• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 9, 2024

Software developer Informatica has been testing different options to generate video ads with artificial intelligence, after launching a campaign using AI that shows brands the importance of having clean data.

Hundreds of data prompts -- which are important to create perfect images -- as well as software are required for brands to launch AI-generated advertising campaigns. Informatica has a "tiger team" that evaluates tools such as Jasper, OpenAI ChatGPT, and an AI art generator called Midjourney as well as Getty and Shutterstock. All are tools for storytelling.

Brands may be ready to give it a go, but their data needs work, says Brett Barash, senior director of brand and creative at Informatica, which uses hundreds of pieces of photographs in its content. That expense could be cut through the use of AI. 

"Chief data officers and chief data engineers get the message around AI, but what they didn't understand is their data wasn't ready," he said.

Barash is the visionary behind the company's latest campaign. The series of ads highlight specific B2B tasks like optimizing automated products and platforms using AI to do it through humor. When tasks go awry in the videos, the narrator says “Everybody’s ready for AI except your data."

Informatica's creative agency fred&ted developed the campaign, tagline and produced the ads. The campaign ran as test media around October 2023, but officially launched in July 2024.

Ad media placements have run across NBC Sports, Golf Channel, LinkedIn CTV, Wired, CDO Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to ensure it reached key decision makers. They are performing extremely well in a few categories, Barash said.

Informatica measures operational metrics, clicks and click-through rates from ads to the landing page. Month after month, CTRs and visits to the campaign landing page are increasing “exponentially,” and are rising monthly based on optimization tactics being used.

"More interesting, we are doing brand lift studies with paid media and brand tracker, and those numbers are increasing each month as well," he said. "Aided awareness and message recall are the two big things for us."

Barash thinks traditional B2B advertiser and their creative campaigns have become stale and serious, lacking the ability to fully address enterprises' largest concerns about deploying and actually using AI."

"The data must be managed properly to be ready for AI,” Barash said. “These spots are humorous, but humor that resonates with our audience. If companies don’t have data ready for AI, trusted, holistic, managed and governed then “weird things start to happen and what the company’s trying to do cannot really work.”

The humorous spots are working because company executives know this, but they find it difficult to accomplish because their data isn’t ready, Barash said.

"The data management category is pretty complex," he said, with an effort to describe duplicate customer profiles that might not have the same information. A company might have two or three customer files on the same person, but no two have the same information. This is similar to having multiple files in an iPhone contact list that have different information for the same person.