 |
|
|
|||||
Jeffrey Katzenberg has long backed ambitious venturesfrom cofounding animation studio DreamWorks to championing digital innovation through his investment firm WndrCo. Now, hes supporting a bold new vision for the future of advertising. WndrCo has co-led a $15.5 million Series A investment in Creatify, an AI video ad platform that has quietly reached $9 million in annual recurring revenue just 18 months after launch. Co-led alongside Kindred Ventures, the latest round brings Creatifys total funding to $23 million, with Katzenberg also joining the companys board. Founded by a trio of engineers who previously built video ad products at Snap, Meta, Airbnb, and Metas AI research lab FAIR, the San Francisco-based startup helps businesses rapidly produce high-performing, AI-powered video ads for social mediawithout relying on traditional production or content creators. Ive spent my career looking for the tools that give storytellers an edge. Thats why Im excited about AI video, Jeffrey Katzenberg, cofounder and CEO of DreamWorks SKG and WndrCo, tells Fast Company. Brands today need hundreds of custom ads across dozens of platforms, fast and cost-effectively. Traditional production just cant keep up, but AI can. Thats what makes it a game changer. The platform features a library of over 750 lifelike AI avatars and more than 140 natural-sounding voices, enabling brands to deliver personalized messages in up to 29 languages. It also includes a built-in scriptwriting tool for crafting ad narratives. Creatifys cofounder and CEO, Yinan Na, says his experience working on Snap Spotlight and Meta video ads taught him that great creative content, when guided by the right algorithms, naturally finds its audience. I saw videos unique power to engage audiences at scale, but also how complex and out of reach video advertising can be for most businesses. Those experiences shaped my vision for Creatify as the Shopify of video adsan AI-driven platform that automates as a one-click video advertising experience, Yinan says. Its about harnessing AI to democratize creativity and empower entrepreneurs everywhere to scale their storytelling and grow their businesses. Creatify has grown to over one million users, with brands like Zumper, NewsBreak, Binance, and Alibaba.com using the platform to launch hundreds of ad creatives each month. To advance automation further, Creatify is now launching an AI agent that autonomously generates, tests, and optimizes short-form video ads. Ive seen firsthand how technology opens new doors, from hand-drawn to CGI animation, and now AI. What excites me about Creatify is that its breaking down barriers around video creation. When production takes minutes instead of weeks, more people get to tell their stories. Thats a real shift, says Katzenberg. AdMax: An AI Agent for Ad Creatives The startups pitch is simple yet disruptive. Video accounts for 82% of internet traffic, yet only 35% of ad spend. Why? Because high-quality video production doesnt scale fast enough for todays digital economy. Creatify aims to solve this with AdMax, an end-to-end AI platform that can generate dozens of video ad variations in minutes. Built for performance-driven platforms like TikTok and Metas ad ecosystems, AdMax autonomously analyzes top-performing competitor ads to generate creative insights, then creates dozens of UGC-style videos featuring AI avatars and tests them directly on Meta and TikTok. At the heart of the platform is Ad Intelligence, a proprietary engine that identifies which scripts, visuals, and formats convert best. AdMax learns which creative elements drive better results and autonomously adjusts campaigns on the fly, continuously improving outcomes with minimal human input, says Yinan. The system uses LLMs to script tailored ads, while powerful VLMs and diffusion models edit and generate the corresponding imagery and video contents. It acts like a 24/7 creative strategist, content producer, and media optimizerrolled into one with the power of AI. With API integrations and team workspaces, AdMax is designed to streamline production workflows for large marketing teams. AdMax is a real breakthrough. What used to take weeks and cost tens of thousands now happens in minutes for a fraction of the price, Katzenberg says. Thats not just efficiency; its creativity and effectiveness, and its a fundamental shift in how this business will work. Scalable Creativity, Engineered by Industry Veterans Creatifys founding team brings significant AI engineering experience. CEO Yinan Na is joined by chief scientist Ledell Wu, formerly of Metas FAIR lab and a contributor to open-source projects like PyTorch-BigGraph, for which she earned an ICML Test-of-Time Award. CTO Xin Zhou, a veteran of Meta and Airbnb, specializes in building scalable AI systems and recommendation engines. Now joining the board, Katzenberg brings decades of experience shaping the entertainment and media industries. He began his career at Paramount Pictures, rising from assistant to president of production under Michael Eisner and contributing to classics like Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark. In 1984, Katzenberg joined Disney as Chairman of Walt Disney Studios, revitalizing its film division into a box office powerhouse. After leaving Disney in 1994, he cofounded DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, producing hits like Gladiator, Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and A Beautiful Mind. After taking the studio public and later selling it to NBCUniversal for $3.8 billion, Katzenberg founded WndrCo in 2017. He believes technology should turn storytelling into business results. To him, Creatify isnt just a new tool, its a creative shift. When I joined Disney in 1984, animation was still painted by handincredible work, but slow and tedious. Today, theres no ink-and-paint department, yet more people work in animation than ever before. Technology didnt take those jobs, it transformed them, Katzenberg says. Thats the pattern: innovation expands opportunity and pushes creativity forward. A New Era of Advertising Early adopters are already seeing impact. Real estate platform Zumper produces over 300 video ads monthly using Creatify, saving about $20,000 each month. NewsBreak advertisers launch tailored creatives in minutes instead of days, reporting improved engagement across audience segments. Marketers no longer wait weeks for agencies to deliver polished campaigns. Weve designed our AI to act as a strategic copilotnot a replacement. Our full-funnel intelligence draws from a rich blend of brand guidelines, historical performance, and real-time industry trends to generate creatives, says Yinan. Marketers are always in controlthey can review, refine, and approve any AI-generated asset. Our goal is to empower them with better data and sharper ideas that drive conversions, all while preserving their unique voice and creative intuition. Whats Next for Creatify? With the fresh capital, Creatify plans to grow its R&D team, enhance customer success efforts, and roll out new features. Upcoming releases include Batch Mode 2.0 for generating hyper-targeted ad variations in bulk, along with AI-powered market insights and automated multichannel publishing. As AI tools evolve from assistants to autonomous creators, a deeper question emerges: what becoes of agencies, creative teams, and the craft of storytelling when a model can do it all on demand? The human touch is still everything. AI doesnt work on its own, it follows vision, direction, and feedback, Katzenberg says. Creatify isnt replacing marketers; its a copilot, not the pilot itself. The best technology has always done the same thing: helped people do what they do bestonly faster, smarter, and at greater scale.
Category:
E-Commerce
In January, Fortune Brands Innovations, whose portfolio includes home and security brands such as Moen and Master Lock, announced it was consolidating its regional U.S. offices into one state-of-the-art campus in Deerfield, Illinois. As part of that effort, they are requiring the majority of corporate employees to move to the Chicago suburb. When asked to relocate, most of these employees declinedbut the company said it expected that, and in a conversation about the transition, CEO Nicholas Fink framed the changes ahead as a positive for the company. He added that while many opted out of relocation, the company still exceeded industry benchmarks for the number of people who said yes to the move. To be candid, its a big change for a lot of people, says Fink, who declined to share more specific figures. There are people who are committed to their communities and their families and arent interested in a move. . . . And then there are people who are very excited to be a part of this. The company asked employees from eight sites across the U.S., as well as some remote employees, to relocate. It will eventually ask employees from a ninth site to relocate as well. The companys manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, and international sites, as well as its digital-focused San Francisco office, will remain open. Among the Fortune Brands sites that will be closing are Master Locks headquarters in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Moens headquarters in North Olmsted, Ohio, and Therma-Tru Corps headquarters in Maumee, Ohio. The larger return-to-office push Fortune Brands isnt alone in its desire to bring employees together after a pandemic that isolated many and led to the remote-work boom, which some employers are now rolling back via return-to-office mandates. In April, CNBC reported that Google had asked remote employees to begin reporting to a Google office three days per week in order to keep their jobs amid cost cuts. Amazon has also asked some corporate employees to relocate amid its full time return-to-office push, prompting a number of workers to resign. While RTO mandates arent unusual, whats less common is requiring a full relocation to a central headquarters. Last year, in a somewhat similar move, Walmart required employees to relocate to its Arkansas headquarters or another main hub, prompting some executives to resign, according to Quartz. Organizing a mass relocation Employees who were asked to relocate were offered an expenses-paid visit to Deerfield, relocation assistance, and, in most cases, an increase in base pay to account for higher cost of living in the Chicago area. Employees who opted out of relocating are receiving severance packages and at least a 90-day notice of their last day of work, the company said. The moves will happen in phases, beginning at the end of this summer. By the end of 2027, Fortune Brands says it will have room for over 1,000 employees at its new headquarters. That includes relocated employees as well as new employees the company is currently in the process of hiring. The move will create about 400 new jobs for professionals in the Chicago area, an exciting prospect for Fink. Were seeing a level of talent applying very proactively to join our company that we really hadnt seen when we were dispersed, he says. There are some jobs that have had 1,400 applicants. Fink adds that he wants to be crystal clear about how much the company values its current talent, though he feels new hires will help give the company a technological edge. In a press release about the new headquarters, the company also announced simplified leadership changes that involve eliminating the role of group president. Creating a central headquarters The location in Deerfield, about 30 miles north of Chicago, was selected based on the potential talent pool in the area as well as tax credits given by the state of Illinois, the company says. The new campus, formerly home to a pharmaceutical company, occupies two buildings connected by walkways, and boasts an on-site gym, daycare center, cafeteria, coffee bar, and recreational activities including golf simulators and a bowling alley. With the move, Fink says he hopes employees who were previously scattered across the countryand across the company’s various brandswill be able to connect more easily and quickly. In fact, hes already seen it happen in the temporary space the company is currently occupying. Im having members of my team walk into my office and say, I just bumped into so-and-so, or, I just ran into someones office and we made a decision in five minutes, Fink says. That might previously have been: Schedule a meeting, someone prepares a deck, someone presents the deck, then you have a conversation about it, and maybe you make a decision or maybe you dont, then you get off the Zoom . . . Fink believes the streamlined communication will allow for higher productivity and greater innovation, which will drive products and services. The company reported mixed financial results in a first-quarter earnings call earlier this month. Sales fell 7% year-over-year, with the company attributing the drop in part to softer consumer demand. However, earnings per share met analyst expectations. In response to the earnings release, the companys stock price dropped 2.78%, closing at $54.31. While Fink believes strongly in the importance of having employees in one headquarters, he says there are no plans to change his companys current hybrid-work policy, which requires three days a week in-office. Thats created a lot of value for people, he says. But theres also value in being together, so were trying to find the perfect balance. Some of the people who arent making the movefor us have found other jobs where they can work remotely. I would think that, over time, that will lead to underperformance relative to the people who are getting together and making decisions much faster. Its a hypothesis, but one were eager to prove out.
Category:
E-Commerce
China blasted the U.S. on Monday over moves it alleged harmed Chinese interests, including issuing AI chip export control guidelines, stopping the sale of chip design software to China, and planning to revoke Chinese student visas.“These practices seriously violate the consensus” reached during trade discussions in Geneva last month, the Commerce Ministry said in a statement.That referred to a China-U.S. joint statement in which the United States and China agreed to slash their massive recent tariffs, restarting stalled trade between the world’s two biggest economies.But last month’s de-escalation in President Donald Trump’s trade wars did nothing to resolve underlying differences between Beijing and Washington and Monday’s statement showed how easily such agreements can lead to further turbulence.The deal lasts 90 days, creating time for U.S. and Chinese negotiators to reach a more substantive agreement. But the pause also leaves tariffs higher than before Trump started ramping them up last month. And businesses and investors must contend with uncertainty about whether the truce will last.U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the U.S. agreed to drop the 145% tax Trump imposed last month to 30%. China agreed to lower its tariff rate on U.S. goods to 10% from 125%.The Commerce Ministry said China held up its end of the deal, canceling or suspending tariffs and non-tariff measures taken against the U.S. “reciprocal tariffs” following the agreement.“The United States has unilaterally provoked new economic and trade frictions, exacerbating the uncertainty and instability of bilateral economic and trade relations,” while China has stood by its commitments, the statement said.It also threatened unspecified retaliation, saying China will “continue to take resolute and forceful measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”And in response to recent comments by Trump, it said of the U.S.: “Instead of reflecting on itself, it has turned the tables and unreasonably accused China of violating the consensus, which is seriously contrary to the facts.”Trump stirred further controversy Friday, saying he will no longer be nice with China on trade, declaring in a social media post that the country had broken an agreement with the United States.Hours later, Trump said in the Oval Office that he will speak with Chinese President Xi Jinping and “hopefully we’ll work that out,” while still insisting China had violated the agreement.“The bad news is that China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US,” Trump posted. “So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!”The Trump administration also stepped up the clash with China in other ways last week, announcing that it would start revoking visas for Chinese students studying in the U.S.U.S. campuses host more than 275,000 students from China.Both countries are in a race to develop advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, with Washington seeking to curb China’s access to the most advanced computer chips. China is also seeking to displace the U.S. as the leading power in the Asia-Pacific, including through gaining control over close U.S. partner and leading tech giant Taiwan. Christopher Bodeen, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||