This AI creative company is insane. So, as you're watching this video, I want you to ask yourself a question. As a head of growth, would you rather spend 8K on a creative strategist and a video editor at minimum or an AI solution that claims to do both?
Let me know in the comments when you have your answer. So, a few months ago, a new AI creative company actually flew me out to LA to attend one of their photo shoots. And I know what you're probably thinking.
But Da, if it's an AI company, why are you on a live photo shoot? Where's the AI? And this is actually why I agreed to meet the AirPost team.
Number one, they use real content. These are real human actors that are starring in the ads. So, it's all real footage that they're using and it's made by a team that has real skin in the game.
I've known John for years. He's an agency owner and he's led teams that have made creative for some of the top brands in DTOC. So candidly, they're not going to be impressed by pretty ads.
They are truly motivated by performance. >> We use the analogy of a kitchen. If you watch every video ad, it's a series of ingredients.
There's a voice over, there's supers, there's actors, there's product shots, right? Think of that as the pantry or the walk-in. So, you got these recipes and you have to have hundreds of different ones, a whole cookbook of them, and then you've got to cook them up.
And that's where the AI comes in. I think when people hear AI video, they picture the like the person staring at the camera, talking, the weird lip-syncing uncanniness. That's not what we're doing.
Yeah. >> In fact, we don't even have that. What we have is real actors that come into the studio, real shots.
The customer of Airbos sends in their product. We take real shots of that. >> Um, and the AI is really the cook.
The AI is really not the thing, but it's in the background putting all the ads together, saving a lot of time and money and effort. >> Hey, Dora from the future here. John actually just let me know that AirPost has a brand new update.
They have an entire AI video team that now makes clips using V3, Sora, and other AI tools. So, Aeropost now is actually pulling from three big baskets of footage. Client footage, aka your footage and their proprietary database of over 300K clips that they personally shot in their own studio and the AI footage that their team creates.
And of course, the client can delete any clips that they don't like and it will never show up in any future AirPost ads again. So essentially, you can upload all the content that you have to AirPost and every single week for the rest of time, you're going to have 30 more ads. It's kind of like magic.
But let me take a step back here and explain why I think this is so interesting. In my years as a creative strategist/media writer, I cannot tell you how many times I've been approached by a brand to say something along the lines of, "Hey, do you know a creative strategist/video editor that can just look through all of my own content and make net new ads? " And uh this is essentially what that is.
This is not a CMO replacement. It is functionally a creative strategist/v video editor, but I am going to keep it 100 with you guys. It is not cheap.
But we'll get into that a bit and why it's going to be worth it for some brands. But what's the deal with those photo shoots, right? I do want to spend a little time on this because when I walked into their studio, it was like walking into a highly optimized creative factory.
They were actually preparing to shoot for seven brands that day through a process that they developed called hyperp production. >> With hyper production, we have gotten so good at getting the cost of shooting 20, 30 video shots, unboxing, product shots, hero shots down to extremely nominal amount. So, they've been able to create a Tetris-l like system where they can combine the right production days with the right brands and the right actors, the right weather even, and essentially go down the assembly line of each creative backdrop in a highly efficient way.
It's a level of organiz that is candidly really hard to comprehend. And I used to manage a studio team in Brooklyn several years ago and uh it did not look like this. But it's all made possible by the AirPost team, right?
every product, every shot, every angle, every talent pairing is carefully orchestrated before anyone even picks up a camera. And when I was there for two days, I actually watched as they just moved down this assembly line. And you could see how they were able to capture really authentic shots with iPhones only that would essentially be fed into their AI system and spit out into ads that didn't look like they had any AI involvement.
I think the trick there is they're using real content. Now, something interesting to note is that they've actually started to phase out a lot of this hyper production because they actually found that brands who were coming to them had a different need. In many cases, they didn't need the new photo shoot, right?
What they actually needed was a system and a process that they could use to put their already existing assets into to get net new concepts and angles out of. And maybe sometimes they just needed a few specific clips, which is why this AI capability is so handy. But of course, that would require hiring a new creative strategist in some cases, a new video editor, and training them and so many other things.
If you've ever been on the hiring end of things, you know that it's like one problem that represents 20. So, they began to work with brands existing content. And this is where I find this idea to be really sticky, right?
Because I think that if there was just an always on option of, hey, I just know that all this content I've already made and developed is not going to go to waste and I had an ability to tap into a great existing library or actually make usable AI content, would I opt in? Probably. But let's talk about my own experience with this platform, right?
Cuz I actually did create some ads for a friend of mine's brand and I want to show you the results of those. So my friend's brand, Monica, she owns the brand Maria. And for this process, we actually took all of the content that she already had made and then worked really closely with the AirPost team to go through a series of prompts that they were then feeding to their big AI algorithm.
And through this process, I was also able to like give just some verbal feedback on like what I thought would be best from the brand based on some of the research I had done beforehand. And we ended up getting back all of this content. And I would say like I could not tell at all that these were made from AI.
And I thought that some of these angles actually were really unique. And some of these were things that I know Monica had never even thought to test before. And this is feedback too that the AirPost team gave me was that in some ways too they actually find that the teams that utilize this system actually like using it in part as a brainstorming exercise because there are certain ideations that come more from their algorithm than what teams have seen internally.
So let's take a look at some of these ads right now. This one here was actually the one that we ended up testing that ended up performing the best. And we were able to get a $35 CPA, which comparatively was a lot better than what they had previously seen in platform.
And what I'll say too is this ad is pretty similar to what we see become top performers at PGM, my agency. And essentially the methodology here is testing out new angles and using AI voiceovers. we are using AI voiceovers a lot in the content that we are producing for brands.
So it was really cool to see hey this is really the gap that airpost is bridging and serving. So let's take a look at some of the results that these bigger brands have had right this spent 200k in just under one month and this one actually has one of the lowest CPAs in the entire ad account and they only launched it a week ago. And this is another great example.
It spent over 50K in just one month. So what do you think? Is this good or is it good enough for AI?
So let's talk about what I think is next for AI. So AirPost right has moved into this really interesting space which is this more elevated AI content. The need they fill for brands is that brands have a ton of content and they want to make sure that they are really squeezing the most juice that they can out of it.
And now they don't have to hire a new creative strategist or video editor to do that. In my opinion and experience, this is definitely one of the most sophisticated AI platforms I've seen, especially for video. And let's face it, we've seen a lot of flops this year.
And I think part of that is they were really able to fly under the radar for the last 2 years, work with a lot of brands, and candidly just focus on making the best product possible. And that included making a lot of pivots. But again, it's a great platform, but it is not right for everyone.
And in general as an industry, I think it's a really interesting time because I think the hype around AI is starting to die and reality is really starting to settle in. I'm starting to figure out what it can replace and can't replace in my workflows and in my team structures. And I've talked to many business owners over the last few months that spent a lot of time, money, resources, manh hours, AI hours on trying to make AI work in their business, especially on creative teams.
And if I'm being honest, a lot of that did not stick. So, I feel like right now the dust is starting to settle and we're really able to discern, hey, how are we going to be working with these tools moving forward? And on the creative side, a solution like AirPost makes a lot of sense.
But right now, it's only available for the enterprise level. But for some of those brands, 8K per month is a drop in the bucket, especially if you're getting a great return. But I'm really curious to hear what you would think as a business owner.
Would you rather spend 8K on a video editor and creative strategists, or would you rather spend it on a solution like AirPost? Curious to hear your thoughts. I'll see you guys next week.
Love you. Hey.
