If you can’t beat them, join them — that’s the mantra that influencer-marketing firm Izea has adopted when it comes to AI.
Since artificial intelligence became all the buzz in late 2022, Izea has been working on developing a framework around AI and marketing, which it refers to as “Generative Sponsorships.”
“The big idea here is that we want to be able to take trained models that brands create, combine them with trained models that creators produce, and allow them to collaborate,” Ted Murphy, founder and CEO of Izea, told Business Insider.
Izea is not the only company in the creator space to have openly discussed its commitment to AI. In November, the influencer-marketing firm Billion Dollar Boy launched a division focused on innovation that would explore potential applications for AI in marketing. A recent survey from influencer platform SocialPubli found that over 80% of marketers saw AI as an opportunity for growth and success.
As a first step in bringing its own AI framework to reality, Izea recently launched AI “Mixers” as part of its AI offering (which it calls “FormAI”).
The concept behind “Mixers” is to offer creators and brands the ability to train their own AI models. Influencers will create digital representations of themselves, while marketers can train AI models of their products.
Then, both parties can work together on the platform to combine their models in a variety of ways, generating different outcomes of possible content that includes the creator’s likeness and the brand’s product.
Izea sees two possibilities for AI use in influencer campaigns: a “direct” application, where the content generated with artificial intelligence is ready to publish as part of a campaign, without modifications from the brand or the creator; and a “guided” application process.
Murphy said embracing AI as a supporting tool for influencer campaigns could help solve the growing concern of rising collaboration costs between brands and creators — an issue that may soon reach a tipping point.
“On the direct application side, we see the opportunity to lower the production costs for both brands and influencers,” he said. “On the guided application side, we think that there’s some applications to make sure that the creative targets are hit and you can move through the process faster.”
The use of AI could help, for example, when a brand needs hyper-targeted content for campaigns that revolve around seasons; geographic locations; or micro-events, like National Pizza Day or National Chocolate Day. With its malleability, AI could allow brands and creators to iterate endlessly on campaign ideas while mitigating the loss of time and resources.
Izea is betting big on the fact that the influencer-marketing world appears amenable to AI tools: creators have been experimenting widely with the technology, with over 94% of them saying they were using it in some capacity in a May survey. Around the same time, another survey found that over half of creators had been asked to use AI by brands.
The tech continues to evolve rapidly, too, and its possible applications change and expand. Still, there’s some time to go before the content generated with the tool can be published directly, Murphy said. So far, the company’s clients have been experimenting with Mixers for brainstorming and ideation. Eventually, Izea plans to develop more advanced capabilities, including video. But for now, Mixers are limited to images.
“I think it’s early. I don’t think that we’re at the point of full publishing. I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, these are photorealistic and this looks like real life,'” Murphy said. “But the pace at which it is improving gives me a lot of confidence that within the next year or so, it’s going to be there.”
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