After the introduction of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in 2014, a whole new era for AI image synthesis began. The latest GAN architectures can generate high-resolution, realistic, and colorful images that are almost impossible to distinguish from the real photographs. So, why spend time on exhausting and expensive photoshoots and video-shoots, if you can use an image or video of an automatically generated AI model who is the perfect fit for your brand? That’s the solution that the most technologically advanced marketing teams are turning to nowadays.
However, AI capabilities are not limited to the generation of visual content. The advances in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG) of the last few years have made artificial intelligence a part of copywriter teams. The marketing messages generated with AI-driven solutions are not only plausible but also data-driven – the text can reflect the brand’s voice and be tailored to specific audiences.
In this article, we feature companies that are leveraging cutting-edge AI research for generating marketing visuals and ad copy.
Visual Content
Are you struggling with finding a perfect model to represent your brand or product? With AI, you can get unique models for your advertising visuals using only software. Here are the companies offering automatically generated marketing and advertising visuals.
1. Rosebud.ai
Rosebud’s technology can generate ideal model faces for your advertising campaigns. With AI-generated marketing visuals, you are no longer dependent on talent, while getting a much cheaper and faster solution.
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When using artificial humans for your ad campaigns, you have the opportunity to easily adapt the model to your different audiences. Basically, you can make infinite variations of models and target your customers with a variety of visuals based on detailed audience demographics. The company claims that the first campaigns leveraging their AI-generated models demonstrate a 22% increase in click-through rate.
Rosebud is headed by Lisha Li, who holds a Ph.D. in Statistics and Machine Learning from the University of California, Berkeley. The startup is backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Amplify Partners, Lux Capital, and several angels including Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI.
2. DataGrid
DataGrid has developed AI for automatic whole-body model generation. They utilize generative adversarial networks (GANs) to synthesize images of non-existent people at high resolution (1024 × 1024). The models look very realistic and are ready to be used for advertising campaigns and online clothing stores.
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The company is housed on the campus of Japan’s Kyoto University and has a strong in-house research and development team. DataGrid is headed by Okada Yuki (CEO and co-founder) and Satoshi Ogawa (CTO and co-founder), who both majored in machine learning at Kyoto University. Furthermore, Professor Yutaka Matsuo from the University of Tokyo serves as a technology mentor for the company.
3. NEON
At CES 2020, Samsung-backed STAR Labs introduced NEON, which is claimed to be the world’s first “Artificial Human”. The avatars introduced by the company can converse and sympathize like human beings. So they are not just models for marketing campaigns but rather virtual assistants of the future. However, it is worth mentioning that the technology is at an early stage, and the conversational skills and visual quality of these artificial humans are yet to evolve.
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The technology includes two key components:
- CORE R3, where “R3” states for “Reality”, “Realtime”, and “Responsive”. The component is responsible for generating new expressions, reactions, and gestures.
- SPECTRA, the AI engine that leverages biomimetic strategies to add intelligence, learning skills, memory, and emotions to the unique personas of the virtual assistants.
Pranav Mistry, President and CEO of STAR Labs, and now also CEO of NEON, is the inspiration and brains behind this new technology. He believes that technology should become more human rather than people becoming more like machines.
4. Synthesia
Synthesia introduces technology for generating localized and personalized videos using AI. In particular, they have two solutions:
- Translate for easy translation of video content to 99+ languages with the person in the video talking naturally in any of these languages.
- Personalize for personalizing conversations with customers. With Synthesia’s technology, you can make a person in the video talk to your customers individually, mentioning their name and any other specific details.
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The company was founded in 2017 by researchers and entrepreneurs from leading universities and research labs. For example, one of Synthesia’s co-founders, Professor Matthias Niessner, leads a Visual Computing Group that has eight papers accepted to CVPR 2020, the key conference in computer vision. Another co-founder of Synthesia, Professor Lourdes Agapito, teaches 3D computer vision at University College London. The team consists of research engineers with true expertise in state-of-the-art computer vision technologies.
5. Zalando
Zalando is a Berlin-based online fashion platform that connects customers and brands. It has a separate marketing unit called Zalando Marketing Services (ZMS), which helps brands using their platform to run more effective marketing campaigns with a data-driven approach.
When it comes to generating creative advertising content, Zalando researchers have some cutting-edge solutions for its partners. In particular, one of their recent research papers suggests a novel approach to generating high-resolution images of fashion models wearing a custom outfit on an input body position. In simple terms, you can transfer the colors of an outfit or a body pose to a different model.
The company recognizes research and innovation as the key factors in their future success, so they have established a Zalando Research lab that focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. The team is led by Urs Bergmann, a machine learning researcher with a strong AI background.
If you’re particularly interested in generating original marketing content with AI, learn about novel approaches to image and video synthesis in our premium research summaries.
Text Content
As well as marketing and advertising visuals, AI is also getting quite good at the generation of ad copy for email, social media campaigns, and more. Here are some companies offering AI-powered copywriting solutions.
6. Phrasee
Phrasee can help you get more opens, clicks, and conversions by generating marketing copies for Facebook, push, and email campaigns. The company claims that its AI-generated messages are always in the brand’s voice, and thus resonate well with the audience.
Clients seem to be happy with the solution. Virgin Holidays says that Phrasee’s AI has increased their email revenue by a few million pounds. A CRM manager from Domino’s Pizza also acknowledges that their email results have become awesome after leveraging the Phrasee solution.
Dr. Neil Yager, Phrasee’s co-founder and Chief Scientist, is the main person behind the company’s core technology. He has been involved in AI-related topics since his Ph.D. in the mid-2000s, although before founding Phrasee he focused on the fields of signal processing and computer vision.
7. Persado
If you struggle to understand how specific words and phrases impact the performance of your marketing campaigns, Persado has an AI-driven solution for your business.
Their technology allows marketing creative to be broken down into six critical elements: narrative, emotion, descriptions, calls-to-action, formatting, and word positioning. Then you can run multiple experiments by using different combinations of these elements to come up with the best-performing message to speak to each customer. The performance of the machine learning models behind Persado’s solution improves with each campaign as new data is received and fed into the models.
With hundreds of brands leveraging the Persado Message Machine, it looks like the solution is really effective at improving brand engagement and conversions. After turning to Persado’s technology, Hostelworld achieved 86% lift of average click-through rate and 12% lift of average open rate. Dell also claims to get impressive results after leveraging this technology for their promotional emails, Facebook ads, display banners, and even radio content: 50% average growth of click-through rate, 46% average growth in conversions, and 77% average lift for “add-to-cart”.
The company claims that its patented technology is the result of six years of proprietary research by world-class data scientists, linguists, and engineers. Indeed, Alex Vratskides, CEO and founder of Persado, has an educational background in applied mathematics, while their Chief Data Scientist Panagiotis Angelopoulos has a Ph.D. in Statistics, a strong academic profile, and solid practical experience.
8. Pencil
The Pencil solution provides marketers with AI-written headlines and descriptions. Based on information about the brand, its audiences, and its products, the technology supplies:
- automatically generated headlines that are in line with the brand’s voice as well as specific to each audience;
- product descriptions that suggest new ways of presenting the products.
The company’s website invites those interested in the technology to “join the waiting list”. So, the effectiveness of Pencil’s solution is probably not yet proven with successful case studies.
However, it looks like they have quite a strong team on board. Sumukh Avadhani, CTO and co-founder at Pencil, was previously a Principal at Google as well as a member of technical teams at Samsung and Google. In addition, the company has attracted a number of AI software engineers with relevant expertise. For example, Divish Dayal, AI Software Engineer at Pencil, co-authored the research paper Automated Generation of Search Advertisements that was presented at one of the EMNLP 2019 workshops.
Learn about state-of-the-art approaches to text generation for marketing & advertising in our premium research summaries.
Apply The Latest AI & ML Research To Your Advertising & Marketing Initiatives
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There have also been a number of new research breakthroughs from 2019–2020 which can give you an edge in your industry.
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