The horror…the horror…
Advertising is already one of the most annoying parts of watching television and, if a high-level executive at Roku is to be believed, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. The Verge reports that the streamer envisions a near future where your TV is flooded with AI-generated advertisements.
“No longer is it going to be about the top 200 advertisers,” Roku CFO and COO Dan Jedda told investors during a recent investor conference hosted by Citi. “It’s going to be about 100,000 advertisers.” Oh, dear God, please no. He apparently went on: “You can use gen AI to [make] a very well-produced commercial,” noting that you can “be up and running within minutes.”
Who is the target demographic to deploy this sort of advertising? Apparently, the answer is small businesses. This makes sense, since many of said businesses may have limited resources to generate more polished (i.e., human) ads for distribution. Thus, the future of video ads may be the AI-generated equivalent of that sort of thing you see at the bottom of less glamorous websites. “The SMB market has been really shut out of all [connected TV],” Jedda told his audience. Gizmodo reached out to Roku for more information and will update this story when we hear back.
The exec didn’t give a whole lot of details about Roku’s plan to capitalize on AI, other than to “encourage” smaller businesses to use it for advertising. The Verge points out that tools could be made available to smaller businesses to create automated content on Roku’s platform, noting:
Your local car dealership, or the restaurant next door, is still spending most of its digital marketing budget on search and social media ads. If Roku has its way, a good chunk of that is going to shift to streaming.
Part of that shift are self-serve tools that make it easier for smaller businesses to buy ads on smart TVs. However, many mom-and-pop shops have also struggled with a much more fundamental problem: They simply didn’t have the means to produce a TV ad. That’s where AI comes in, according to Jedda.
By now, I’m sure most of you are familiar with the experience of watching AI slop. It’s true that, as Jedda says, you can get said slop “up and running in minutes.” It’s also true that, by and large, it is the stuff that nightmares are made of. In short, I’m not entirely sure that businesses are going to prosper if they’re using hallucinogenic montages filled with four-fingered humans to sell their products.
There was one particular AI-generated ad, produced for online prediction market site Kalshi, that got some press a couple of months ago and, while it wasn’t exactly in the same nightmare territory as other genAI crap, it still induced a stomach-churning queasiness in this particular viewer. I suppose the tech could improve and the ads could get better, but I’m just not so sure that most people are going to be thrilled about navigating a flood of televisual spam while they try to unwind for the evening.
Read the full article here
