AI has been a hot topic in 2023, with tech titans racing to capitalize on interest in ChatGPT and roll out their own AI-powered platforms (we’re looking at you, Google Bard and Adobe Firefly).

The TV business wants to get in on the excitement, too, and there’s at least one company trying to use AI to make it easier for advertisers to spend on TV. Meet Waymark, a startup that debuted in 2017 and has, according to Crunchbase, raised $4.6 million in funding since its inception. The company’s premise? Using AI to help smaller advertisers quickly create lower-cost commercials.

The startup, which has had a yearslong deal with Spectrum, more recently partnered with Fox Corp. in a bid to make it easier for small businesses in local markets to advertise on TV.

“We’ve had a great opportunity and luck with working with these large platforms that already have these relationships with the smaller businesses,” Alex Persky-Stern, Waymark’s CEO, told Marketing Brew. “It’s a really great partnership to pair technology that we’ve been able to put together with the relationships and distribution that some of these large partners have.”

Waymark’s AI technology, which uses a variety of non-language models as well as ChatGPT, can pull information from a company’s website and its social presence, including its logo and color palette, Persky-Stern told us. From there, he said, Waymark’s technology can generate “custom visual styles that will match your business.” Companies can also provide instructions outlining what they want the content of the video to be.

Companies using the platform can tweak the video by editing text, changing color schemes, and adding other AI-generated elements like voiceovers (Persky-Stern compared it to editing a page on Squarespace). As AI technology improves, Waymark’s AI-generated videos are improving along with it, Persky-Stern said.

Continue reading here.—JS

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The Paris Olympics won’t kick off until summer 2024, but marketers are already staking their claim on the competition.

NBCUniversal is sold out of all of the ad slots for the live airing and streaming of the Opening Ceremony, and only has a “handful” of units left in the prime-time re-airing of the ceremony, Dan Lovinger, NBCU’s president of Olympic and Paralympic partnerships, announced Wednesday. The network is also sold out of all planned halftime sponsorship positions across team competitions like soccer and basketball, he said.

NBCU, which has the rights to air US broadcasts of the games through 2032, is also sold out of “Prime Pods,” a new linear and streaming ad format from NBCU that places ads from a single advertiser within Olympics programming during prime time. (That sellout was previously reported around the time of the network’s upfronts presentation, when it said it had locked in around $100 million in Olympics ad commitments.)

In all, total sales are pacing ahead of prior Olympic Games and prior Paralympic Games, an extension of a trend the company previously shared six months ago.

“With just about 10 months ago, we’re further ahead than we’ve ever been before, for summer or winter games,” Lovinger told Marketing Brew.

The advertisers: NBCU is clocking advertiser interest “across the board,” Lovinger said, with automotive and pharmaceutical brand interest trending upward compared to past games. Brands are particularly interested in women athletes and NBCU’s coverage of women’s sports, which will account for more than 50% of the network’s coverage.

“From pharma to tech to auto, you name it, everybody wants to be part of that,” Lovinger said.

Advertisers are also eager to be involved in the Paralympic Games, he said, which NBCU will air a few weeks after the Olympic Games conclude.

Read more here.—KS

The summer of girlhood may be over, but gal-oween is right around the corner.

Nearly three months after the release of the hit film Barbie, Halloween costumes from the movie are almost entirely sold out, Mattel EVP and chief brand officer Lisa McKnight said at Advertising Week New York.

In a conversation with Time correspondent Eliana Dockterman, McKnight looked back at Mattel’s marketing efforts before and after the movie and shared insights into what has ultimately been a successful product push for the brand, with Barbie sales jumping 25% year over year in July and August.

Time for a rebrand: About 10 years ago, McKnight said “the Barbie brand had hit a low point,” with parents no longer seeing the doll as a role model or feeling a connection with her. In 2015, Mattel started working with BBDO to try to associate the doll more with empowerment, which came as the toy company opted to release dolls that were representative of more diverse shapes, sizes, and looks.

“The minute people stopped focusing on Barbie the doll and thought of her as an idea and a point of inspiration is when we really started to connect with people,” McKnight said.

Releasing (some) creative control: As Mattel was pushing back on the perception that Barbie was strictly blonde-haired and blue-eyed, it was also in the midst of talks with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Margot Robbie to produce and potentially star in the movie.

“When we found out that she wanted to play Barbie, we thought, ‘Wow, this is a tough one because we love you and you’re an amazing actress, but how are you advancing this perception issue that we have with the brand?’” McKnight said. Some of those concerns were alleviated when director Greta Gerwig expressed her vision of Barbieland, where many of the dolls, not just Robbie’s character, go by Barbie.

Read more here.—KH

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AI-generated songs call into question how computers help make music—and the Grammys and Jay-Z have points to add to the conversation.

Check it out.