Disney’s AI advertising promotion is gaining momentum.
A company executive said in an internal meeting that the company is preparing to release a beta version of its AI-generated TV advertising tool in July, according to an audio recording shared with Business Insider.
The entertainment giant originally shared news of the tool in January as part of a broader CES announcement of upcoming technology-driven features for advertisers. Other major ad sales companies, including Google, Meta, and TikTok, are also rolling out AI ad generation tools for advertisers.
Adam Smith, chief product and technology officer for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, shared a timing update with employees during a product conference last week. He said the AI tool can generate scripts, videos and music, and said this is “one of the clearest areas where we’re really getting attention.”
Smith said the advertising tool is specifically aimed at small and medium-sized advertisers who don’t have video assets. In a previous announcement, Disney touted the tool’s ability to allow brands to create connected TV spots using existing creative assets, allowing them to be customized based on factors such as audience and context while providing a level of human oversight.
Smith said it will eventually be available through Disney’s self-service advertising platform, a dashboard that allows advertisers to manage and run advertising campaigns at Disney properties.
“You can think of this as having everything from the script to the video to the music creation all in a single coordinated workflow,” Smith said, according to the recording. “Every week they send me these samples, and every week I say the samples are getting better and better.”
Ashwin Navin, CEO of ad measurement service Samba TV, said a video ad generation tool like Disney’s could open up the company to advertisers with smaller budgets.
Navin said these advertisers don’t have the budget to pay a “creative agency to create the perfect 30-second video.”
Alicia Weaver, vice president of media activation at media agency Media Associates, said she has begun talking to clients about Disney’s tools and sees it as a way to help advertisers customize connected TV ads to different audiences.
“It takes time to create different versions,” she said. “Anything that can facilitate that in a more turnkey way is definitely an advantage.”
Advertisers have gone from being excited about the promise of time and money savings from AI to fearing a consumer backlash against so-called slop.
With this change in mind, Weaver said Disney wants to know things like how the ads meet the brand’s quality control expectations before recommending advertising tools to clients.
“We’ve reached a point where our clients want to leverage AI to make sure their brand is represented correctly,” she said. “AI is getting more attention now that we know what it can do. AI is no longer a shiny new object.”