Your Next Commercial Won't Be Target Audience-Specific
· AI News · 2 min
What happens when AI doesn't just produce ads for target groups, but creates individual films tailored to situation, interest, and buying intent?
There's a particular development in advertising that I find incredibly exciting right now.
Amazon recently introduced a technology that automatically adapts parts of a video ad to the individual viewer.
We're not yet talking about a completely new commercial being spontaneously generated for every single person.
But the direction is, in my opinion, quite clear.
The same spot no longer has to look identical for everyone.
Different messages, products, or calls to action can be deployed depending on where an individual is in their purchasing journey.
Now, let's think a few years down the line.
Traditionally, advertising typically works something like this:
We define a target audience.
We develop an idea.
We produce a film.
Perhaps we create five or ten variations of it.
Then, we decide which person sees which version.
Generative AI could completely flip this principle someday.
Instead of producing twenty finished versions, we might then produce a creative world.
Characters.
Products.
Locations.
Camera concepts.
Messages.
Music.
Story elements.
And from this, new variations emerge constantly, depending on the situation, platform, and viewer.
Perhaps someone sees one version in the morning and a different one in the evening.
Perhaps an existing customer sees a different story than someone discovering a brand for the first time.
Perhaps a product film changes based on industry, region, or interest.
This might sound like a very technical form of advertising at first glance.
But for me, it's actually a creative question.
Because if a single film can suddenly spawn a hundred or a thousand variations, the original idea must be all the stronger.
The brand must remain recognizable.
The visual language must be consistent.
The character of a campaign must not get lost.
And that's precisely why I don't believe this development will render creative production obsolete.
I believe it merely changes what we produce.
Perhaps in the future, we'll build fewer individual commercials and more often create visual systems from which many films can emerge.
This already influences how I think about productions today.
At Chris Jean, we are therefore increasingly trying to look beyond the single image.
We consider how characters, locations, products, and visual ideas can be developed in such a way that they can later be reused, altered, and expanded.
This is one of the great advantages of hybrid production.
One part can be shot live.
One part can come from 3D.
One part from AI.
The crucial thing is that in the end, everything belongs to the same world.
Perhaps in a few years, we'll look back and find the idea of millions of people watching the exact same commercial quite strange.
We are still at the very beginning of this development.
But I believe it will fundamentally transform advertising.