New AI-generated ad from financial services company Etoro to air during Paris Olympics

The 30-second video spot – titled ’Be the investor you want to be,’ – features a cast of AI-generated characters representing fictitious Etoro users, the core message being that the platform can enable users to study and emulate the particular strengths of different investors around the world.

“Who am I?” the narrator asks in the ad’s opening shot. “I’m the one who can be 100 different investors all at once.”

The visuals for the new ad were created using LTX Studio, an AI-powered video generation and editing tool created by software company Lightricks. All other elements of the video spot – including the script, the music and the voice – were also created with the assistance of various generative AI tools.

“The process allowed us to imagine without the boundaries that we usually have in real life,“ Etoro’s chief marketer, Nir Smulewicz, tells The Drum. “It was a really interesting process to live through. It gave us the freedom to dream, to iterate and to add more elements during the editing process.“

The spot is slated to air during the Paris Olympics, which kick off on Friday, July 26.

Not long ago, the only TV ads generated by AI tools were parodies. But in a short span of time, the laughs have turned into raised eyebrows as a string of innovations have enabled marketers to create lifelike AI-generated videos with just a few keystrokes.

But AI-generated video is far from a perfect science at this stage, and the new ad from Etoro is an illustrative example of the technology’s limitations. Pay careful attention, and you’ll notice glitches: the digital text on an arrivals screen in a subway station is garbled and incoherent; a man appears to be frozen inside the glass doorway of a bus; flowers are depicted as growing far taller than the height of a fully grown man.

Etoro’s Smulewicz concedes that the brand’s implementation of AI in its marketing efforts is a work in progress. “We are still very much at the beginning of the journey with AI and we learned a lot from this campaign,“ he says. “This campaign is definitely an early experiment; however, we are thrilled with the outcome, and we look forward to integrating further AI initiatives across our marketing efforts.”

Today, a growing number of marketers are experimenting with AI-generated video, if only to showcase their brand’s technical chops. Retail company Toys R Us, for example, released a video ad created using Sora, a text-to-video platform developed by OpenAI. (The public response to that video, which depicted a childhood dream of the brand’s founder, wasn’t stellar.)

Sports drink brand Bodyarmor also released an ad created in part by AI during Super Bowl LVIII in February, though the spot was a tongue-in-cheek stunt intended to underscore the technology’s shortcomings.

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