AI Tools Automate Creative Ad Research
A new workflow detailed on the "Marketing Against The Grain" podcast uses AI to automate hours of creative research for social media advertising. The process uses Appify to scrape TikTok videos and Google's Gemini to analyze content and comments, extracting insights on visual hooks, themes, and audience pain points to generate creative briefs.
- The podcast detailing the workflow, "Marketing Against The Grain," is hosted by HubSpot’s CMO Kipp Bodnar and SVP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan, focusing on emerging growth tactics and AI's role in marketing systems. - The process of scraping TikTok data is handled by platforms like Apify, which can extract video URLs, user comments, and engagement metrics based on specific hashtags or profiles for analysis. Google's Gemini is then used to perform multimodal analysis on this scraped content, identifying visual trends, emotional triggers, and recurring themes in both the video and text comments. - Beyond research, AI tools are reshaping video production workflows; text-based editors like Descript allow for editing video by altering the transcript, while platforms such as Opus Clip and Veed use AI to automatically identify viral moments in long-form content and repurpose them into short social clips. - Top-tier B2B video campaigns that drive results often blend narrative storytelling with clear business outcomes. For example, Adobe's "I Love You, Acrobat" campaign won a 2024 Webby Award for its effective B2B storytelling, while Slack's "So Yeah, We Tried Slack..." succeeded by framing the video itself as a customer testimonial. - To elevate customer testimonials and documentary work, many B2B creators employ classic narrative structures like the "Hero's Journey" or the StoryBrand framework, which positions the customer as the hero and the company's product as the guide that helps them overcome a specific villain or problem. - The move toward AI-assisted production is a key theme in creative leadership, where it's used to de-risk concepts and scale content. Lexus famously used AI to analyze award-winning ads to write a commercial script, while Harley-Davidson utilized an AI platform to automate ad optimization, resulting in a 2,930% increase in leads. - Major brands are using generative AI to scale creative production far beyond traditional methods. H&M created AI-powered "digital twins" of models to generate thousands of consistent images without costly photoshoots, and Coca-Cola has used AI to create ad content tailored to specific cities and cultural contexts. - The adoption of AI in creative and media workflows is accelerating, with 37% of the marketing and advertising sector actively using it. Furthermore, 81% of creative professionals report having used generative AI tools, with many cutting down task time by about 20%.
