Take the example of Shapermint, a direct-to-consumer fashion brand that used generative AI to scale its influencer program: The company’s in-house team developed an agent (named “Altair” after its stars) that can generate scripts and storyboards for TikToks and Instagram Reels and distribute them to influencers.
Massimiliano Tirocchi, chief marketing officer at Shapermint’s Uruguayan parent company Trafilea, which has lofty ambitions to use AI to “power the entire creative process,” is using Altair for routine tasks previously handled by its in-house marketing team. Nine months after the tool’s release, he said, his team has reduced production time for influencer creative by about 70%.
Shapermint’s setup was built by an in-house team using OpenAI and Meta API access, but is relatively similar to the projects and use cases coming out of digital and creative agencies.
While the company’s creators aren’t required to adhere to the company’s scripts, storyboards or copy, Tirocchi estimates that 70-75% of Shapermint’s creator content is created using at least some of Altair’s output. The company began developing the tool in 2023 and began using it just before last year’s Black Friday shopping weekend.
Tirocchi estimated that in a typical work week, one staffer could plan 15 campaigns, placing four to six videos in each. “This allows us to do the same work in less than a day,” he said. Shapermint’s Altair tool connects to the Meta ad library through the tech giant’s API, allowing staff to incorporate data about content performance into future scripts. The team had previously drafted scripts and analyzed Meta data, but Altair sped up both processes.
Unlike Toys R Us, Shapermint doesn’t use generative AI to generate assets. “The video capabilities aren’t there yet,” Tirocchi said. Video footage quality isn’t good enough, and the company wants its video spots to show the actual products it sells, rather than just generated approximations of the products.
Tirocchi added that Shapermint is using the time it saves by using Altair’s tools to expand to platforms including YouTube and Pinterest, and to spend more time creating localized content for markets outside the U.S.
The brand has about 1,000 creators, including a core group of 30 influencers. The company previously relied on Meta ads to reach consumers, but last year it began to place more emphasis on creator content and increased the budget allocated to influencer activities by 20%.
That equates to $250,000 in monthly production costs, Tirocchi said. The company’s total advertising budget typically hovers between $5 million and $6 million per month, with 85% of that going to producing, testing or promoting creators’ content.
Shapermint expects global revenue to reach $300 million, up 35% year over year, and Tirocchi attributes the growth to the brand’s influencer marketing approach. “This is a big driver for us to scale,” Tirocchi said.
Projects like Altair are closer to the median than proof-of-concept ads built with tools like Sora, said Nicole Green, vice president and analyst at Gartner for Marketers. “We’ve moved from pilots, experiments to implementation,” she said.
The shift comes amid shrinking marketing budgets across the industry.
A Gartner study published in May estimated that budgets will shrink by 15% between 2023 and 2024. This is a long-term trend, and the average budget is lower than in 2019, when marketing expenses accounted for 10.5% of companies’ revenue.
“CMOs continue to be asked to do more with less,” Green said, citing another Gartner survey. “Only 24% of CMOs say they have adequate budgets to execute their strategy. In a world where we’re being asked to do more with less, we’re finally able to do more. Gen AI gives us the ability to do more.”
George Strahov, global head of creative technology at DDB, said most of the AI projects the firm is pursuing and implementing are focused on scale and new efficiencies. “We’re at the stage where people are trying to move from toys to tools,” he said.
Strakhov cited a research product developed by DDB called “Gut Check” that is already being used by several clients, though he declined to name them. The tool is a generative AI agent that combines up-to-date social listening data with a search engine to help marketers understand the latest market attitudes towards specific products or brands.
“I don’t see this as a replacement for actual research,” he said, adding that the tool’s real use is to save time on tedious tasks. While it may lack the sci-fi appeal of the whole AI-generated animated ad thing, this is the kind of use case that currently fills a need for marketers.
