This post was created in partnership with MNTN

Producing a TV ad has always been an expensive, time-consuming process, making it challenging to jump on real-time trends and viral moments. But with the rise of CTV and social ads, the need for speed is real, and brands are finding new ways to capitalize.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with MNTN, Fraser Woollard, head of business development, detailed how AI has unlocked the ability for small brands to compete in this new age.

Fastvertising has taken flight

Woollard began his presentation with a quick definition of “fastvertising,” which is exactly what it sounds like—an opportunity to create brand awareness by capitalizing on a “lightning in a bottle” type of cultural moment.

“It captures something to do with culture, something to do with the news cycle, or something to do with the social conversation,” Woollard explained.

An excellent example of this concept in action literally floated across screens earlier this month during the Artemis II space mission. “I actually saw that clip when the Nutella in zero gravity is flying through, and I thought, ‘Nutella’s got to do an ad!’” said Woollard. Within minutes, the brand went all in on the happy accident with some lighthearted social content.

While there have been similar real-time brand wins on social media (like Oreo’s famous “dunk in the dark” tweet during the 2013 Big Game power outage), creating a TV ad at that same speed hasn’t traditionally been feasible due to the high costs and longer production times. Until now, that is.

Beyond slop, AI is fueling fastvertising potential

Though the term “slop” comes up time and again when discussing AI’s creative pursuits, Woollard believes AI can unlock opportunities for more brands.

AI can also help brands create multiple versions of an ad, he explained, with different scenes based on locality, or targeted to specific audiences. And when you put those AI tools in front of a creator who actually understands how to make a compelling ad? That’s where brands can achieve amazing results.

Targeted, real-time ads powered by AI

While Woollard acknowledged that the biggest impact on an ad’s success is the message itself, where an ad runs matters as well. With AI’s ability to help brands create more variants customized to target markets or to the show the ad is running on, the “when and where” can become even more significant.

 “I think this truly is the future of fast advertising—the ability to very quickly generate ads that actually match the show that you’re in,” Woollard said.

This post was created in partnership with Respondology

AI is changing how brands interact on social media. Increasingly, the real action is happening in the comments—where conversations unfold, and brand perception takes shape in real time. And AI tools can help manage those interactions

During a Social Media Week panel co-hosted with Respondology, industry leaders explored how AI is helping teams manage scale and engage more meaningfully—without losing the human touch.

Where AI is improving social teams

Danica Calderhead, SVP of revenue at Respondology, opened by framing the challenge. “Teams are incredibly stretched, very, very thin. There’s only so much you all can do,” she said. To manage that pressure, teams are rethinking how the work gets done—and where AI fits in.

Cameron Curtis, VP of multi-platform strategy and digital media at Warner Bros. Discovery, said her company uses AI as a comment moderation tool.

“If we’re able to suppress a lot of the content that is not super conducive to those conversations, our fans feel like they can interact with each other and engage with the content in a more efficient way,” Curtis shared. 

Kate Kenner Archibald, founder and fractional CMO working across beauty and CPG, described a different application. For her, AI is most valuable in identifying where brands should show up in the first place.

“We have used AI for a discoverability standpoint,” Archibald said. “There’s a really great, authentic way in which brands can get engaged while leveraging AI to discover where they should be and what conversations they should be a part of.”

Maintaining connection as communities grow

The conversation shifted to how brands maintain a sense of belonging as their communities grow.

Archibald pointed to direct engagement as an effective way to build that connection. She shared the example of a founder spending a month responding to community questions, as well as an example of an influencer who hosted a small karaoke night with followers, creating an offline connection.

Archibald also noted that many brands now aim to respond to comments and DMs within 24 hours, which can create a new challenge. As volume grows, maintaining that level of responsiveness becomes difficult to sustain manually.

This is where AI can help. Tools can help draft responses and manage volume, allowing teams to stay active without losing their voice.

Authenticity and creativity are still the differentiators

As the panel wrapped, the conversation turned to what comes next. Archibald emphasized that authenticity and creativity are more important now than ever, especially since AI is not coming up with core creative ideas.

Curtis echoed that point, saying AI can help ideate, but audiences can quickly spot content that feels artificial. “Your brand and your POV and how you talk to your consumer is very specific,” she explained. “Audiences are smarter than we give them credit for.”

AI can help teams move faster. It can surface insights, draft responses, and reduce manual work. But the core of social engagement—how a brand shows up, responds, and builds trust—still depends on human judgment.

This post was created in partnership with Viral Nation

Data is at the center of social media marketing’s shift to AI. As social media generates an unprecedented volume of signals, brands need the right tools to build the intelligence infrastructure to turn that data into decisions and those decisions into measurable commercial growth.

During a Social Media Week session co-hosted with Viral Nation, Joe Gagliese, founder and CEO of the social media marketing and creator agency, shared real-world examples of what’s possible for social media data using AI.

AI tools for large social media data sets

Viral Nation has 11 years of social media data. It’s ingested 1.4 million hours of social video, processed 34 million posts, and used multimodal intelligence and filtering to capture attributes.

Gagliese shared that Viral Nation now has one of the largest data sets in the world and uses it to run and build AI tools.

“AI is not a concept. AI is in full delivery, meaning large organizations like Viral Nation and others are already in market with large tools and big data sets,” he said. “That’s exciting, but the data is the most important piece to how you start to unlock the signals and social necessary to help you to win.”

Gagliese shared three of Viral Nation’s AI tools that help its customers leverage social media data.

Creator discovery intelligence

Gagliese explained that creator discovery is still largely manual today, relying on keyword and hashtag searches across millions of creators.

Viral Nation created a database of over 100 million creators globally. A campaign brief is uploaded, and the system qualifies creators using filtering and data points to find the right ones for a specific campaign.

Gagliese shared that since sourcing talent is a hard task, using AI to place creators for campaigns is a massive milestone.

Community management intelligence

Gagliese explained that  AI works by turning community management into intelligence, intelligence into signals, and signals into sales.

“Viral Nation is now starting to hit momentum where we’re creating more revenue for our customers in community management than they’re paying us to do it. Because community management is where the people are. It’s where the customers are,” he said.

Its community management tool analyzes the comments sections across thousands of conversations to identify intent in real time. Every comment is assigned an urgency level and a recommended action.

AI to measure and increase ROI

Gagliese shared that the reality is social works, but marketers just didn’t know how to show that it was working.

So, Viral Nation developed a tool that measures creative variables and how a product is demonstrated directly against sales. It’s found that user-generated content is 46% more efficient than cinematic content at driving sales. Data proves awareness is converting more efficiently than anything else.

“So, now imagine how empowering it is for me to walk into a room with a CMO of a Fortune 500 company and be able to literally show them that they’re making more money from awareness creator campaigns than from creator campaigns that are meant for sales,” said Gagliese.

Bob Liodice remembers a moment from his first job interview, 31 years ago, for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). “One of the questions that I got is, ‘do you lick envelopes and stamps?’” he recalled. 

It wasn’t a joke. In 1995, companies still did business through the mailroom, and only 14% of Americans had internet access. Liodice—hired as senior vice president before becoming CEO—helped change that, taking the ANA from a struggling trade group with $28,000 in the bank to an organization representing $400 billion in brand spend and offering premium resources, including the Marketing Knowledge Center and Masters of Marketing conference.

But as Liodice prepares to step down at the end of this year, the leader who takes his place will face a challenge arguably bigger than the coming of the internet: the rise of AI, and the rapidly evolving influence it’s having on the production and dissemination of content.

“My successor is going to have to deal with the implications of the way ANA manages itself,” Liodice told ADWEEK. “We consider ourselves to be a content company, a convening company, and a leadership company. We have to figure out a way to insulate that, such that the high-value content generated by the ANA is viewed as being valuable and unique within the minds and hearts of our members.”

Liodice is not alone in his caution; AI crawling and repurposing proprietary information is a huge concern among businesses. The stakes are higher still for organizations like the ANA, which presents a great deal of its business intelligence in a quasi-public sphere—conferences attended by marketers the world over—and then repackages that as online content.

“We do a thousand events a year,” Liodice said. “Then we bottle that… and distribute to our members in various content forms.”

He said the challenge his successor will have to navigate is “the way we bring our members together to get something which is unique, which increases the value of the ANA.”

Fundamentally, Liodice regards AI as positive force in marketing. But the CEO who takes the reins from him will require greater vigilance.

“There is so much incredible opportunity from AI—the power of it is beyond imagination,” Liodice said. “But it also comes with… issues. We don’t spend as much time talking about that in our industry.”

With 258 days left before Liodice officially steps aside, the hunt for his replacement has just started and candidate names have yet to surface. (“We are in the process of finalizing an executive search firm,” he said.)

But when asked about what an ideal CEO would look like, Liodice was clear: It will need to be someone with a broader range of experience than he had when he arrived three decades ago.

Having spent 15 years at Kraft General Foods, Liodice came to the ANA as a quintessential brand guy. But to lead the ANA now, he said, “I don’t think you can just be a brand guy.”

“If my successor is going to be able to navigate this extraordinarily complex terrain, brand [experience] is limiting unto itself,” he said. “What about media expertise? What about technology? This person needs to have exposure to these things.”

Fortunately for the incoming CEO, whomever they are, licking stamps and envelopes are skills no longer required.

Anthropic Labs, the team dedicated to incubating and testing experimental AI products like within Anthropic, today unveiled Claude Design, an AI-powered platform that automates the creation of designs, slides, one-pagers, and other marketing and sales collateral. It’s designed to be easy to use for both experienced designers and nontechnical users.

The product is built on Claude Opus 4.7, the upgraded version of Anthropic’s flagship model, launched Thursday. 

The product is poised to rival other design software titans like Figma and Adobe, both of which have been aggressively investing in AI tools to streamline design workflows, including prompt-based interface and asset generation.

Designers, marketers, creatives, and sales teams can use Claude Design through a familiar natural language interface. They can simply tell the system what it wants to make and watch Claude produce an output based on that input. Then, users can edit the asset directly, or prompt Claude to make changes through chat conversation, inline comments, or custom sliders, a Claude tool that lets users manipulate images, data, or other elements in real time.

During onboarding, users plug in foundational reference materials like design files and codebase. Claude Design then creates a design system that will be used as the de-facto standards for each project, standardizing colors, typography, and other design elements. Users can update or refine the design system, and can create more than one. 

Once they’re set up, users can input text prompts, refer Claude Design to their codebase, upload documents and visuals, or even pull elements straight from a website using Claude’s web capture feature. Claude Design will produce outputs based on these inputs; then, users can make edits to polish their designs and can collaborate with colleagues in a shared interface with Claude. Then, designs can be exported in various formats or plugged into Claude Code to start building.

Claude Design is currently in a research beta with select companies, including design software platform Canva, cloud monitoring software company Datadog, and online learning platform Brilliant.

Testing teams have used Claude Design to build product mockups and wireframes, pitch decks and presentations, alongside marketing content like social media content, webpages, and campaign visuals. Claude Design also allows users to create more advanced prototypes and digital experiences sans manual coding, including voice interactions, video elements, 3D visuals, and special effects.

Canva, which in theory could view AI asset generators like Claude Design as competitors, considering the platform has its own native AI-powered visual generation tools, has worked with Anthropic for a year. The company is leaning into the partnership further as it tries out Claude Design. The company’s CEO and cofounder Melanie Perkins said the integration will make it “seamless for people to bring ideas and drafts from Claude Design into Canva, where they instantly become fully editable and collaborative designs ready to refine, share, and publish.”

At Datadog, Claude Design has already proved capable of shortening iteration periods and “enabling live design during conversations,” according to product manager Aneesh Kethini. “We’ve gone from a rough idea to a working prototype before anyone leaves the room, and the output stays true to our brand and design guidelines. What used to take a week of back-and-forth between briefs, mockups, and review rounds now happens in a single conversation.”

Anthropic hopes the new product will appeal to both advanced designers and nontechnical users. “Even experienced designers have to ration exploration—there’s rarely time to prototype a dozen directions, so you limit yourself to a few. And for founders, product managers and marketers with an idea but not a design background, creating and sharing those ideas can be daunting. Claude Design gives designers room to explore widely and everyone else a way to produce visual work,” the company said in a press release shared with ADWEEK. 

Claude Design is accessible to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers.

Creativity and AI can properly co-exist for brands as long as the right tools are implemented, according to Higgsfield AI’s Mahi de Silva.

The co-founder and chief strategy officer of Higgsfield AI spoke to ADWEEK’s COO, Zoë Ruderman, during a Social Media Week session in New York on Tuesday, where he said his company is focused on democratizing content creation.

“We’re an AI studio, a platform made by creators for creators,” de Silva said. He added, “It’s anything and everything you want to create in multimedia. Images, audio, video, all come together with point-and-click, drag-and-drop ease of use.”

Calling today’s current AI environment the “access era,” de Silva says the only limits to a brand’s creative execution are one’s imagination with his studio’s AI capabilities. And it’s paying off on the bottom line.

For example, the executive pointed out that Eight Sleep, a digital-first brand, achieved substantial cost savings by using the platform.

According to de Silva, Eight Sleep used to spend roughly $30,000 over a three-week period to build an app. As a result of working with Higgsfield AI, the company can now do that work in a day or so for less than $1,000.

“What that frees up is ideation, experimentation, iteration,” he said. “Really understanding what works and what doesn’t work at a tiny fraction of the cost, not just the monetary cost, but the time cost of being able to reach your target audience.”

De Silva acknowledged that not all brands are ready to openly embrace the benefits of multimedia AI in creative campaign building and execution. The exec said several brands used Higgsfield AI’s tools for this year’s Super Bowl and Winter Olympics, but those brand names aren’t public.

“Maybe find him backstage, and he’ll tell you,” Ruderman joked.

Regarding companies he can name, de Silva said that beverage maker Coca-Cola was one of the brands that uses their tools. He believes that by 2027, as AI multimedia tools and companies become more commonplace, more brands will be more comfortable acknowledging and embracing AI.

Towards the end of the session, the former Snapchat executive spoke about the deluge of AI slop and its negative implications, saying that one way brands could overcome this is by recognizing the power of creativity and storytelling with positive use of AI tools.

“If you can harness these tools and your creativity to tell stories and find people where you want them to be or to take them where you want to take them, I think that’s going to be a huge inspiration,” de Silva said.

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