Spectrum Is Helping Smaller Brands Make AI-Generated TV Commercials

As brands experiment with recent advances in generative machine learning, one of the nation’s biggest cable companies is offering small and medium-sized businesses the means to generate and place television commercials with artificial intelligence.

Spectrum Reach, the ad sales arm of cable giant Charter, is rolling out a new tool that will pull information and images from the web and social media in order to create a video ad for a given business, complete with AI-generated copy and voiceover. The service was developed in partnership with an AI video startup called Waymark. 

The rollout comes as brands and agencies have begun to experiment with a wave of new AI advances in recent months from language models like ChatGPT to image and even video generators. Gartner has estimated that 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated by 2025, but those systems still leave a lot to be desired for big advertisers.

Spectrum is betting that this technology can serve a need for smaller brands that might not otherwise have the resources to pull together a polished TV spot, according to Michael Guth, svp of Marketing, Spectrum Reach.

The ad creator pulls images, copy and a color scheme from a given business’ website, positive reviews and social media channels then weaves them together into a slideshow-like video with one of 11 AI-generated voices overlaid. Users can also choose a tone for the ad, and Waymark has integrated a form of OpenAI’s GPT language engine to power the script-writing. 

“The point that we’re making is, you already have a social footprint, you already have a point of view,” Guth said. “We’re just simply taking all those things, combining it together in a simple, elegant way to show you that you can create effective commercials and build an effective media schedule.”

AI as a tool for small business

While many big brands with upscale marketing operations remain wary about the potential shortcomings of AI-generated synthetic media, platforms have seen a clearer use case in offering AI as a starting point for smaller and medium-sized businesses that might not demand the same slick quality of creative output.

Website makers began offering small business tools integrating GPT-3–a model similar to the one that powers ChatGPT–back in 2020. Shopify recently rolled out an option for its client base of smaller ecommerce sellers to create AI-generated product descriptions.

Brandon Camp, CMO of ancestry site Storied, told Adweek in a previous interview that AI could help to level the playing field for smaller brands without the money to spend on a big-budget commercial.

“It’s another tool in the tool belt–I feel like we’ve been doing things in marketing with a screwdriver, and ChatGPT is a power drill,” Camp said. “So it still accomplishes the same job to be done. But it’s much more efficient and much quicker.”

A sea of sameness?

Until now, however, such technology has focused more on digital advertising than television. That could change as Spectrum rolls out this tool to the 91 markets it serves across 36 states. Guth said Spectrum and Waymark solicited feedback from a set of clients throughout the development process to shape it to their needs.

While the company believes that there is enough variation available within the tool to avoid flooding the airwaves with a sort of sameness of aesthetic, Guth said that is something the company will monitor as the platform is rolled out.

“What was interesting is each time that we would do a commercial, it would come out slightly different,” Guth said. “So even if you have the same voice, it is tweaked in different ways. And there are multiple templates and different pieces to it. And so we’ve not seen that [sameness.] But it’s certainly something that you always want to be wary of.”