Session: AI Video Ads – Built 90% Faster & 80% Cheaper - Athar Zia, BLKbox

[Music] we want to have um Al Di from BLK box black box is it black box or thank you just abbreviated just just It Black Box BLK box okay so um uh ala you're going to be talking about building oh ai ai ads ads the most OD topic right now to study the ads auction and one of my partners grew to be the fifth largest on Facebook spending a million dollar a day on ads so the story really came I would meet Executives every week and they would say what's the Black Box behind the face auction and I heard that

enough to say you know what it's good that we create the company called blackbox and demystify the algorithms behind it so how long have you been going then with this uh with you can count on my gray hairs now but it's been 5 years we're 130 people strong we're born during covid and another cool fact it's self-funded so we put in millions of our own dollars into this to really drive solutions that work and our skin is in the game so the only way we grow is if our partners grow absolutely and having worked with a number of AI platforms myself it's interesting to just hear your perspective on working through those years when AI was not that popular where everybody was talking about smoke and mirrors and you know very with great cynicism how has it changed in the last sort of couple of years from being sort of underground or covert and then obviously now ai becoming the thing of 24 to 25 we we

actually saw the change in 2020 if you can believe it that's when I left Facebook because what we saw was creatives were playing a larger part than bidding budgeting targeting I've bought media myself so I can speak your language I know how art is made I know how UA buyers think and uh that was a change at which we left to create blackbox and now it's not going to be a boring presentation we'll be making video ads live so present away we'll start with that so hey guys thanks for uh dealing with the technical difficulties a little bit but my name is z I'm the CEO blackbox created company 5 years ago um I left Facebook we saw a gap in the market where creatives started playing a larger role than bidding budgeting targeting and if you could find the winning ads you were able to drive profitable UA so we created blackbox where our goal was that it's going to be the most powerful AI powered creative intelligence platform where you can ideate and analyze test scale and create

Allin one platform we'll go to the next one so myself um I am I've got a background in predictive modeling I've built Financial algorithms myself and I'm bringing that type of um knowledge to Performance Marketing with the ads auction expertise alongside myself we have a team of really curated folks from gaming and non-gaming that are very very technical to bring the science and data to marketing and we're perfecting that knowledge to AI video ads and a lot of the AI Solutions you'll see today cool so there's a lot of talks on what can AI do today there's fears on it there's use cases on it a lot of it is on like 3D models there's image generation it's it's a lot of surface level stuff that we were scratching maybe four or five years ago and what we've been able to do we've got five pillars we call them analyze ideate create test scale and what we're

effectively doing is to 10x human compute and what I mean by that is if you're to come up with five ideas before how do we use AI to supercharge your team members today so ideally we want them to get promoted we want them to look like rockstars within the company and if they succeed we succeed so our mission is to 10x human compute using AI if you could come up with five ideas before we want to create 50 if you could make 10 ads before we want you to make a 100 ads and essentially our system that differentiates us is by test that was one of our core pillars in the beginning which is how do we identify an ad that has a propensity to scale and we are now able to do that within 48 Hours of our testing and that powers all of our Solutions in the back end so by the time we're done making it ad it just doesn't look good it will actually perform as well cool and we'll go to the next and now we'll just make video ads enough of the technical stuff I'll get my laptop back so we've prepared a demo

guys just to show you how far AI has come we've trained our system on three to four partners that we don't work with so Clash of cleanse uh we've got Jackpot Party we've got Subway Surfers and we've got angry birds that we've been using before but we don't work with these Partners today and huge caveat all the numbers you see are just mocked up numbers but we want to show you the power of AI um in a live setting so guys this is our actual platform we haven't cooked up the data in any way and essentially our five pillars to unlock Performance Marketing in 2025 rest on these five pillars your ability to analyze your competitor ads come up with rapid ideation that is 90% faster generate AI video ads test them and scale them so we really think AI is a 10x multiplier to everything we do today and the Five Pillars are going to drive success whether you're small Advertiser or large we work with multi-million billion dollar companies so we want to take the solutions of the biggest

Advertiser and bring them to everybody in gaming so so far what we've done is for Subway Surfers I've just picked that as an example um what we can do is quickly go through and pick a competitor within the competitor we can see what are they running what and classify their ads into top uh growth and test and learn when we find this ad our AI will break down their ad DNA of a winning ad essentially why is it working and if you were to speak to your art team today they would say well the next inherent step here is we're going to copy their ads right we've made that pretty seamless we'll go to this ad and let's say top performing I want to leverage this you could go ahead and create this and say clone this ad for me I think it's working I want access to that and from here our team has already gone through and we can say here is a let's pick competitor creatives sure now the AI says well we've already fetched all

their data do you want it to be males females what dimension what country and give us some guidelines if you give it some guidelines hit generate the storyboard it will start going through that and starting to take the DNA of what is working and combine it with the IP of Subway Surfers all right and we'll we'll go through some of these and just show you what this looks like so by the time we're done doing this it ends up looking like this right today the process that people are using is going to Mid Journey copying a lot of these ads it takes a lot of time but what they're going to be missing is a storyline the connecting to competitor ads there's a lot of missing pieces that we just aggregate all the Solutions in the market and make it really easy for UA and art team to be able to ideate rapidly right and if you were to go through this you could say and I haven't done this before so we can say uh generate a red drag again chasing

the main character so some of these are bounded to Performance again so they may let you do it but others may not it we're making prompt engineering really really easy um so in this case there are bounds we will see what it produces uh but essentially what you have in your mind we want to be able to get it on paper really fast so so while this we'll give it a few more seconds if it doesn't work I'll show you kind of like the different versions that you can iterate on pretty quickly on this 2 one okay so if you go through this you could go back in here and say whether you like this one or not you could go back and do version tracking and say you know what I actually like the original one better I want to export this you hit export it's going to convert it to a PDF and you can ship it to anybody that you like cool now we've gone through the ability to take our competitor ad we can clone it turn it into to an idea and

let's go now to creating some of this we've got four AI video ad Solutions today which is data to video ad think of this product as essentially when you do your testing your ads will have an engagement curve so assuming that you have a 3se second drop off what our system will be able to do is say we've got hundreds of your ads that we've tested if you have pointx at 3 seconds we're going to replace that with another one so what we end up doing is flattening that curve of Engagement and when you do that the ad networks reward you right so to show you this in action we don't work with Subway Surfers right and you can effectively take data to video ad storytelling digital humans or naturally translate the languages in any any uh language that you want process is simple we said hey cool you've already done the testing I'm going to take this ad and I want you to make me a new version of it we'll hit generate and our system will go through and synthesize a new add but for the

sake of this we'll go back into here and show you what these look like my videos all right so we'll play one of these ones actually I'm going to pick so Guys these are all video ads we have none of their assets and we can turn these into ads super fast so check this one now we're not getting the sound on this are you getting it on your [Music] end so that was a purely generated by Ai and its performance is to make performance be unlocked and Sam is back there Sam made some of these ads and he's our growth person he has no production skills right and if I give you guys any of you access to our

platform today as long as you have video ads already in place you'll be able to make video ads within 10 minutes all right yeah so there's a bunch of these examples that we have that um and it gets really cool so you can go ahead and say uh let me go back out of here you can say I want a new variation so we know the UA side if an ad works we want more variations of it and you can quickly say turn this into this color for me right and it's making that for you as we speak you could then go ahead and say I want a version in 9 by6 because I have a specific placement make more of these these are all being made right in front of us as we speak right and if you wanted to localize your ads it will say what language do you want to be in we'll pick Korean go to next I like this ad this one's working well for me and what are the emotions you want to elicit when you're trying to localize these ads and and I can say fear of missing out and

hit a script for me so now it's going to end up creating a script and I will just use English in this case but and it will say do you want a digital human to speak this as well right if you don't cool you can go next and you can pick the language of what you want the person to sound like so our ability to proliferate content is super super fast at this point right and I'll go back and show you what this looks and feels like you can say uh voiceovers ever wished you could escape the ordinary so you get the point internet sucks but um we can then go to let's go to Jackpot uh actually let's go to Clash of Clans all right and here are some ads that again we don't work with Clash of Clans and we'll play one of the ads and this was made by me so we'll see what this looks

like it will load so you guys get the point there's many ways to make this um we'll go to id8 just to show you what storyboarding looks like for something like Clash of Clans come on you got to load images at least um it's very native we can take your competitor ads combining with the IP of of Clash of Clans we don't even work with them when we get their data to work with it it becomes like put it on supercharge essentially right and if this is not there we can go to jackpot party it's a casino title so our AI is

able to transform many different products different languages different categories of games um and we'll play one of these and then we'll video oh no do I have to go a duplicate all right let's try duplicating this is it on duplicate it's still on duplicate so what oh here we go we're back we're back all right so we'll play you an ad on what a casino ad looks like so this can 10x the scale of content that's going to going to hit the market I know we're all talking about

images being generated one of the things that we think is actually going to be a problem statement in the future is not making video ads we think that's going to flood the market if I can make a video ad it's going to 10x itself if if you give this in the hands of artists so what we really think is going to happen is the ability to test 10x more volume of ads is going to be very constraining how do we figure out ad a versus ad B that has different colors different emotions what is resonating with our users and that is part of our test pillar where when we 10x the volume the testing pillar will help us unlock what type of users are resonating with your product so that our retention our LTV curves stay optimal all right we're going to have to wrap I'm sry no worries so so you guys get the view of where we're going with this AI is going to become a super powerful assistant to your internal teams we are already there if we can make it now we want to empower the rest of you guys to make it with that I