I’ve seen many small businesses do well on TikTok and Instagram by eschewing all fancy graphics and technology, and just talking into their phone’s camera like a normal person. “Hey I’m Joe, I just opened a cafe down here. It’s always been my dream, etc.” The more quirky and human the video, the better it does.
I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.
What you’re talking about is the primary marketing collateral. But any good marketing campaign needs a ton of secondary or even tertiary marketing collateral
The first “real video” you talked about is meant to grab attention and tell users, honestly, what the product is about
But they’re not customers - yet. They need to be reminded about your brand again and again
You can’t run the same video every time - for one, its repetitive. And for two, its disruptive on the wrong channels
You will need static images and basic videos and even tweets across platforms to remarket to your audience
That’s where tools like this come in handy. You grabbed attention with the first video. But now you need to tell users that if they buy tomorrow, they get 15% off.
I think you might be seeing guys who do that well so it's a bit survivorship bias. For most, if you just record yourself talking for 1m and watch it back as a video it's incredibly painful and awkward. The filler words, tangents, weird pauses. It really made me have respect for great speakers
No, I have seen plenty of awkward people talking about their new business. The awkwardness is inferior to charismatic speakers, for sure, but it's still better than generic AI slop marketing content.
This works for the subset of people who have a good story or a real connection to their brand, but that's just not most businesses. I buy and operate e-commerce brands, and I can't do it both because I really don't want to be on camera and because "hey I bought this company that sells leather handle covers for cast iron pans, and I personally don't use them but the cashflow was good" is not so compelling as a message. Sometimes you just need messages that convey the value proposition of the brand. (And FWIW they are nice handle covers, I just prefer to use a kitchen towel to grab my cast iron.)
That said, I think video generation is at the point where someone will probably develop a product that fakes the kinds of videos you're talking about in the near future.
Yes but those guys need their marketing to work. Most marketing people just need to spend a budget. For those guys now they can pump out infinite crap to spend their budget so that you rEMemBeR tHeM lATer.
This is depressing. We are already meat in the google ad-serving machine that tracks us, profiles us, gives us "free" stuff (gmail, anyone?) in order to feed us advertising.
Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.
Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
--
[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.
One of the best arguments in favor of ads is that high-quality ads act as an honest/credible signal that a firm is a serious business offering a serious product. Through making the production of high-quality ads cheap, people who are truly passionate about their small business will be "disrupted", and scammers/fly-by-night operations will be "supercharged".
> The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)
If that happens it won't be the AI people who benefit. The wealth will be concentrated among the present capital owners. Even many top AI experts who contributed critical research won't become rich.
You'll see the wealth concentration you talk of, but it'll be completely different people who get this wealth, maybe even people who own businesses where wages are a large outlay.
This is why they are looking at government coffers with a hunger in their eyes. They don't care for the long term societal stability; the richest of them fantasize riding it out in their island bunkers.
The answer is already in your question. The original Industrial Revolution concentrated wealth and yet increased the baseline wealth for everyone else.
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population?
Who cares? That's two quarters away. What matters is that I got my Lambo and my speedboat today. Let the poors worry about the future.
People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
That is the problem with this advice. “Can choose not to” is code to stop someone complaining. “Just don’t use it then”. It sounds equivalent to the “love it or leave it” slogan used in the 70s in America.
We don’t leave. We fight. We don’t stop using. We openly and publicly criticize
I’ve been thinking long and hard about how AI could disrupt the field of ads creative, because a significant part of my income is tied to motion design applied to html5 banner campaigns for large companies in Europe.
What I see is that clients that invest in a campaign do not want to think about what an AI can produce. They don’t want to interact or brief an AI, they don’t want to do feedback rounds with an AI. They want a group of professionals that knows them to take over and do it all. If the professionals then use some AI for it, they mostly don’t care.
This is true so far for any campaign that allocates relevant funds (mid 5 figures and upwards).
When it comes to the actual creation phase, right now AI is fundamentally immature and incapable of being controlled past the creation of static content.
All the motion and animation part for example is still somehow terra incognita for these tools. Take Adobe Animate, which is the go-to tool for anything 2D-animation, or Google Web Designer. Zero AI-features, simply because you can’t LLM frame by frame animations and have a result that is as precise as you need it. Or maybe you can, but for some reason these companies don’t see a business case for allocating resources to this specific development.
These tools can be great for smaller business that won’t have access to large campaigns, but as someone else mentioned, why do that when hiring a working gen-z social media native student will cost you slightly more, and possibly perform 100-times better with their native social media aesthetic?
Ps: Pomelli means door handles in Italian, and that’s… weird? Feels like a name randomly regurgitated by an LLM as well.
Probably good for mom and pop shops, and super useful for someone who has a couple of restaurant locations or a few small grocery stores. I know a lot of places don't update their IG or whatever with specials for the week or basically anything because it's time and effort, if someone was running a campaign for a week of say a free side with a burger, but wanted to do a different side every day you could pick for free, you could churn stuff like that out super fast with this.
I tried it. I used it first for my stuff and thought wow I'd never use this for my stuff, but my stuff isn't a mom and pop burger joint with the kids working on weekend etc, I will show it to the lady who has the pho shop next door, maybe she will update her IG with her specials more often than "whenever I remember".
Suspicious-me is wondering how Google are going to treat AI generated marketing slop created using Pomelli differently to slop created with other tools (or even human created marketing content) in search ranking?
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
I doubt that the product folks over at Google overseeing an experimental project like this have such outsized influence over something core like the ads engine
Google actually doesn't give a single flying fuck about AI slop because they produce it themselves and believe AI slop will feed their quarters going forward.
They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.
Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
I doubt Pomelli would get ranked higher. Google biases ads to their highest spenders. The more you spend, the better your ads perform. Nobody using something like Pomelli is giving Google enough money to rank highly. They could outrank the very lowest spenders, namely scammers and dropshippers whose ads are already AI slop anyway. But, really, who cares?
Readit News
I know this new tool looks to be for static graphics; but I do think the same thing applies. Not using AI-generated polished graphics will become a differentiator.
The first “real video” you talked about is meant to grab attention and tell users, honestly, what the product is about
But they’re not customers - yet. They need to be reminded about your brand again and again
You can’t run the same video every time - for one, its repetitive. And for two, its disruptive on the wrong channels
You will need static images and basic videos and even tweets across platforms to remarket to your audience
That’s where tools like this come in handy. You grabbed attention with the first video. But now you need to tell users that if they buy tomorrow, they get 15% off.
That said, I think video generation is at the point where someone will probably develop a product that fakes the kinds of videos you're talking about in the near future.
Now even that advertising will be AI-generated. The human is reduced to the ultimate consumption machine, to be fed stuff paid for by advertisers and generated by machines.
Maybe that's good and maybe not. But big brands always had this splashy advertising, so this evens the field
There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better
--
[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.
We set all our servers to listen on port 4443, and walk away from the whole sorry mess.
Make it all again from scratch. Block whole swathes of IP ranges known to belong to FAANG.
Question is, if the AI bros are right about a "new industrial revolution", will there be consumers to consume if all the wealth is concentrated in the top 1-2% of the population? (the owners of AI hardware and software)
You'll see the wealth concentration you talk of, but it'll be completely different people who get this wealth, maybe even people who own businesses where wages are a large outlay.
The question is, will be there anything left for humans to consume ? will we survive ?
There is no reason to believe otherwise in this revolution.
Who cares? That's two quarters away. What matters is that I got my Lambo and my speedboat today. Let the poors worry about the future.
Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.
I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.
The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
I think we’re in a world so dominated by the attention economy and things optimized to hook us in that it’s hard to just say “I quit”.
That is the problem with this advice. “Can choose not to” is code to stop someone complaining. “Just don’t use it then”. It sounds equivalent to the “love it or leave it” slogan used in the 70s in America.
We don’t leave. We fight. We don’t stop using. We openly and publicly criticize
What I see is that clients that invest in a campaign do not want to think about what an AI can produce. They don’t want to interact or brief an AI, they don’t want to do feedback rounds with an AI. They want a group of professionals that knows them to take over and do it all. If the professionals then use some AI for it, they mostly don’t care.
This is true so far for any campaign that allocates relevant funds (mid 5 figures and upwards). When it comes to the actual creation phase, right now AI is fundamentally immature and incapable of being controlled past the creation of static content.
All the motion and animation part for example is still somehow terra incognita for these tools. Take Adobe Animate, which is the go-to tool for anything 2D-animation, or Google Web Designer. Zero AI-features, simply because you can’t LLM frame by frame animations and have a result that is as precise as you need it. Or maybe you can, but for some reason these companies don’t see a business case for allocating resources to this specific development.
These tools can be great for smaller business that won’t have access to large campaigns, but as someone else mentioned, why do that when hiring a working gen-z social media native student will cost you slightly more, and possibly perform 100-times better with their native social media aesthetic?
Ps: Pomelli means door handles in Italian, and that’s… weird? Feels like a name randomly regurgitated by an LLM as well.
Still waiting for the AI LLM based ad autobidder so that I can just plug a machine to Google and press the "give them all my money" button.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/17L3FKCBbf/
I tried it. I used it first for my stuff and thought wow I'd never use this for my stuff, but my stuff isn't a mom and pop burger joint with the kids working on weekend etc, I will show it to the lady who has the pho shop next door, maybe she will update her IG with her specials more often than "whenever I remember".
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.
Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
Guessing: because they have AI products in the pipeline that can create Youtube shorts or similar.
This aspect will be interesting to watch.
Edit: Youtube Premium should include an optional AI slop filter.