Can AI make TV advertising faster and less expensive?

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.”

Crunching the numbers

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.

“Every month or certainly every three months, we feel like there’s a meaningful improvement in both the underlying technology and the videos that we’re able to produce,” he said.

It takes a village

The company’s technology has already been used quite a bit. Persky-Stern said that hundreds of thousands of videos have already been created on the company’s platform. Overall, he said, some Waymark users have reported a 94% decrease in the amount of time it would take to create a similar video without the tech.

Partnerships with TV networks have expanded the use of Waymark’s technology. The company recently inked a deal with Fox Corp. where Fox distributed the technology to smaller advertisers to help them create TV ads. Waymark and Spectrum Reach, which have been in partnership for longer, recently rolled out the tech to advertisers in 91 markets. Waymark’s other partners include Gray Television, Beasley Media Group, and Morgan Murphy Media, according to Variety.

Waymark’s future plans include making its tech available directly inside of ad platforms small businesses already use so that they can “create video where they’re already familiar working,” Persky-Stern said.

“Fundamentally, our goal is to make creative accessible to every small business out there,” he said.