ChatGPT and its cousins took the world by storm this year, introducing the world to the wonders of generative AI and large language models. 

It’s been quite a wild few months too, as people, having become familiar with the technology and what it can do, are speculating on all of the ways it will reshape different industries.

The television industry is no different—AI has emerged as an issue in the current WGA strike—but we chose to focus on more positive use cases, particularly around advertising, in our latest Hot Takes piece.

Here’s what our TVREV Thought Leaders Circle members had to say:

Tony Marlow, CMO at LG Ads Solutions, focused on AI’s potential to increase advertising effectiveness by helping to optimize campaigns, something he suspects is going to be happening in the very near future. 

We stand on the precipice of an unprecedented productivity boom, driven by generative AI, the likes of which we've probably never witnessed before. This exponential growth of AI is anticipated to bring rapid improvements in capability over the next 12 months alone, a surge that might take many by surprise since we are more used to thinking in terms of linear growth patterns.

Crucially, AI promises to herald a new era in the realm of advertising. It promises the ability to better target and optimize advertising campaigns, thereby enhancing audience engagement and conversion rates. Furthermore, AI's potential capacity to optimize creative messaging and assist in content creation signifies a transformative shift. This technological leap isn't just enhancing productivity; it's rewriting the rules of the game, setting the stage for an advertising revolution that focuses on a personalized and interactive viewer experience.

ESHAP Founder and Noted Media Cartographer Evan Shapiro had a great take on fears that AI could soon be writing the next Ted Lasso.

The fear that GenAI will replace television and film writers is unfounded. AI can’t replicate human writers, because AI doesn’t lie awake at night thinking about its dysfunctional relationship with its parents. 

Joe Hirsch, Magnite’s SVP, Innovation & Special Projects pointed out that by increasing efficiency and streamlining processes, AI can free up actual humans to focus on strategy, creative and other important topics, while also allowing buyers and sellers the ability to optimize CPMs in real time.

At a time when the industry is buzzing around possible applications of AI tech, it’s important to focus on how AI can have an impact now while innovating for the future. AI provides speed, accuracy and efficiency, freeing up human capital to focus on things such as strategy and creative production. Applying those benefits to forecasting could open up new opportunities, particularly in a dynamic environment with constant changes in demand and supply. With growing AVOD, FAST and live streaming ad opportunities, the ability to forecast avails more accurately to optimize CPMs in real-time based on those forecasts will enable improved monetization. Combining AI with streamlined offerings can further maximize value, driving cost efficiencies as well as profitability.

Grant Parker, CRO at Mediaocean took on the ways generative AI will (positively) impact the creative process, helping with tasks as diverse as research and image creation as brands and agencies invest more money in their creative product as a way to stand out.

We don't see the world's biggest advertisers turning over their creative to ChatGPT or DALL-E anytime soon. But there is definitely opportunity to use generative AI to support the creative process. Our latest market research report shows the top use cases for tools like ChatGPT are copywriting, data analysis, market research, and image generation. As media optimization reaches a point of diminishing return thanks to data deprecation, we're seeing investment in creative become a bigger priority. With Flashtalking, we're already using AI to help with omnichannel creative formatting and analysis. If generative AI can help make creative more efficient and effective, we'll see steady adoption over time.

Paket TV Founder Raf Bagdassarian sees generative AI quickly becoming ubiquitous and used for everything from advertising to content recommendations. He does worry that its superior ability to target will lead to greater fragmentation in our media choices.

ML models and third party APIs such as ChatGPT/GPT4 are fast becoming essential utilities across all industries – not just media. Saying a platform leverages “AI” will soon become as inane as saying one’s service is hosted in “the cloud.” On its own, the utilization of AI will be (or, again, already is) a commodity – so it’s important that those who use it do not fool themselves that simply plugging into a third party API will give them a competitive advantage. On the whole, I think it will broadly enhance ad and recommendations experience across the board. Ultimately, however, differentiators will come from the inputs from which a machine learning model will generate experiences such as on-the-fly content, localization, recommendations, and more.

While I’m generally bullish on the prospects, I fear that the advent of AI will only further fragment the media landscape into smaller, more efficiently marketable audiences – which will likely translate to a more fragmented and less universal cultural experience and, eventually, a more fractured society. Let’s hope there are those among us looking to use its power towards more unifying aims.

Cathy Oh, Vice President, Global Head of Marketing at Samsung Ads sees a bright future for AI as a tool for advertisers and ad creatives and shared that Samsung Ads is already using it to power its new targeting tool as well as interactive shoppable units. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are just starting to scratch the surface of what they can do for the TV advertising ecosystem.

At Samsung Ads, we’re tapping into the power of AI and ML to help our advertisers activate more efficiently and drive better outcomes for their business. We’ve developed an AI/ML-powered product called Smart Audiences designed to simplify the creation of highly-targeted campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences data. By using AI/ML to identify and reach the audience most likely to convert, we’re able to help advertisers drive engagement, improve conversion rates, and, ultimately, increase revenue. 

There is also an increasing appetite for AI enabling more interactivity and ad creatives as we’ve seen many companies address this during the 2023 IAB NewFronts. Today’s consumers are utilizing their Smart TVs for a variety of interactive uses beyond entertainment – from gaming to socializing to shopping. With new viewer behaviors in mind, we recently partnered with KERV Interactive to release AI-powered shoppable content to deliver simplified, interactive shoppable experiences to our clients enabling viewers to connect with brands on their mobile devices without pausing connected TV content.

Adam Helfgott, Madhive’s CEO, highlighted how AI can help with programmatic bidding by synthesizing complex data sets including historical data, in order to make better predictions. 

Speed is a chief objective in programmatic, where fractions of a second make the difference between securing vital media and losing it to a competitor. The race for CTV’s finite premium inventory makes it even more important to be able to make decisions as quickly as possible.

This requires synthesizing troves of data, gauging available audiences and, ultimately, predicting outcomes. Before AI and machine learning, these analytics weren’t possible. But now, technology can sift through massive amounts of information in milliseconds, surfacing informed purchasing decisions for CTV buyers.

To take it a step further, DSPs can leverage historical data on previous bid outcomes and performance trends. The more historical data a system has on CTV, the more it will be able to use AI to accurately predict future outcomes in real time, enabling marketers to make smarter media decisions and optimize campaign strategies as they play out. Couple that with scarcity’s ability to find the right viewer at the exact right moment, and media outcomes get a huge boost.

Finally, Rohan Castelino, VP of Marketing at IRIS.TV delved into AI’s ability to extract a wide range of contextual data from shows on a frame-by-frame basis, which will give a massive boost to advertiser’s ability to target their ads based on context.

While identity signals in streaming are losing fidelity due to business, technological, and regulatory reasons, marketers still need to reach relevant consumers watching CTV. While identity is not going away, many have revisited contextual as an alternative to help boost the signal. Video has been challenging because the data around sight, sound, and motion is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s chaos from a classification perspective.

What’s remarkable about the advancements in A.I. is the ability to really know what the story is about. It has made content signals, when extracted at the video level, a window into consumers' mindset. Frame-by-frame analysis makes it possible to extract and create contextual, brand-suitability, emotion, and sentiment segments with unparalleled accuracy resulting in precise targeting and measurement.

When securely shared and activated via a content identifier like the IRIS_ID, content owners can truly focus on what they do best, creating the stories we love and the journalism we need.

Our TVREV take is that AI is going to be a huge plus to the industry and a key tool in improving consumer experience. 

It is not going to replace writers on any fictional series and most non-fiction, the exception possibly being home shows where there really isn’t much to the writing. (“The next house the Russos looked at was a split-level near Joe’s office…”)

While much ado about nothing on that front, it will prove a most useful assistant in adapting ad creative for custom audiences, for creating artwork that would otherwise have been cost prohibitive and for letting brands with small production budgets create slick looking TV commercials. Not to mention the ability to customize all that creative content into regional and/or seasonal versions. 

AI will also prove incredibly valuable on the consumer experience side too. It should lead to much more accurate and personalized recommendations as well as personalized playlists.

The biggest effect though, will likely be seen around data where it can enable everything from custom segments to enhanced programmatic buying prowess to continual campaign optimization that is able to incorporate years of historical data in its decision making process.

In other words, all hail our robot overlords!