Pencil launches AI-generative creative platform Studio

Creative AI company Pencil has launched its first enterprise product – a generative creative platform for advertisers called Studio. This comes after securing SG $1.5m in seed funding which is being used to expand engineering and customer success teams, grow proprietary datasets and extend patent-pending technology. Studio uses AI to aid creative and media teams in generating personalised advertising content, both language and visuals, with speed and scale. According to a press release, the technology works by first using computational power to massively experiment, then AI pattern detection to spot the best ideas. This ensures divergence and surprise in creative outputs, while also applying historical learnings to improve campaign performance. Studio also provides predictive feedback to users, suggesting whether generated content is likely to be effective, differentiated and “on brand”. The process for generating AI content using Studio is highly collaborative, with the human user firmly in control. Creatives brief the platform and then review generated content, providing feedback in the form of approvals or edits which in turn train and refine the AI. In addition, Pencil is pioneering the concept of Sustainable AI. Any creative that uses Pencil’s tools will, in the future, be able to monetise the generative algorithms they have trained with their specific taste and expertise. Sustainable AI enfranchises the people working alongside algorithms, and is a model that Penci; believes should be applied to all automation. Pencil was founded in March 2018 by Will Hanschell (pictured bottom left), a former partner and management consultant at creative agency Iris Worldwide, and Sumukh Avadhani (pictured bottom middle), a deep learning and computer vision specialist who was previously a principal at Google. The company sets out to address the problem with advertising today where many creative teams, overwhelmed by the volume of content that modern digital advertising requires, are unable to focus on ideas which reach consumers creatively and meaningfully. Consumers then experience increasingly targeted advertising which fails to resonate, leading to a vicious cycle of even more invasive targeting. Pencil aims to break this cycle by enabling creative teams to deliver quantity without sacrificing quality. “We believe that AI will be as fundamental to creativity in the future as the pencil was in the past. Our goal is to bring the scale and speed of automation to creativity, without killing it. We’re working towards a world where humans and machines collaborate on ideas of all kinds, together pushing the boundaries of what creativity even means,” said Will Hanschell, co-founder and CEO of Pencil. Paul Santos, managing partner of Wavemaker Partners – the venture capital firm which led Pencil in its seed rounds – said that the “number one pain point” of marketing teams is to increase ROI. He points out that “almost every solution” proposes greater targeting or better customer profiling and is “fundamentally limited” by the amount of content one can “humanly produce”. “Pencil takes a new and complementary approach, allowing teams to generate and distribute personalised content at scale using AI. We are happy to support Hanschell and Avadhani in their vision to put this technology into the hands of the world’s best e-commerce, brand and agency teams by 2020,” he added.