Austin-based Creative.ai is putting advances in generative artificial intelligence to use for mobile game publishers to help them create video advertisements.

Generative AI has taken the internet by storm for its ability to create new content based on data used to train them. Prominent examples include OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT, which can answer questions with human-like ability, and Stable Diffusion, which can generate new and vivid artwork based on text prompts.

Using Creative.ai’s platform, publishers can have advertisements for their games rapidly generated by inputting their desired parameters and then the algorithms take care of the heavy lifting. It can generate gameplay narrative, ad copy, voice overs, avatars and more.

The company was founded in January 2023, as the brainchild of former Meta Platforms Inc. ads auction expert Athar Zia, chief executive of Creative.ai, and former Meta solutions engineer Jay Shah. They brought with them expertise and training data from a previous venture, Blckbox.ai, that analyzed millions of dollars of advertisement testing data.

“The AI learns from the past to understand which stories resonated best, what music people liked most, what gameplay made them most excited and the AI synthesizes all of that to generate beautiful video ads to deliver performance,” Zia told SiliconANGLE in an email interview.

Whereas traditional ad creation has problems, Zia explained, 95% of all video ads are expected to miss their investment metrics and 70% of creative time is spent on video production by artists. By using generative AI, Creative.ai can automate all of that repetitive work, Zia said, “enabling artists to do what they do best, which is to generate thoughtful, engaging and fun stories to engage their audience.”

The company’s AI training model considers a variety of different factors when creating an advertisement including creative tags and objects, the gameplay and emotions. The dataset the company compiled also included a lot of what made advertisements “pop” with users, which means that it can “home in” on winning concepts and pinpoint what the company calls “engagement curves.” It can also insert appropriate music and scene transitions as well to make sure that it fits into the needs of publishers.

The core market for Creative.ai is mobile gaming and has been tested with e-commerce and brand partners. “We have trained our algorithm on hundreds of thousands of mobile gaming ads and built beautiful, engaging stories for social casino, racing, match 3, hypercasual, design, fashion and player-versus-player-style games,” Zia said.

Although he did not name any names, Zia said current clients of the company include mobile gaming publishers in the top global 30. He also revealed that during the closed beta of the platform, the ads the generative AI produced pulled down a 38% higher install rate and a 25% lower cost per install, with an 11% higher click-through rate.

The company uses its own proprietary generative AI model for producing advertisements and each advertiser’s data is walled off from one another. That allows the platform to remain compliant with any policies, branding and legal questions that might arise about the creation of ads and use of the platform.

Zia said that he wants Creative.ai to become a one-stop shop where advertisers can produce, test, iterate and get analytics on their creative strategy as well as production. By taking the guesswork out of what makes a winning advertisement, he said, creative teams can get back to what they do best: creating new concepts.

Image: Creative.ai