Several times a day, the AdExchanger editorial team receives yet another pitch with “AI” in the subject line and news of an AI product release.
We only cover a fraction of those announcements. In the past week, Salesforce, Google and a startup backed by an ex-Oracle employee, Rembrand, all made the cut by using AI in material ways.
How each company is using AI to help marketers runs the gamut. Startup Rembrand uses AI to put shampoo bottles in influencers’ YouTube videos. Salesforce is using AI to help marketers query data without using code. Google is using AI for pretty much everything, including to show virtual models trying on clothes in different sizes or to come up with variations of a product.
As AI is infused into more and more creative, it can feel strange at first. A shampoo bottle in the back of a meditation video might be jarring, even if it’s less interruptive than an ad in the middle of a meditation session.
It also fuels various worries, leading to speculative questioning. Could this tech be misused to create deepfakes? If third-party cookies were harmless little trackers that also enabled more nefarious types of spying and privacy violations, what could AI-generated creative unleash?
Playing in that sandbox
After diving through the latest wave of announcements, we turn to the privacy sandbox in the second half of the episode. Publishers continue to drag their feet in testing, our associate editor Anthony Vargas noted, while reporting from the Ops conference last week in New York City.
Given the challenges of the current media climate, with ad revenue down, few publishers want to think long term and invest in testing. But before long, even short-term publishers will be nudged over the edge, especially after 1% of third-party cookies are deprecated in Q1 2024.
