While much of the world is wringing its hands over how AI might replace people, one startup wants to prove that the real opportunity lies in bringing the two together.
Launched earlier this year, Kartel is a creative marketplace that helps brands and agencies create campaigns by matching them with freelance artists who specialize in AI.
That vision is already playing out for Laser Eye Center, a Los Angeles-based company specializing in Lasik that started experimenting with Kartel to generate creative for broadcast television.
Laser Eye Center had struggled for years with the high cost and slow pace of working directly with networks to create ads, Jenifer Abi Hamad, the brand’s chief strategy officer, told AdExchanger.
The ads generated by Kartel outperformed Laser Eye’s traditional ad spots by 1.5x to 2x, she said.
Pairing up
Kartel’s goal is to democratize advertising through cheaper campaigns that still have a human voice, said Co-Founder Ben Kusin.
(When asked about the company name Kartel, by the way, his explanation was simply that it stands out, it’s catchy, and “we have a rogue pirate vibe.” Okay.)
A brand starts by uploading a brief to Kartel’s platform, which analyzes the content to identify the key themes. From there, Kartel suggests artists in its system whose work aligns with the brand’s creative vision, and the brand makes its selection.
Most of the artists in Kartel’s marketplace come from the “traditional creative space,” said Kusin, including editors, producers and directors who previously worked in ad agencies and have taught themselves how to use AI tools.
The struggle is real
Abi Hamad wasn’t specifically looking for AI as a solution, but she knew Laser Eye needed a new strategy for content generation.
In the past, the local TV network had been producing Kartel’s creative – a perk reserved for its highest-spending clients – but the end results lacked brand cohesion and relevance, Abi Hamad said. In addition to the increasing fragmentation of TV consumption and the struggle to reach the right audience across different channels, Laser Eye’s messaging would get lost among the middlemen, she added.
For instance, Laser Eye Center once said it wanted to focus on the challenges people put up with in their daily lives when they have trouble seeing, like losing their keys or struggling to clean the bathroom.
“The next thing I know,” Abi Hamad said, the network’s creative team had added imagery of a woman cleaning a toilet to the next commercial, which, while accurate, was a bit too literal. “Like, no,” she said. “What are we doing here?”
The other challenge Laser Eye Center was up against was time.
It would take months – sometimes as long as four and a half months – to create just four or five ads, even when Laser Eye was “just versioning,” Abi Hamad said. The smallest changes, like revising a script to say “text” instead of “call” or replacing a phone number with a local LA area code vs. an 800 number would require an entire rerecord.
By the time the hired talent was finished recording each variation, Abi Hamad said, they’d be “burned out.” The scripts had heart, she said, but the final commercial would have “dead energy.”
All eyes ahead
The great thing about robots, though, is that they can’t burn out.
After zeroing in on Laser Eye’s “pain points” – the need for hyperlocalization, cultural intelligence and creative versioning – Abi Hamad recognized that using an AI tool would be the best way to get the speed and efficiency her team was looking for.
After adopting Kartel, Laser Eye was able to reimagine its long-running campaign without starting from scratch. Using the same script and testimonials it had relied on for years, the brand developed a fresh narrative built around 14 characters, each with their own storylines.
Now, though, the characters resonate more deeply with Laser Eye’s audience because they “bring the words to life” more effectively, Abi Hamad said.
But that emotional connection didn’t happen by accident.
The question is always how to turn an ad with a smaller budget into what feels like a “million-dollar commercial,” said Estefania Guarderas, Kartel’s executive producer who designed the creative for Laser Eye.
Guarderas prompted the AI with a detailed background story, similar to how she would direct real actors, drawing on her background as a director and producer. She used Midjourney and Reve for image generation and then touched up the resulting images in Photoshop.
By crafting fully fledged personas – one character, for example, was a construction worker and another was a doctor – Guarderas helped make the creative feel rooted in everyday life.
To add in another layer of authenticity, Guarderas prompted the AI tools in her arsenal – Kartel is tool-agnostic and relies on a range of whatever is considered to be the most advanced at the moment –to hyper-localize the language.
Laser Eye was specifically targeting native Spanish speakers, and Guarderas’ prompting and use of AI made it possible for each character to speak in the accent and cadence specific to a particular country and region.
Changing one’s tune
And it wasn’t only Laser Eye that saw value in this new approach. The TV network that now airs (and used to generate) the brand’s commercials is now looking into using AI for creative production itself.
Abi Hamad acknowledged that many people have an “aversion” to AI-generated content. But she emphasizes that Kartel was able to generate twice as much output with less effort and reduce redundant work, like having to rerecord full commercials to make just one small versioning change.
“I didn’t go looking for AI,” she said. “You start with your objectives, and when you reverse calculate, that’s where you end up.”
