Marketers claim they want to control creative production, but the moment new AI tools arrive, they suddenly become more focused on convenience.
AI video advertising platform Airpost, which launched last month, is doing its best to find its happy medium. Today, the company announced $4.1 million in seed funding.
CEO and founder John Gargiulo said Airpost is “not for” companies that want to abandon their marketing budget, lay off half their employees, and use only AI-generated content.
But most brands don’t want to give up control and are trusting machines to do everything accurately, from brand voice to product images, he said. And even if we are ready to relinquish control, the AI itself may not be ready.
“Anyone who says AI can be creative and performant is fooling themselves,” Gargiulo said.
The bulk of Airpost’s 33-person team (about two-thirds) is made up of engineers working on the AI engine. A separate team creates and shapes the AI video assets, and a broader creative team assembles and refines the final product.
First, brands upload their existing assets and audience guidelines. Airpost generates a creative brief for a specific product, which brands can manually modify. Airpost’s creative team then uses the platform to create video ads, and each client receives at least 10 unique ads per week, plus unlimited version control.
Videos are a mix of AI-generated and organic content.
Organic content falls into one of two baskets. One is a brand’s own existing assets, or what Gargiulo called Airpost’s “proprietary library,” which AI analyzes and categorizes based on details like shot angle and image content.
The “library” consists of stock-like images that are not product-specific, such as a shot of someone’s home or a couple walking in a park. This is content that brands agree to share for reuse, rather than generating new AI content or filming nearly identical scenes.
AI alone is “not enough” to generate a perfect ad, Gargiulo said. He said people still need to “enhance their copy” or replace the weirdly creepy clip with perhaps an existing clip in their library.
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For example, Airpost’s AI was testing a deodorant ad for a personal care brand (mainly aimed at men) that wanted to target women looking for scents that weren’t traditionally feminine. One of the generated lines was “a little bit AI-ish,” Gargiulo said, noting that not all women “want to wear women’s deodorant.” Airpost’s creative team noted that this line sounded a bit dull and awkward, and deemed it unlikely to resonate with viewers.
Gargiulo said one of the humans on the creative team “got tired of smelling like a scented candle” and modified it to make it catchier and ultimately lead to better performance, noting that AI “can’t create yet.”
(But stay tuned: Gargiulo says the plan is to use most of the seed funding to improve Airpost’s AI engine, eventually allowing it to create high-performance ads on its own, which he called “incredibly difficult.”)
Once the content is complete, brands download and run ads across their channels.
To keep these ads compliant and on-brand, Gargiulo said Airpost uses AI to ensure each ad meets brand guidelines.
One of the first things brands submit to Airpost is a deck containing restrictions such as settings they want to avoid or words they can’t allow in ads. Airpost’s AI tools interpret the restrictions (a human then double-checks the AI’s behavior) and generate ads that comply with the brand’s specific standards.
“Legal regulations and compliance are very sexy,” Gargiulo said, but it drives the brand experience and needs to be done with great precision.
To encourage broader use of the product, Gargiulo said the company also plans to use the seed funding for influencer marketing, focusing on people who “understand the space” and actively demonstrate use of the product, such as creative strategists who have an active social media presence.
Word of mouth, along with networking, is the main way Airpost spreads the word about its products.
“I hate to say this, but we don’t spend a single dollar on Google ads,” Gargiulo said.
The company aims to acquire “really big customers” and capture “the entirety” of the enterprise space, which Gargiulo believes can be done without “a large marketing or sales team.”
“We just need creators and industry people,” he said, holding the product.
