Month: October 2024

Gone are the days when big brands were solely reliant on agencies to produce high quality content. Thanks to tools like AI, creators can now get in on the action. With the rise of social media, short-form video, and the growing influence of AI, creators are now in a prime position to snag a slice of that lucrative pie. Whether through their own channels or self-made businesses, creators have become more important to these brands.

One example is Brandon Baum, otherwise known as Brandon B — the YouTuber who is Europe’s largest visual effects artist on the platform with more than 14 million subscribers and 10 billion video views.

Completely self-taught, 25-year-old Baum turned his hobby of watching YouTube videos after school from about the age of 12, about how to use special effects, into a full-fledged career. After dropping out of film school, having realized he already had the knowledge and skills needed to succeed, Baum spent four years working in TV where he learned about how productions are run at scale, working on multi-million pound sets with crew sizes of over 100. This experience led to him working with and being mentored by YouTube duo Woody and Kleiny, and subsequently launching his own production company, Studio V, now with 25 staffers, during the 2020 lockdown.

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This story was first published on sister site, Modern Retail.

Major advertising platforms are pushing marketers to use generative AI to make holiday ads. Agencies and brands, however, are still unsure about integrating such technology into their playbooks.

Meta’s holiday marketing guide encourages advertisers to use its generative AI creative features within its Advantage+ ad platform to change backgrounds on images, expand ad image sizes to fit different aspect ratios or generate different versions of ad text to see what works best with shoppers. A Google Ads newsletter by Jyotika Prasad, Google’s senior director of retail ads, recommends brands use similar features to generate new holiday lifestyle imagery, create new image variations or automatically change headlines and descriptions within campaigns.

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Gaming’s presence at Advertising Week 2024 was less all-encompassing than in past years — but the presence of key industry players at this year’s conference shows that gaming companies still view advertising as a key potential growth area for 2025.

After bonanza years fueled by the COVID-19 lockdown, ad industry excitement around gaming has subsided somewhat in 2024. At Advertising Week 2021, there were 15 dedicated gaming or metaverse sessions; in 2022, the number of gaming sessions peaked at 18. At this year’s event — as with last year — the number of gaming-specific panels stood at 10. Gaming is still making its voice heard at Advertising Week, but artificial intelligence is undeniably the belle of the ball.

The reduction in the quantity of Advertising Week’s gaming sessions was arguably counterbalanced by an increase in the quality of the gaming advertising inventory on display. This year’s conference featured talks by two of the largest gaming platforms currently making a push into advertising: Roblox and Discord.

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The world’s long list of large language models now includes a macropod.

On Wednesday, Walmart debuted a new set of retail-specific AI models to help power the company’s “Adaptive Retail” era of personalized shopping and customer service. Called Wallaby, the LLMs were trained on decades of Walmart data with company-specific knowledge about customers, employees, Walmart terminology, its corporate values and other brand-specific data. Walmart also plans to integrate Wallaby with other AI models based on the goals for each application.

Along with Wallaby, other initiatives in the works include a new “content decision platform” that uses AI to understand customers, and a generative AI-powered tool to predict content each shopper would want to see on the Walmart’s website. Walmart also has developed an AR platform called Retina to engage with customers in new online environments using virtual spaces and avatars. Another update includes new immersive commerce APIs, which are in alpha tests with the gaming engine Unity and the virtual world platform Zepeto.

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Kelly MacLean, vice president of product, Amazon Ads

Modern marketers are facing a confluence of rapidly shifting currents — some exciting, and some that are perhaps more unclear. Constant upstream changes in the world of digital advertising keep poking holes in marketers’ boats, forcing them to decide whether to get a bucket and start bailing or get a new boat altogether.

Making this decision requires a hard look at the currents driving all this change. Understanding them may lead to a closer look at the ability of their DSP to perform for present and impending needs. This is a time for marketers to look at things a little differently, building for the long term to develop solutions grounded in what they need now and in the future. 

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Hulu wants to immerse audiences into the world of Mexican boxing. La Maquina, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, premiered on Hulu this week, marking the streaming service’s first Spanish language-produced original series. Searchlight Television brought the idea to Hulu, according to Jordan Helman, executive vice president, drama, Hulu Originals and ABC Entertainment. The…

X is replacing its Ad Revenue Share program with a payout system dependent on how much Premium subscribers engage with a creator’s content.

Domino’s is fueling gaming sessions and solving beauty emergencies with a novel buy one, get one free offer in the second flight of its “Emergency Pizza” campaign from agency of record WorkInProgress. Domino’s Rewards members who spend $7.99 or more through Jan. 19 will receive an offer in their account for a free medium, two-topping…

Grande Communications either knew or was “willfully blind” to identities of infringing subscribers, yet “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway,” an appellate court said.

Grande Communications either knew or was “willfully blind” to identities of infringing subscribers, yet “made the choice to continue providing services to them anyway,” an appellate court said this
week.