While TikTok's AI can create videos with human-like avatars, brands find more success using it for product-focused content, like showcasing furniture or beauty products. The technology for believable AI people isn't quite there and it raises trust issues. AI is better used to create product variations or enhance real user-generated content.

The next evolution, the Generative Ads Recommendation Model (GEM), aims to fully automate ad creation. Marketers will simply provide an image and a budget, and the AI will generate the entire ad library. This shifts the marketer's primary value from ad creation to optimizing the post-click customer journey and offer.

AI video creative is no longer theoretical. E-commerce company Ridge reports that it is running full-blown AI-generated videos that are "winners in the ad account." These assets now command up to a third of the company's total ad spend, proving their real-world performance.

The largest advertisers on platforms like Meta launch over 10,000 new creatives a year, equating to more than 40 per workday. This massive scale of experimentation is manually impossible for most companies, creating a clear market need for AI platforms that automate and scale video production.

Meta's ad platform is evolving towards a generative model called GEM. The ultimate goal is for advertisers to provide a single image and a budget, allowing the AI to generate all creative variations and iterate on them automatically, personalizing them for individual users.

Successful AI video production doesn't jump from text to video. The optimal process involves scripting, using ChatGPT for a shot list, generating still images for each shot with tools like Rev, animating those images with models like VEO3, and finally, editing them together.

The cost of creating a sophisticated, multi-clip AI video ad, including all image and video generations, can be astonishingly low—as little as two dollars. This radical reduction in production costs democratizes high-quality video creation, making it accessible to nearly anyone, regardless of budget.

Previously, marketers told Meta who to target. With the new AI algorithm, marketers provide diverse creative, and the AI uses that creative to find the right audience. Targeting control has shifted from human to machine, fundamentally changing how ads are built and optimized.

TikTok is integrating powerful AI tools for businesses, including AI-generated scripts and voiceovers from product data, and AI models to showcase apparel. This democratizes video ad creation by removing the need for expensive photoshoots, models, or extensive video production.