The Brandtech Group

Brandtech, the world’s leading Gen AI partner for global brands, launches program to bring the best AI creatives to marketers

New York, New York, 16 July 2024: The Brandtech Group, which owns the world’s #1 Gen AI marketing platform, Pencil, is launching a new program aimed at bringing the world’s best Gen AI creative excellence to marketers. Some of the most interesting and significant Gen AI creators in the world are participating.

Brandtech’s Pencil was created in 2018 and is the only generative AI marketing company that has made more than 1 million Gen AI ads and is powered by $1BN in media spend across 5,000 brands, enabling it to predict performance as well as generate marketing assets. It is the only end-to-end Gen AI marketing platform, creating everything from insights, copy and imagery to channel-specific, channel-ready finished ad creative. Pencil was named by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies 2024, the only Generative AI marketing company to be recognized. (This AI platform has made and modeled a million ads).

The Residency program is being run by Collectively, Brandtech’s influencer and creator company, and will enable the world’s top AI creators to explore the creative possibilities of Gen AI in marketing.

The program is the brainchild of Brandtech Partner and Head of Emerging Tech, Rebecca Sykes and Brandtech Consulting Creative Director James Dow. It will welcome talented Gen AI creators throughout 2024, each joining for four weeks to explore the possibilities of their specific area of expertise in a marketing context, and push the creative boundaries of marketing with their unique use of Gen AI. They will also help educate Brandtech Gen AI teams on how to create for their specialism, and assist the broader Collectively and Mofilm creator communities to fully participate in the Gen AI revolution.

Brandtech partner Rebecca Sykes believes Gen AI is a huge enabler of creativity. “We are convinced this technology delivers a huge unlock for creativity, and these amazingly talented artists are leading the way”, she says. “We all benefit – they learn how to see their work in a marketing context, opening up new opportunities for them, and we get to explore that with them and also have our people learn from these subject experts. It’s a win-win.”

The specialisms are:

  • Product Photography
  • Consistent Characters
  • Textures
  • Fantastical Imagery
  • Photorealism
  • Motion in Statics
  • AI animation
  • Zero-to-one Video Generation

 

The first creators to rotate into Brandtech are, London-based Salma Aboukar, who specializes in Gen AI product photography, Seattle-based animator, James Gerde, and London-based AI director, Ryan Phillips.

Sykes adds: “There are two drivers of being the #1 in generative AI, one is having the best technology and we unquestionably have that in Pencil, and the other is having and working with the best talent. The Residency program will allow us to incorporate and learn from the very best and most original Gen AI creators in the world and we can help them turn their skills to commercial use. I could not be more excited to welcome them and deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients.”

Collectively, Chief Innovation Officer, Natalie Silverstein, says: “Generative AI opens up unimaginable new possibilities for creator content and is already raising the ambition for what’s possible in social feeds. Collectively’s mission is to help brands tap into the genius of the creator community for collaboration, and this new generation of talent will undoubtedly help evolve what influencer marketing can achieve.”

Brandtech Founder and CEO David Jones says: “The mobile phone made everyone a creator – generative AI makes everyone an ad agency. When we acquired our first Creator Economy businesses back in 2015, the industry was really embryonic – today there are over 60MM people making a living in the Creator Economy. Imagine the power of that on AI steroids!! I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we are going to see the greatest creative revolution in history!”

About The Brandtech Group

The Brandtech Group is the world’s #1 digital-only marketing group and the leading global generative AI marketing company. It was founded in June 2015 (as You & Mr Jones) by former Havas Global CEO David Jones, with the simple mission to help brands do their marketing better, faster and cheaper using technology. It was renamed The Brandtech Group in January 2022.

Today it is the largest global digital content partner for many of the world’s biggest brands and companies, often using its unique in-housing model. It works with eight of the world’s top 10 global advertisers and 49 of the world’s top 100. Clients include Google, Microsoft, Unilever, LVMH, Morgan Stanley, Bayer, TikTok, Diageo, Reckitt and Renault-Nissan.

Its most recent acquisition was Pencil, the only generative AI marketing company that is powered by $1BN in media spend across 5,000 brands.Typically, Pencil’s ads are 10x faster, with 2x better performance than a brand’s usual baseline. Working with the Group, Pencil launched a new tool, Pencil Pro, which is specifically designed for major global brands and has an industry-leading approach to brand safety, data ringfencing, IP ownership, copyright protection and other policies.

In addition, the Group invests in cutting-edge marketing technology companies and has been active in the AI, AR and gaming spaces since 2015.
The Group was the very first external investor in Niantic (creators of Pokémon Go), alongside other investments such as AI Foundation (2018), Automat (AI chatbots, 2016), Elsy (AI media planning, 2016), Jivox (dynamic automated content, 2016), Crossing Minds (deep learning AI recommendation system, 2017), VidMob (automated content, 2018), CreativeX (AI-driven content optimization, 2022), Zappar (AR, 2017), Provenance (blockchain, 2022) and GGP (the world’s largest gaming fund).

The Group is one of the most prominent marketing industry voices on the prediction and movement to AI-driven marketing, including generative AI. It was named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies 2021 by Fast Company, and by CB Insights as one of the World’s Most Valuable Private Unicorns.