CANNES — Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize the creative and advertising process in the next few years – but what exactly will that look like?

AI can make the process of creative supply much faster and easier, as well as improve the quality of the output, Mihael Mikek believes.

“Everyone wants to leverage AI to basically be faster, better, obviously to reduce the costs,” says Mikek, Founder & CEO of Celtra Inc, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “But again, the challenge is now, ‘How to use this very powerful technology and plug it into the process to just reduce the steps, make things faster and better?’”

Modular Production

Celtra is a software company specializing in Creative Management Platform (CMP) for digital advertising. Established in 2006, Celtra started developing creative automation about four years ago, before the recent AI boom. The company’s vision was to enable brands to centralize production and start designing advertising as modules.

“Modular production is what we basically enable with our platform,” Mikek tells Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein. “And so that means that brands can build building blocks that then get activated in the market. And inherently these activations are automated.”

In that process, Celtra uses AI to bring in insights from past campaigns and media performance to optimize the assembly of ads, localization, personalization, and other important use cases.

Minimizing Production Steps

Celtra is also focused on minimizing the steps in the production process, as there are multiple roles involved. The company aims to connect the creative process to the media process, which have traditionally been separate.

“Creative usually is the last step in a campaign. Some assets get plugged in and the opportunity to really leverage creative as the most important lever for campaign performance was not used,” Mikek says.

“This is what we’re trying to do with creative automation… (to) bring insights in and help with optimizing campaigns at scale, connecting creative process to the media process.”

Consolidating Roles

Mikek believes that AI will lead to the consolidation of different roles in the creative and advertising process. Technology will enable people to do more and take out intermediate steps.

“I think that what we will see is that the people who are creating and the people who are actually using the content or actually marketing this link will be more direct, shorter,” he predicts.

“All the steps in between from, for instance, from designers to creative strategies to creative ops, and even content managers, I think that will all be consolidated into a single role.”

You’re watching “Global Leadership Summit: All Things AI,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series at Cannes Lions 2024 presented by Celtra, Microsoft Advertising and Silverpush. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.

By Robert Andrews on @robertandrews