Motion logo on a black background. Text: Motion. A musical sting plays.
John Gargiulo: So, huge bounce forward from here to here.
Slide titled "This is how much better AI got in 2024". On the left, a distorted, uncanny AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti, labeled "January 2024". On the right, a highly realistic AI-generated video of Will Smith eating pasta at a beachside restaurant, labeled "December 2024".
John Gargiulo: That's great. None of us are making Will Smith eating spaghetti ads. What about AI UGC ads? You're starting to see this term AI UGC pop up. When can this help us?
Slide with the title "What about AI UGC Ads?"
John Gargiulo: Uh, I want to show you three ads and I want you to try to guess which one is not using AI.
Slide titled "Which one is NOT made with AI?". Three vertical videos are shown side-by-side, labeled A, B, and C. Video A is pixelated with a "WARNING" and a play button. Video B shows a woman working out in a gym. Video C shows a woman meditating.
John Gargiulo: > [VISUAL: Video A plays. It's a fast-paced ad for "Mindbodygreen Creatine+". It shows the product, text overlays like "Feeling weak", "Slow recovery", "Lack of focus", and someone mixing the powder into a drink. Upbeat electronic music plays.]
Video B plays. It's an ad for a creatine product. It shows a woman working out in various ways, and then mixing the product into a water bottle. On-screen text: "Nobody is talking about how creatine+ routine in perimenopause can change your life?". Upbeat music plays.
Video C plays. It's another ad for "Mindbodygreen Creatine+". It features a woman counting money, a different woman looking at her phone, the product, and someone mixing it into a drink. On-screen text includes "Stop wasting money and time on ineffective supplements" and "Mindbodygreen Creatine is the ultimate choice". Upbeat electronic music plays.
Alright, so one of those ads had totally was totally done manually. They found an actor or actress, they, you know, weeks, hours of work, an editor, ideation, the whole process. The other two, and I really mean this, took zero humans in the loop. They just were made with a click, the whole thing, end to end, based on a library of footage and uh other tech.
All right, put in put in your uh were you able to do the poll, Melissa?
I see everyone putting it in the chat.
Okay. Wow, a lot of different answers here. Let me click on poll here, hang on. I see. All right. The answer is, this was done completely with AI.
The slide is updated. Under video A, the text "AI" appears.
John Gargiulo: C was done completely with AI.
Under video C, the text "AI" appears.
John Gargiulo: And B was done with people.
Under video B, the text "Manual" appears.
John Gargiulo: Let's do another one. Here's A.
A new slide appears with three new vertical videos, labeled A, B, and C. Video A shows a woman applying cream. Video B shows a product box for "B-GLOSSY". Video C shows a product box for "SWEET DREAMS" under a Christmas tree.]
> [VISUAL: Video A plays. It's an ad for a cream called "GET-DREAMY". It shows a woman applying the cream, the product jar, and text overlays. Audio: "I was tired of skin that just didn't feel tight. My bestie set me up with GET-DREAMY, transforming my nights into restoration time. Enjoy the benefits of smoother, toned skin. And Milk Thistle enhances my nightly routine."
John Gargiulo: Here's B.
Video B plays. It's an ad for a serum called "B-GLOSSY". It shows the product, hands, and screenshots of a product page and reviews. Audio: "Do you have crepey skin? Come here. You need B-GLOSSY. Imagine being able to smooth out wrinkles with our serum. Just apply daily and see your skin transform. Because harnessing hyaluronic acid and shea butter for elasticity. Try out B-GLOSSY and feel the firmness return."
John Gargiulo: And here's C.
Video C plays. It's an ad for Maelys' "Sweet Dreams Sleep Tight Kit". It shows a woman unboxing the gift, applying the products, and getting into bed. Audio: "Gifting just got so much easier with Maelys' Sweet Dreams Sleep Tight Kit. If you're anything like me, one for me, one for you is your motto while holiday shopping. And the Sleep Tight Kit makes a perfect gift for the skincare lover in your life. The combination of the Get-Dreamy Overnight Toning Body Whip and Get-Cozy 2-in-1 Body and Pillow Mist will have you wanting to keep a set for yourself and share the love with others. Because sharing the gift of glowing skin starts with yourself. Celebrate the season of giving with Maelys."
All right, let me flick back over here.
I'm seeing a lot of Cs is done manually. This one looks more consistently. Wow, you guys all think C. Oh wait, here comes some Bs. How about the poll? I can't see the results of it, Melissa, can you?
Ah. I can't hear you. Okay. Um, well, C, thank you. Yes, you all are very smart because AI, AI, C is manual.
The slide is updated. Under videos A and B, the text "AI" appears. Under video C, the text "Manual" appears.
John Gargiulo: If this were more of a conversation, I would love to learn from you what it is you spotted about that ad that feels that way. I have some guesses. Here's the kicker though. So this is uh customer of Airpost called Maelys. They've run a lot of uh these ads. Uh they spend millions of dollars a month on paid social. A and C uh were, oh I'm sorry, I forgot to switch these top performers. The, the AI ones were, spent a lot of money.
The slide is updated. Under video A, it says "AI Top performer". Under video B, it says "AI Top performer". Under video C, it says "Manual Dud".
John Gargiulo: Uh and the manual one did not. Of course, they have a lot of manual ads that do spend a lot of money, but if you've ever wondered, yeah, but like, do these things work? Um, they they work.
Okay. So these ads were, these ads are more like assembly, right? These are all real actors. These are all, this is all real footage, nothing creepy, nothing uh uncanny. Um, full disclosure, these AI ads were all built with Airpost. But there's a lot of other stuff out there I want to share with you guys that's happening.
Slide titled "The talking-head-staring-at-the-camera model can work, too." with three example videos.
John Gargiulo: Uh, the talking head scaring at, staring at the camera thing also can work. Uh, I'll share some companies that are doing this well. You all have probably experimented with this before. I'm going to show you a top performing ad that's also spent quite a lot of money for Manly Bands uh that uses this model.
A vertical video ad plays. A man is talking to the camera about a ring. On-screen text: "Say 'I Do' with a hint of 'Yee-haw'". Audio: "Embrace your inner outlaw with The Cowboy Ring. Crafted from black-plated tungsten with a koa wood inlay, this 8mm symbol of ruggedness and confidence will level up your style. Get yours now, slide it on, and tip your hat to a happily ever after."
John Gargiulo: So what's cool about that, again, from a production and cost standpoint, particularly if you are trying to be scrappy this year and get a lot of things made uh without a lot of time and money, it's a decent ad. It took somebody time to go pick all that B-roll out. It was built manually, but they did not have to cast a new actor. Uh they did not have to go back and forth with reshoots or sending a product that maybe went to the wrong address or figure out PayPal payments and all that stuff, Venmo. Uh, they just probably did it in about four or five hours and it was a hit.
Okay, what does the future look like? Nobody knows the future, but I live this every day and um can share a little bit at least about what I'm seeing.
Slide with a retro-futuristic background of a pink grid road leading to a sun. Text: "The (near) Future".
John Gargiulo: By the end of this year, this I'm sure of because it's already here, you'll be able to artificially shoot images of almost any product.
Slide titled "By the End of 2025". Bullet point: "You'll be able to artificially shoot almost any product image". Below is a grid of AI-generated images of a blue can of "SOM SLEEP" in various settings.
John Gargiulo: So none of these images exist. This was like a one-shot thing. I didn't even try to massage the prompt or the training model. This is from a company called Everart, um that I'll list at the end of this. Some of these are funky, but you know, you go into Shutterstock and you're looking for a picture of someone doing yoga, they have a million pictures, you just need one. It's real easy to pick out the ones that are funny. Um but they got the wording right on this, the coloring of the bottles right on this bottom one here. So if you don't have much to work with, you can start here.
And then this image also was produced uh with Everart. It's not a real guy, not a real image. Looks pretty darn real, right number of fingers.
Slide titled "By the End of 2025". Bullet points: "You'll be able to artificially shoot almost any product image" and "Bring images to life with video". An AI-generated image of a man in a gym holding an "ATLAS BAR" is shown.
John Gargiulo: And then you can pop it into Sora or Runway, and not a bad little few seconds to use in a video ad.
The image of the man holding the protein bar animates. The camera slowly zooms in on him.
John Gargiulo: Completely manufactured out of thin air with AI. It's getting pretty real now. By the end of this year, you won't need lots of shoots and uh platforms and all that stuff. You'll just be able to do this stuff yourselves. Gives you guys a ton of power.
So you'll be able to artificially shoot almost an image, bring those images to life with video, build out a huge library, and then use AI. We're one of many companies that are working on this, to make hundreds of fresh UGC video ads to choose from and iterate on.
Slide titled "By the End of 2025". Bullet points: "You'll be able to artificially shoot almost any product image", "Bring images to life with video", "Then use AI to make hundreds of fresh UGC video ads to choose from and iterate on". An image of an app interface called "airpost" is shown, displaying various video ad concepts.
John Gargiulo: Kind of like all those yoga photos that you choose from versus, you know, going and doing a yoga shoot yourself pre-stock images. We're about to enter an era where you can just look through hundreds of uh creatives based on certain templates that work, maybe some many of them that you've seen on this presentation and this call from others.
DeepSeek is a sea change. Essentially what it's going to do is lead to a lot more startups able to dive in and help make creatives and help make everyone's job higher leverage.
Slide titled "By the End of 2025". Bullet points: "DeepSeek will lead to even more startups in the ad creative space", "AI will be able to write more colloquial scripts", "AI will go beyond words to take actions to make your job easier". An image of a hand holding a phone with the "deepseek" logo is shown.
John Gargiulo: And write more colloquial scripts. A lot of you've probably realized that AI sucks at writing things that sound authentic. That's absolutely true. You go to ChatGPT, you say, write me a TikTok script for Brooklyn and Sheets, it's going to be pretty corny and not work. Um but it's getting better and better and better. And there are now many startups that are really focused on fine-tuning those models to make scripts that you can't tell the difference. You saw some of those ads uh earlier.
And then AI will go beyond words to take actions. This is extremely nascent. I mean, this just launched like a week or two ago. Um Claude has had one for a little longer.
Slide showing screenshots of the "OpenAI Operator" interface. It shows a user prompting the AI to perform tasks like auditing a Facebook account, doing competitor analysis, and managing an ad account. The AI responds and can take actions like logging into a browser.
John Gargiulo: But this is real. You can go in and give it access to your Facebook account, ask it to audit your account structure, ask it to do all those annoying uploads and, you know, naming conventions and formatting things and, you know, more complex things. Use Foreplay to find the longest running ads of my competitors, you know, take their hooks and structure, make a script that sounds kind of along the same lines, slack it to my editor uh that I just got set up on Upwork and tell him to get it to me Monday. And you just type that like a prompt and it goes. If it sounds futuristic, it's really not. I think by the end of this year, we'll all be doing that.
Okay, I wanted to leave you all with some things worth checking out. I could have given you 198 AI companies and demos and tweets and uh vaporware. I tried to keep it focused to things that you saw in this presentation, things that actually work, things that are actually useful for creative strategists today.
Slide titled "AI Tools Worth Checking Out". It's a 2x2 grid. Top-left quadrant is "Avatar Apps" with "HeyGen", "CapCut Avatars", "Instagram Edit". Top-right is "AI Images" with "Everart", "ImagineCreate". Bottom-left is "Image > Video" with "Runway", "Sora". Bottom-right is "End-to-end marketing" with "OpenAI's Operator", "Claude Computer Use".
John Gargiulo: HeyGen does the best, in my opinion, at the talking head thing. Uh you can also go into CapCut and use it. I've done that a lot. I would highly recommend you sign up, uh pre-sign up for Instagram Edit, the big CapCut competitor they've been working on a long time. There's a lot of AI tools in that. Um watching Barry's presentation, which I thought was great, there's also a lot of like filters and AI characters and things that you can use now beyond just uh, you know, what's coming through your lens to really make it look uh catchy.
AI images, I mentioned Everart. This is like a five-person company, guys. Again, with DeepSeek, you're going to see a lot more of those that are really powerful. ImagineCreate does the same kind of thing. You know, if you've got a fashion brand, you can literally take a shirt image that you threw up on Amazon and make uh images of lots of models wearing the shirt and it looks extremely realistic.
Image to video, taking those images, taking images you already have, maybe something that's performing well, maybe something you made out of thin air with Everart, and just sending it to Runway, you don't even have to prompt it. You can just say, five seconds, go. Sora, five seconds, 9 by 16, go. And it will make it move like the guy holding the Atlas protein bar.
And then end-to-end marketing. This is the vision of Airpost. Uh this is where I think our industry is headed. Um it's what's putting all these tools and high leverage in your hands. Um I think creative creatives will be doing creativity for a very long time, the rest of my lifetime, but these tools on this screen and particularly these tools that can take action can just make all of us super creative strategists.
Motion logo on a black background. A musical sting plays.
Motion logo on a black background. Text: Motion.
A montage of various ad creatives (images and videos of models, products) fly across a purple background. Text appears: "Ship more winning creative".
Speaker 1: It's time to ship more winning creative with Motion's creative analytics platform that helps you scale winners into unicorns and helps you figure out where your ads might need just a little more help.
A screenshot of the Motion app dashboard. It shows "Sprints" with metrics like "Launched creatives", "Winning creatives", and "Unicorns". Below is a list of creatives with performance data.]
> [VISUAL: A montage of ad creatives. Emojis in badges appear over them: a unicorn, a trophy, a pointing hand.]
> [VISUAL: A list of creatives with their names, performance metrics, and suggested actions like "Try new hook", "Fix ending", "Improve CTA".
Speaker 1: Join over 2,100 teams shipping winning ads with Motion, like Vuori, True Classic, HexClad, and more.
A purple rounded rectangle with text: "Join 2,100+ teams shipping winning ads with Motion". Below are logos for Vuori, True Classic, Hexclad, Jones Road, MUD\WTR, MuteSix, Ridge, Wpromote, and Power.
Speaker 1: Get a free VIP tour today and you can see how Motion can help your creative strategists and your media buyers speak the same language.
A close-up of a performance data table with colored bar graphs.]
> [VISUAL: Black screen with purple and pink gradient text: "Book a demo for a VIP tour".]
> [VISUAL: Motion logo on a black background. Text: motionapp.com.
