AI-powered tools are changing how connected TV (CTV) campaigns are created and executed for advertisers, ad tech partners, and creatives.

“Artificial intelligence has a chance to impact nearly every aspect of CTV advertising, from strategy to creative, to planning, to measurement,” said our analyst Nate Elliott at the recent EMARKETER Summit on CTV and Streaming.

These AI tools have the potential to help advertisers reach an influential channel that’s maturing as it grows in reach. This year, streaming TV ads rank third-highest among the types of ads consumers look to for help with holiday shopping, according to a June LG Ad Solutions survey. Thirty-four percent said streaming TV ads informed them, besting traditional TV ads (32%).

Powering up buying and measurement

Industry leaders say AI is improving CTV advertising by streamlining the bidding process, helping find audiences and measuring results.

“The ability for our marketing systems to make decisions using AI just eliminates operational overhead,” said Jonathan Watkins, head of optimization for tvScientific, in the EMARKETER Summit session.

Predictive models and smarter assessments are just a few ways this overhead is being lessened in the streaming space.

“There’s a lot of talk about really sexy things in AI, but I think the things in CTV that are really winning right now are somewhat more ‘boring,’” Caroline Giegerich, vice president of AI for Interactive Advertising Bureau said in the session. “ Closing that loop on outcomes is very important in the space, and I think AI is really helping to do that effectively.”

Boosting ad design

AI tools are also helping artists design creative, experts say, by providing insights on-the-fly about the effectiveness of specific elements in ads.

“There are a lot of interesting things going on around creative,” Watkins said. “I’ve seen tools that do creative assessment that are looking at whether or not you’re missing some key elements in your creative, like calls to action, or having your end card on long enough to make sure there’s brand retention.”

Generative AI is also advancing to the point where marketers can generate video content from a prompt, Watkins said.

AI-powered automation in ad creation has been around for many years in the form of dynamic creative optimization. However, those in CTV are seeing more seamless results as the technology advances.

“It’s able to swap different elements of ads to make them feel more personalized,” Todd Feitlin, vice president and creative lead for One Horizon said during the session. “There’s the ability to do things where you can now create many different versions of one ad in that way.”

Scaling production

While genAI tools can generate content directly from prompts, much of the ad world uses them to boost efficiency and scale human-derived ideas.

“It’s cost, it’s time, it’s efficiency, it’s being able to react,” said Feitlin. “It’s a big deal with production, not…always to create the content itself, but using it for editing, tagging, and a lot of things like that on top of the ability it has on the creative side.”

AI can measure responses by multiple cohorts to different versions of ads in near real-time. Customizing ad versions for specific cohorts lessens the risk of sending a one-to-one personalized ad to the wrong person.

“Because the machine can learn and say, ‘Oh, OK, this cohort responds at a different rate than this cohort responds,’ that’s all possible and it’s not going to end up in a situation that feels creepy,” said Watkins.