Recently, Waymark signed a deal with Beasley Media Group to deploy its generative AI technology to 29 Beasley-owned radio stations.
Waymark’s AI-powered video platform enables local businesses to “generate professionally narrated, high-quality commercials in less than five minutes,” the company said. The AI-generated technology is currently in use at Beasley-owned radio stations in Augusta, Georgia; Charlotte and Fayetteville, North Carolina; Detroit, Michigan; and Las Vegas, Nevada. The agreement with Beasley Media Group marks Waymark’s first major step into the radio space. , following recent national video deals with Spectrum Reach and Gray TV stations.
To learn more about Waymark and its services, Radio World emailed Waymark CEO Alex Persky-Stern with a question.
Radio World: Can you briefly explain what Waymark is and how it was founded? What needs does your company serve in the broadcast industry?
Alex Persky-Stern: The easiest way to describe Waymark’s platform is that it is an AI-based video generator. Users can create complete, broadcast-ready commercials in minutes. A very short (less than 3 minutes) demo of how this works. It won a Google Demo Day award in 2017 and officially introduced video creators. At that time, AI was not being used in operations. We started implementing AI in 2020-2021, and around that time our creative offerings began to accelerate significantly.
Media providers such as broadcasters, cable, streaming services and now radio use Waymark to expose TV advertising to small businesses. Traditionally, TV advertising has been dominated by big brands. Because historically, only big, deep-pocketed companies could produce TV commercials. A single 30-second commercial can take days or weeks to produce and can easily cost thousands of dollars. This is time and money that many US companies do not have. Waymark enables media providers to offer their clients this affordable, high-quality video creative as part of their advertising package. They found that this was a win-win, adding significant value to local businesses and generating more advertising dollars.
Our partners seem to agree as well. We have deals with Gray Television, Spectrum Reach, Gamut and now the Beasley Media Group. We also participate in creative directories with both Hulu and Roku, who both point to us as resources for their self-service advertising platforms. We have several other partnerships that we will announce in the future. It’s an exciting time for us as these innovators leverage our technology to democratize video production across markets.
RW: Tell us about Waymark’s interest in radio. What inspired you to expand beyond just video applications?
Persky-Stern: We are well positioned to help the radio industry meet the explosive growth of CTV and OTT. The radio industry is constantly innovating and seizing new opportunities to expand local business marketing. That’s why radio has remained a staple of advertising for so long. Many radio stations have longstanding relationships with local advertisers. They have that trust and history, as well as the expertise and knowledge to see streaming as a powerful new opportunity. Waymark is perfect for filling a creative gap where you can introduce your clients to video advertising in ways never before possible.
RW: What are the main features of your AI technology?
Persky-Stern: We have evolved to use multiple AI models in our platform, making much of the experience AI-driven. Our partner loves his AI scriptwriting, which generates an entire commercial script in seconds. Automatic branding that takes images and creatives from her company’s web presence and matches them to the brand’s colors. And the latest addition is AI narration that adds an extra layer of sophistication to your commercials. All of these are significant differentiators while providing unprecedented levels of ease of use, speed and affordability for all users.
RW: How was the interest from radio stations?
Persky-Stern: We have seen a very positive response from the radio industry, especially in terms of OTT and CTV advertising sales.
In fact, the radio industry invented one of Waymark’s most popular uses: the spec spot creator. In radio, it was common to approach ad clients by providing them with a “specification” creative to preview what the ad would look like. They found this very helpful in getting potential customers enthusiastic about the marketing possibilities there. Until Waymark stepped in, there was no way to leverage its “creative first” selling approach at scale. Now it exists and account executives using it are reporting very strong results.
RW: How do you address concerns shared by many broadcasters about the introduction of AI into everyday work life (and potential disruption to work and trusted content)?
Persky-Stern: There is no doubt that AI will impact the world of media. Waymark expects a lot of AI content to emerge, but the media winners will be those who know it’s AI.Supported Content, not AIgenerated Content, that’s the most interesting and powerful.
We have a theory called “humans at the helm”. It was developed by ourselves after doing a lot of research with AI. After doing tons of experiments, we’ve always found that we can use AI to create something very quickly. But using human creative experts to guide and enhance that result produces the most interesting and compelling content.
As more companies embrace AI in their content creation, they need to find new ways to differentiate themselves from the rest of the AI content out there. And the answer has always been there: in humans. We expect what we see with AI to follow the same pattern as all other technological advances in history. In other words, humans will come out on top as they learn to use AI and strengthen their skill sets.
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