Dive Temporary:
- TikTok is increasing its Symphony suite of generative synthetic intelligence (AI) merchandise for manufacturers, per information shared with Advertising Dive. The announcement was made as a part of the platform’s presence on the Cannes Lions worldwide promoting competition.
- One of many instruments, Symphony Picture to Video, converts static footage, resembling product images, into five-second clips tailor-made to TikTok. Textual content to Video does the identical for textual content prompts whereas Showcase Merchandise introduces digital avatars on TikTok that may maintain items, mannequin clothes or exhibit an app on a cellphone display.
- Picture to Video is out there immediately inside Adobe’s Specific providing for social content material creation as a part of an expanded partnership with TikTok. Symphony’s options are additionally coming to WPP Open, the ad-holding group’s AI-powered working system, additional broadening their availability to manufacturers.
Dive Perception:
TikTok is ramping up its efforts round generative AI as digital promoting platforms race to roll out know-how that may do extra of the heavy lifting for entrepreneurs. CMOs have acknowledged stress to generate extra content material, sooner, whilst many take care of stagnant budgets. Generative AI is positioned as a approach to enhance productiveness, although it has taken some time for the know-how to fulfill advertisers’ wants round high quality.
TikTok debuted Symphony final June, giving manufacturers the power to faucet into digital avatars, edit movies and optimize campaigns with the help of automation. The most recent updates allow sooner, extra dynamic content material creation primarily based on easy inputs like textual content prompts and static product imagery, which may rapidly be spun into five-second movies aligning with TikTok’s orientation round short-form content material. Showcase Merchandise additionally step up the position digital avatars play within the TikTok promoting ecosystem, with synthetic fashions exhibiting off every part from water bottles to pink midi attire.
To get its options within the palms of extra advertisers, TikTok is deepening its work with Adobe and WPP. The ad-holding group is the primary within the company class to combine Symphony, which can present an edge with manufacturers prioritizing video-first social content material. WPP has been battered by shopper losses and spending pullbacks, and directed extra power towards its Open working system and AI as a part of its turnaround technique.
On the digital avatar entrance, WPP’s shoppers will be capable to leverage licensed and consensually authorized representations of actual folks, which was positioned within the announcement as a technique to personalize and scale international branded content material. Equally, TikTok is offering AI-powered dubbing and translation instruments that help over 15 languages. Danone, a WPP shopper, is a launch associate for the Symphony integration, with a concentrate on its plant-based Alpro model in Europe. WPP is aligning the TikTok tie-up with a previous dedication to spend 300 million kilos, or roughly $400 million, on AI, knowledge and know-how yearly.
“With TikTok’s Symphony Suite, we’re giving our creatives much more firepower to push boundaries and experiment for our shoppers,” stated Rob Reilly, chief inventive officer at WPP, in a press release.
AI-generated content material was initially clumsy, notably with reference to video, with avatars that landed firmly within the uncanny valley. However the know-how has been refined over time, and harder to discern from the actual factor as software program is ready to emulate extra plausible motion and speech. Symphony content material shall be robotically labeled as AI-generated, in addition to topic to a number of rounds of security opinions with reference to visible inputs and prompts.
TikTok’s greater push round Symphony follows rivals launching extra generative AI instruments focused at manufacturers. Meta, its chief competitor within the U.S., is reportedly planning to automate most advertising and marketing features with AI, a menace to businesses like WPP. In the meantime, President Donald Trump stated on Tuesday he would “most likely” lengthen a deadline, at the moment set for June 19, for ByteDance to divest the U.S. belongings of TikTok.
