Today’s Mad Men aren’t smooth-talking suits trying to convince CEOs their brands need to reassure people “You are okay,” it’s tech companies like Google filling the airwaves with cheap, mindless AI slop. Google now has an AI video generator called Veo, and it can take any image—even AI-generated—and transform them into mini-movies. The videos look semi-realistic, which is good enough for the advertisers Google is trying to sell its tool to.
Google is the first to put its new model into private preview on its business-centric Vertex AI platform. Veo joins Meta Movie Gen and Runway’s video generation tool, though it also beats OpenAI’s Sora model to a wider launch. Last month, artists leaked a version of Sora to the internet in protest of using AI for artistic purposes.
Veo can generate text from text prompts and/or images. Google is combining it with its existing Imagen 3 model for any business that wants to create brand-specific images. The AI video generator can create videos with different styles in mind. The company showcased a few examples, including a cartoon man looking up from his desk and smiling. There’s another video of a teddy bear strumming a guitar without any fingers to pluck the strings.
Google says these images include invisible, digital watermarks, and the model should stop users from generating anything that might get the public mad if they see it pop up in their next cookies ad. Imagen 3 further allows users to modify images using its “Inpaint” generation to create new objects in an existing photo or its “Outpaint” tool to expand an image, with AI filling in the missing space. It’s akin to Adobe’s existing Firefly tools in programs like Photoshop.
In its blog post, the Mountain View tech monolith said it was working with advertisers from Mondelez International. Never heard of them? They’re the massive international conglomerate that owns brands like Chips Ahoy!, Oreo, Ritz, and Tabisco, to name a few.
That’s a lot of brands, and the companies together think that consumers demand fast, cheap ads streamed straight to their eyeballs. Google wrote that its Veo model will allow “rapid development of consumer-ready visuals at scale” for its many brands in languages specific to all the countries where it sells its snacks.
Google said it’s also working with travel app Agoda. The company claimed it is already working on AI ads, including this odd-looking travel ad that will make you break your mouse trying to click the “skip ad” button.
Like most AI video generators, Veo may be limited in how much footage it can generate. In effect, the generated ads may appear like a jumble of random stock videos. AGoda’s chief marketer, Matteo Frigerio, said the company created images of “dream destinations” and animated them with Veo.
The end result of these promotions is more ads of dubious quality. The modern advertising model relies on cheap ads made quickly, so much so that they can fill every ad space on your social media feed. Mondelez’s VP of consumer experience and digital commerce says the company already uses Imagen 3 to produce “hundreds of thousands of customized assets” to reduce “time to market and costs.”
The visuals for AI video may improve over time, though that won’t necessarily change how samey, drab, and lifeless they’ll be. A survey from the technology research firm YouGov showed about half of consumers don’t like ads that use AI-generated images, whether for humans or products. Perhaps advertisers will learn the hard way that you can’t cheap out on human-created content, even for ads.