- TikTok is expanding its Symphony suite of generative artificial intelligence (AI) products for brands, per news shared with Marketing Dive. The announcement was made as part of the platform’s presence on the Cannes Lions international promoting festival.
- One of the tools, Symphony Image to Video, converts static pictures, akin to product photos, into five-second clips tailored to TikTok. Text to Video does the identical for text prompts while Showcase Products introduces digital avatars on TikTok that may hold goods, model clothing or showcase an app on a phone screen.
- Image to Video is out there directly inside Adobe’s Express offering for social content creation as part of an expanded partnership with TikTok. Symphony’s solutions are also coming to WPP Open, the ad-holding group’s AI-powered operating system, further broadening their availability to brands.
TikTok is ramping up its efforts around generative AI as digital promoting platforms race to roll out technology that may do more of the heavy lifting for marketers. CMOs have acknowledged pressure to generate more content, faster, whilst many contend with stagnant budgets. Generative AI is positioned as a way to improve productivity, though it has taken some time for the technology to meet advertisers’ needs around quality.
TikTok debuted Symphony last June, giving brands the power to tap into digital avatars, edit videos and optimize campaigns with the help of automation. The latest updates enable faster, more dynamic content creation based on easy inputs like text prompts and static product imagery, which may quickly be spun into five-second videos aligning with TikTok’s orientation around short-form content. Showcase Products also step up the role digital avatars play within the TikTok promoting ecosystem, with artificial models showing off the whole lot from water bottles to red midi dresses.
To get its features within the hands of more advertisers, TikTok is deepening its work with Adobe and WPP. The ad-holding group is the primary within the agency category to integrate Symphony, which can provide an edge with brands prioritizing video-first social content. WPP has been battered by client losses and spending pullbacks, and directed more energy toward its Open operating system and AI as part of its turnaround strategy.
On the digital avatar front, WPP’s clients will find a way to leverage licensed and consensually approved representations of real people, which was positioned within the announcement as a way to personalize and scale global branded content. Similarly, TikTok is providing AI-powered dubbing and translation tools that support over 15 languages. Danone, a WPP client, is a launch partner for the Symphony integration, with a give attention to its plant-based Alpro brand in Europe. WPP is aligning the TikTok tie-up with a previous commitment to spend 300 million kilos, or roughly $400 million, on AI, data and technology annually.
“With TikTok’s Symphony Suite, we’re giving our creatives much more firepower to push boundaries and experiment for our clients,” said Rob Reilly, chief creative officer at WPP, in a press release.
AI-generated content was initially clumsy, particularly with regard to video, with avatars that landed firmly within the uncanny valley. But the technology has been refined over time, and harder to discern from the actual thing as software is ready to emulate more believable movement and speech. Symphony content will probably be robotically labeled as AI-generated, in addition to subject to multiple rounds of safety reviews with regard to visual inputs and prompts.
TikTok’s greater push around Symphony follows rivals launching more generative AI tools targeted at brands. Meta, its chief competitor within the U.S., is reportedly planning to automate most marketing functions with AI, a threat to agencies like WPP. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would “probably” extend a deadline, currently set for June 19, for ByteDance to divest the U.S. assets of TikTok.
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