TikTok and YouTube announced AI-driven ad products one day apart

The role generative AI will play in the creator economy is still up for debate, but in the ad world, the value of that technology is already apparent. On back-to-back days, both TikTok and YouTube unveiled new product suites that harness the power of genAI to enhance the rollout, tracking, and customization of campaigns.

TikTok is giving brands variety to match their volume

The app has added new tools to TikTok Symphony, the AI-powered suite that arrived this past June. Symphony’s new Creative Suite will let brands develop multiple versions of the same ad — a process that has been shown to improve results for advertisers. In a blog post introducing the Symphony Creative Suite, TikTok noted that brands can increase their return on ad spend (ROAS) 1.5 times over by including 5-7 creative assets in their campaigns and refreshing those assets at least once per week.

To help brands assemble a suitable number of assets, the Creative Suite offers access to AI-powered generation tools that incorporate videos, images, sounds, and avatars sourced from partners like Billo and Getty Images. The AI-generated ads will be cleared for commercial use and informed by top-performing content on TikTok.

For brands with more complex needs, Symphony Digital Avatars will offer a combination of stock and custom avatars who can serve as presenters for Symphony-generated ads. The avatars can be configured to appeal to viewers across age, geographic, and linguistic barriers.

The Symphony Creative Suite feels like TikTok’s answer to services like Icon, which have employed AI to provide advertisers with the asset variety they desire. Given TikTok’s embrace of AI, its decision to elbow into third-party territory fits into its overall strategy.

YouTube’s new ad services are all about Shorts

It’s now been almost two years since YouTube first brought ads to Shorts, and with a little help from generative AI, those ads are becoming more optimized. In a thorough update published on Google’s Ads and Commerce Blog, YouTube Ads Director of Product Management Melissa Hsieh Nikolic ran through a number of updates that pertain to Shorts spots.

Many of the new YouTube features are integrated into Demand Gen campaigns, which spread across YouTube, Gmail, and Google services. Like TikTok Symphony, Demand Gen uses AI to deliver customized creative assets that appeal “to the most relevant potential customers.”

Hsieh Nikolic explained that Demand Gen campaigns are getting format buying controls that can specifically target the Shorts feed or limit creative to horizontal assets. With vertically-oriented campaigns on the rise, YouTube is preparing to bring Shorts-only buying to Demand Gen customers.

Thanks to the latest Demand Gen updates, users can fill their ads with animated images pulled directly from Google Merchant Center listings. They can also use Google AI to enhance videos; YouTube’s example of an AI-powered enhancement is an ad that’s flipped to a different orientation (so that it can better target a specific format like Shorts).

As Big Tech’s AI empires continue to grow, we can expect more features like these within genAI-powered suites. Google’s Gemini is on the upswing, so the team in Mountain View figures to be a big name in AI ads over the coming months and years.