• by Laurie Sullivan , over 1 hour ago

Microsoft Advertising has expanded artificial intelligence (AI) animation capabilities in Copilot that turn still images into short videos. 

"Image Animation" transforms static images into short video assets through Copilot, Microsoft's AI-powered assistant, in products including Windows and Microsoft 365.

James Murray, global product marketing lead for generative AI at Microsoft, demonstrated the tool during a briefing with advertisers.

The feature, available worldwide except for mainland China, extends asset performance across Microsoft Advertising Network's video publishers and online video placements. Advertisers can access the pilot program through Ads Studio's video templates. 

Video creation addresses a growing demand for motion content.

The paid-media team for online travel agency Priceline, which manages about 200,000 campaigns annually, became an early tester of the tool, seeing the potential to pursue niche and emerging marketing opportunities such as independent properties, upper-funnel destination searches, and one-time travel events such as concerts and festivals.

In the Microsoft Advertising platform, Copilot can be integrated into an advertiser's proprietary ad platform. This enables the advertiser to automate the build of hundreds of thousands of customized creative assets for a huge volume of smaller cities, independent properties, event-specific travel moments, and upper-funnel queries that could not be done manually because of the amount of time involved.

On Monday, Microsoft also launched a "Performance Comparison" analysis tool that has been added to provide context to insights to monitor trends over time or compare two different assets, for example. It also can benchmark results for year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter, or day-over-day comparisons.

Performance Comparison also can measure things like comparing test results to control groups provide a quick summary of a recap, and can identify the lowest- or top-performing keywords. Copilot provides the readout and the insights in a report.

Google created a tool that has some similarities, but is different in its focus on developing creative assets from still images and text prompts. In October the company added generative AI (GAI) capabilities to Asset Studio, a creative tool that enables advertisers to generate, edit, and turn images and videos into assets for ads, and to review content before it goes live across media channels — for use in Google Ads.

For example, advertisers can upload a product photo of an item such as a branded jacket, and with a text prompt like "a young man walking in the park," Google AI will generate a new image featuring a model wearing the jacket in that exact scene.