alt Hacker NewsCounterpoint: our CEO spent 25 minutes shitting out a bunch of AI ads because he was frustrated with the pace of our advertising creative team. They hated the ads that he created, for the reasons you mention, but we tested them anyways and the best performing ones beat all of our "expert" team's best ads by a healthy margin (on all the metrics we care about, from CTR to IPM and downstream stuff like retention and RoAS).
Maybe we're in a honeymoon period where your average user hasn't gotten annoyed by all the slop out there and they will soon, but at least for now, there is real value here. Yes, out of 20 ads maybe only 2 outperform the manually created ones, but if I can create those 20 with a couple hundred bucks in GenAI credits and maybe an hour or two of video editing that process wipes the floor with the competition, which is several thousand dollars per ad, most of which are terrible and end up thrown away, too. With the way the platforms function now, ad creative is quickly becoming a volume-driven "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" game, and AI is great for that.
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> Counterpoint: our CEO spent 25 minutes shitting out a bunch of AI ads because he was frustrated with the pace of our advertising creative team. They hated the ads that he created, for the reasons you mention, but we tested them anyways and the best performing ones beat all of our "expert" team's best ads by a healthy margin (on all the metrics we care about, from CTR to IPM and downstream stuff like retention and RoAS).
My guess is that the criticism of AI not being that good is correct, but many people don't realize that most humans also aren't that good, and that it's quite possible that the AI performs better than mediocre humans.
This shouldn't be much of a surprise, we've seen automation replace low skilled labor in a lot of industries. People seem uncomfortable with the possibility that there's actually a lot of low skilled labor in the creative industry that could also be easily replaced.
A/B/C/D testing is the perfect grounds for that. You can keep automatically generating and iterating quickly while A/B tests are constantly being ran. This data on CTR can later be used to train the model better as well.
> Maybe we're in a honeymoon period where your average user hasn't gotten annoyed by all the slop out there and they will soon
It’s this. A video ad with a person morphing into a bird that takes off like a rocket with fire coming out of its ass, sure it might perform well because we aren’t saturated with that yet.
You’d probably get a similar result by giving a camera to a 5 year old.
But you also have to ask what that’s doing long term to your brand.