TikTok’s Ads with Gen-A.I. Avatars of Creators

According to a report by The Verge, TikTok plans on adding new features to its suite of A.I. tools, most of these relevant to business owners. The new feature will allow for gen-A.I. creation of “avatars” of content creators to stick into ads.

The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post

Using A.I. to generate human spokespeople for marketing content is the main draw of this technology to business owners.
There are two kinds of Avatars to choose from: Stock or Custom. Stock Avatars are like stock images—purposely designed to seem generic and multi-purpose. Custom Avatars are modeled after specific real-world content creators.
A significant benefit that this has over regular human-made endorsements is natural-seeming dubbing. A content creator who speaks nary a tiny lick of a given foreign language can suddenly be fluently pitching a product in that lingo.
The true tests for this technology remain to be seen. For instance, what if a specific ad comes out looking totally awkward, and the A.I. fails to generate suitable alternatives?
Another caveat emptor businesses should consider is poor translations. How much trust should a business owner put into a machine-translation tool? The question is especially relevant for business owners who speak nary a tiny lick of a given foreign language used in an ad.

The New Way of Doing Celebrity Endorsements

(For the peace of mind of everyone involved in the making and reading of this article, please resist the temptation to mentally haggle with the imagined writer of this blog post over what constitutes a “celebrity”.)

In ye olde days of advertising, celebrity endorsements involved getting a celebrity to a location for a photo or film shoot.

The digital age has allowed for remote celeb endorsements.

However, even that remote work involves getting the (e-) celeb to do the manual labor of filming a segment.

The gen-A.I. vanguard simply allows advertisers to just get a celebrity to sign off on using Name & Image & Likeness for the purpose of branding.

What Business Owners Should Know About TikTok

If you are not quite sure what to make of all this, or are just not too familiar with social-media platforms, you can get some more context below.

Social-media platforms are already flooded with ads, which are most of the platforms’ primary source of income. TikTok is no different.

The engagement of its users, and hosting the digitized self-expression the platforms engender, are simply the means and costs of attracting advertisers.

What often gets users’ attention are the familiar faces and “personalities” that enjoy the status of “influencer”.

These so-called content creators enjoy a celebrity status on TikTok, outside of which the content creators may be completely obscure to anyone not giving their attention to that social-media site.

Think of it as something like an online Hollywood. An absolute glut of content creators striving to get the attention of the masses. Some content creators manage to achieve that.

With that achievement comes the opportunity to sign potentially lucrative brand-endorsement deals with businesses. To extend the analogy, think of how Hollywood celebrities, which tend to have a wider reach than TikTok’s e-celebs, will appear in Super Bowl advertisements.

Double Trouble

Doubling oneself in the form of an avatar is certainly one way of generating an income source.

 In effect, one would be delegating to a truly objectified version of oneself the task of helping sell products to consumers.

That makes generating income off of one’s N & I & L much more convenient and easy.

Making marketing a much more passive process for everyone involved will in all likelihood encourage more and more influencers to sign up for A.I. avatars.

Since the job pretty much does itself, all it takes is a willingness on the part of the content creators to double themselves for the sake of marketing.