Brandtech Group accelerates AI experimentation through a creator residency program

The residency program will be overseen by Brandtech’s influencer company Collectively, which will be open to creators who use generative AI to join throughout this year. Each will participate for four weeks to focus on their specific area of expertise, ranging from video generation to AI animation.

Some of the creators joining the program currently include generative AI product photographer Salma Aboukarr, AI director Ryan Phillips and animator James Gerde. As a sort of quid pro quo, the creators will help to educate Brandtech’s generative AI teams on their expertise, as well as support Collectively and another Brandtech creative content agency Mofilm in generative AI work. The financial terms of these agreements were not revealed.

Gerde will lead a class covering content creation with motion graphics and animation with brands. He said he sees a lot of examples that creators can experiment with, such as surreal takes on an image or product. With generative AI tools, he cautioned that although content can be created quickly, the “novelty wears off quickly” too — making the specifics, like brand details and control over certain elements, still very important as a creator.

“I prefer to stick to the tools that have more control,” Gerde said. “Where I actually think we’re going to see it leading is AI departments on traditional production teams.”

Natalie Silverstein, chief innovation officer of Collectively, said the company’s larger ambition is to become “the leading generative AI marketing company in the world” through these types of programs.

“We have technology for that,” Silverstein told Digiday. “We have a workforce that is poised to utilize that technology and share it with clients. We have the … emergent class of creators that are people who are utilizing the generative AI tools in really novel ways and creating content that you would just never see before in your social feeds and elsewhere on the web.”

With generative AI moving quickly within the marketing landscape, she said creators will also provide a way for the company to keep clients informed about emerging tools and applications. The classes will be available to Brandtech’s 7,000 employees internally, but potentially made available to clients when necessary.

Silverstein also sees an opportunity for ads made with generative AI to make the process cheaper due to its ability to quicken the process. Beauty and fashion brands are likely to embrace these types of AI ads, she adds, given some of the conceptual or “fantastical” content and influencer involvement in the space.

“I think what we’ll see is just an overall kind of raising of ambition and the production value of advertising across the board,” Silverstein said.

Eric Dahan, founder of creator commerce agency Mighty Joy, agreed that influencer marketing is well-positioned for AI transformation, as it is “one of the most human-capital intensive forms of marketing.” Mighty Joy works with clients to combine social commerce and influencer marketing strategies, like focusing on TikTok Shops, performance of creator partnerships and user-generated content.

One of the largest “pain points” in influencer marketing is finding and identifying influencers, while another is communication — and both are already being impacted by AI, Dahan explained.

“AI makes it possible to parse through all the various data points that a marketer may want to query to find the perfect influencer, such as gender, location, recent collaborations, tone of voice, age, audience, other influencers that they follow, brand affinities, brand fit (very subjective), rates, availability,” Dahan said.

For its part, Brandtech last year also bought Pencil, a generative AI content platform working with large brands like Unilever and Bayer. Created in 2018, Pencil and Pencil Pro, its enterprise AI product, can be used to generate insights, marketing assets and creative content that could be tailored for specific channels. The company said it has created some 1 million generative AI ads through $1 billion in media spend across 5,000 brands.

Brandtech Group was founded in 2015 (originally as You & Mr. Jones) by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, and it was renamed The Brandtech Group in January 2022. The company was one of the initial external investors in Niantic, which made video game Pokémon Go, as well as making investments in content optimization company CreativeX and AI chatbots company Automat.