NewFronts Day 2—protests outside of Peacock and AI advancements
Welcome to Ad Age’s NewFronts 2023 newsletter. We’ll be sharing a daily roundup of events, interviews and sessions from Interactive Advertising Bureau's dog-and-pony show throughout the week. You can find all of Ad Age's NewFronts coverage here. Advertisers brave...
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AI news
Snap is incorporating ads into its new AI chatbot, the company announced at its presentation. The social platform will begin testing sponsored links in My AI, which is similar to how Microsoft is testing ads in Bing, Ad Age’s Garett Sloane writes.
David Roter, Snap’s VP of global agency partnerships, also touched on some other ways AI could factor into Snapchat, at one point promising “mobile video powered by conversational intent.” But exactly what that means is vague. It sounds like AI could help deliver video recommendations based on signals it detects from users in chat.
Roku will use AI to place a brand’s creative against what the company called an “iconic plot moment” in its content library, Herren writes. AI will search for these moments within shows and match them up to a brand’s message, according to Julian Mintz, head of U.S. brand sales. So an apparel ad, for example, could appear when Tim Gunn makes a critique during “Project Runway.”
Snap’s Trump impersonator swipes at TikTok
Matt Friend, who has built a following doing comedic impressions on Snapchat with the help of transformative AR filters, opened Snap’s NewFront with a couple of jabs at TikTok. Friend joked he had booked a gig for TikTok in Montana, but the show was canceled, Sloane writes. “If you know, you know,” he quipped. Of course, we know Montana’s state government is debating banning TikTok.
The Snap star didn’t stop there: In a demo of how he uses Snap’s augmented reality to play different characters, Friend showed a video of himself impersonating Donald Trump on Snapchat. Friend, as Trump, sang the praises of Snap, specifically referencing how it wasn’t owned by “China,” using Trump’s specific pronunciation.
