Tag: boom

Advertising & Marketing

How the generative A.I. boom could forever change online advertising

Sebastien Bozon | AFP | Getty Images

Shortly after ChatGPT hit the market last year and instantly captured headlines for its ability to appear human in answering user queries, digital marketing veteran Shane Rasnak began experimenting.

As someone who had built a career in creating online ad campaigns for clients, Rasnak saw how generative artificial intelligence could transform his industry. Whether it was coming up with headlines for Facebook ads or short blurbs of ad copy, Rasnak said, jobs that would have taken him 30 minutes to an hour are now 15-minute projects.

And that’s just the beginning.

Rasnak is also playing with generative AI tools such as Midjourney, which turns text-based prompts into images, as he tries to dream up compelling visuals to accompany Facebook ads. The software is particularly handy for someone without a graphic design background, Rasnak said, and can help alongside popular graphic-editing tools from Canva and Adobe’s Photoshop.

While it’s all still brand new, Rasnak said generative AI is “like the advent of social media” in terms of its impact on the digital ad industry. Facebook and Twitter made it possible for advertisers to target consumers based on their likes, friends and interests, and generative AI now gives them the ability to create tailored messaging and visuals in building and polishing campaigns.

“In terms of how we market our work, the output, the quality and the volume that they’re able to put out, and how personalized you can get as a result of that, that just completely changes everything,” Rasnak said.

Rasnak is far from alone on the hype train.

Meta, Alphabet and Amazon, the leaders in online advertising, are all betting generative AI will eventually be core to their businesses. They’ve each recently debuted products or announced plans to develop various tools

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Advertising & Marketing

Short-form video ad boom may not be great for TikTok (eventually)

The growth of short-form video advertising may not be a great thing for TikTok.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it will be a bad thing either. Money continues to pour into the short-form video app at a clip, despite the ongoing controversies over it. But those dollars may not flow as fast as they once did, now there’s more competition — competition from the likes of Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and even Snapchat’s Spotlight.

While more ad dollars are being spent on the short-form format, it’s now being allocated across more platforms than ever before. And this could become troublesome for TikTok in the long run even if it initially got marketers addicted to short-form video content.

“TikTok led the global short video field over the last few years — 2023 is the first time that run may be challenged,” said Jamie MacEwan, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “TikTok’s user base crossed a billion while ad revenue reached around $9 billion in 2022, up tenfold on 2020. We expect its ad growth to slow a bit to around 40% this year.”

If this happens, it could be a chance for a company like Meta to carve out a bigger share of those ad dollars earmarked for short-form video.

Reels is closing the gap

Momentum for advertising on Reels is building. Expect Meta will do what it can to sustain it. Marketers have told Digiday over the last few months that Reels is already in a strong second place to TikTok, and the gap between the two is narrowing.

Reels has already made inroads into those budgets over the last year or so. Its annual ad revenue run rate tripled from $1 billion in Q2 2022 to $3 billion at the end of the year, a rate likely to continue now

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