Today’s Mad Men aren’t quiet suits trying to convince CEOs that their brands need to reassure people “You’re fine,” they’re tech companies like Google filling the airwaves with cheap, mindless AI. Google now has an AI video generator called Veo, and it can take any image, even an AI-generated one, and turn it into mini-movies. The videos look semi-realistic, which is good enough for the advertisers Google is trying to sell its tool to.
Google is the first to put its new model in private preview in its focused business Vertex AI Platform. I see it joins Meta Movie Gen and Runway’s video generation tool, though it also beats it OpenAI’s Sora model to a wider release. last month, artists leaked a version of Sora on the Internet in protest of the use of AI for artistic purposes.
Veo can generate text from text prompts and/or images. Google is combining it with theirs existing Imagen 3 model for any company that wants to create specific brand images. The AI video generator can create videos by thinking about different styles. The company showed a few examples, including a cartoon man looking up from his desk and smiling. There is another video of a teddy bear playing a guitar with no finger to pluck the strings.
Google says these images include invisible digital watermarksand the model should prevent users from generating anything that might anger the public if they see it appear in their next cookie ad. In addition, Imagen 3 allows users to modify images using its “Inpaint” generation to create new objects in an existing photo or its “Outpaint” tool to enlarge an image, with AI filling in the missing space. It is similar to Adobe’s existing Firefly tools in programs like Photoshop.
In its blog post, the Mountain View tech monolith said it was working with advertisers from Mondelez International. Never heard of it? They are the large international conglomerate that owns brands such as Chips Ahoy!, Oreo, Ritz and Tabisco, to name a few.
That’s a lot of brands, and the companies put together think that consumers are asking for quick, cheap ads delivered directly to their eyes. Google wrote that its Veo model will enable “rapid development of consumer-ready visuals at scale” for its many brands in specific languages across all countries where it sells its snacks.
Google said it is also working with travel app Agoda. The company claimed it’s already working on AI ads, including this weird-looking travel ad that will make you break your mouse trying to click the “skip ad” button.
Like most AI video generators, Veo can be limited in how much footage it can generate. In effect, the generated ads can appear as a jumble of random stock videos. AGoda’s head of marketing Matteo Frigerio said the company created images of “dream destinations” and brought them to life with Veo.
The end result of these promotions is more ads of dubious quality. The modern advertising model is based on cheap ads made quickly, so they can fill every ad slot in your social media feed. Mondelez’s vice president of consumer experience and digital commerce says the company already uses Imagen 3 to produce “hundreds of thousands of custom assets” to reduce “time to market and costs.”
AI video images can get better over time, but that won’t necessarily change the way they will be, dull and lifeless. A survey of the technology research company YouGov showed that half of consumers dislike ads that use AI-generated images, whether for humans or products. Perhaps advertisers will learn the hard way that you can’t discount human-created content, even for ads.
