too, that most people who are seeing [the product] on TikTok are then making the final purchase on Amazon, where our DTC initiative is.
So for us to be able to promote on Amazon Prime through Streamer, it meets our customers where they’re already making the purchase.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
