LONDON, UK — In 2024, hype about bleeding-edge creative AI in the ad industry is likely to blossom into real-world application.

Speaking to me at The Future of TV Advertising Global 2023, presented by Index Exchange, Jean-Paul Edwards, Managing Director, Product, OMD Worldwide, got excited about use of machine learning in ad planning and generative AI for innovative content creation.

OMD AI Will Scale-Up

“We’re doing these things in a private and secure way and teaching our people about responsible use of AI,” he says, emphasizing the need for cautious application of the technology.

Looking forward, Edwards predicts a rapid advancement of these technologies. He believes that the focus in the coming year will be on proving these concepts at a larger scale.

“I think we’ll see more use of these tools in day-to-day planning, he suggests. With AI, decisions about the context for advertising can be made more precise and efficient.

Experimentation and Innovation

“We’ll definitely be experimenting heavily in terms of just exploring some of these new opportunities.”

So, what kinds of innovation is Edwards imagining?

“Gen AI is very much based on the creation of content –  ‘synthetic content’, some people call it,” Edwards explains.

The capacity for AI to generate content from a prompt could allow for the creation of entirely new forms of advertising, he speculates.

Though the technology is in its early stages, recent developments such as the launch of Pika Labs (a text-to-video creator) and Runway TV (a platform from AI model creator Runway, streaming ML-generated video content) suggest that we could soon be seeing high-fidelity, high-resolution video content created from text or image inputs.

AI Brings A New Dimension

Edwards also sees potential in the application of AI in creating what he terms “layers of content”. He cites the example of Amazon Prime’s Next Gen Stats, an initiative that uses AR models to track live video and provide real-time player analysis for their Thursday Night Football.

Such technology could be used to add an extra dimension to advertising content and could potentially be sponsored by brands.

Furthermore, he highlights the potential for AI in breaking down language barriers, citing technologies like LipDub and HeyGen that can translate audio in the speaker’s voice and sync the lips to match.

You’re watching Beet.TV coverage of The Future of TV Advertising Global 2023, presented by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews