Generative Video Ads: The Next Frontier
Generative Video Ads: The Next Frontier
If 2023 was the year of text-to-image, 2024 and beyond belong to text-to-video. For advertisers, this is the holy grail. Video converts better than static images, but it has always been expensive and slow to produce. Generative Video (GenAI Video) is about to crush those barriers.
The Players: Sora, Runway, McAuley, and Pika
Just a year ago, AI video was a flickering, nightmarish mess. Today, OpenAI's Sora and Runway's Gen-2 are producing cinematic quality clips that are indistinguishable from reality in many cases.
- Sora: Known for deep physics simulation and complex camera moves.
- Runway: Offers granular control for editors, like "motion brush" to animate specific parts of an image.
- Pika: Great for anime and stylized aesthetics.
Cost-Per-Creative (CPC) is Plummeting
Traditionally, shooting a high-quality video ad required:
- Actors
- Locations
- Crew
- Equipment
- Editing
This could easily run $10k+ for a single asset. With GenAI video, the marginal cost of generating a variation approaches zero. You can test 50 different opening hooks for the price of a monthly subscription.
The "B-Roll" Revolution
The immediate killer app for this tech isn't generating full 30-second commercials with dialogue (yet). It's B-Roll.
Need a shot of a diverse team brainstorming in a sunlit office? Need a close-up of coffee pouring in slow motion? Need a drone shot of a futuristic city?
Don't buy stock footage. Generate it. It's unique to your brand and free of copyright strikes (mostly).
Challenges Remain
- Consistency: Keeping a character's face the same across shots is still hard.
- Text Rendering: AI still struggles with legible text in video.
- Legal: The copyright landscape is still murky.
Conclusion
We are moving from a world of "Asset Scarcity" to "Asset Abundance." The winning advertisers won't be the ones with the biggest production budgets, but the ones with the best taste and the ability to curate the best AI outputs. Start experimenting with these tools for your social media ads today.