Political marketers are desensitized to a lack of consistency with publishers’ ad approvals following the great bottleneck that was 2022. Last cycle, OTT/CTV vendors, many new to the political market, struggled with approvals as ad dollars poured in. File types were as inconsistent as the definition of “attack ad.”
A new consideration this year: How AI-generated imagery may fill a hole in campaign spots — specifically for b-roll that doesn’t otherwise exist.
“A few years ago I was looking for an image of a farmer in a field, and I wanted it to be like a relatively wide shot where you could see the farmer’s back. It was really hard to find. It was shocking to me,” said Tucker Middleton, a partner at Putnam Partners LLC. “I looked on all different sites and thought, ‘if I could use AI to just build a shot that I need … That’s where AI is interesting to me.”
She’s not the only one. But could that ad with the AI-generated farmer get placed widely? That remains to be seen. While Google has announced disclosure requirements for “synthetic” or AI-generated content, we’re still waiting on other major channels to clarify where they stand on the issue.
Could local TV stations say no to a campaign’s ad with an AI-generated image of a rival candidate? Could CTV/OTT publishers? What if it’s an original photo that AI simply enhanced?
What if AI contributed to the script for a spot? Does that require disclosure?
For reference, Google doesn’t require disclosure on “inconsequential” changes made by AI tools, such as “editing techniques such as image resizing, cropping, color or brightening corrections, defect correction (for example, ‘red eye’ removal), or background edits that do not create realistic depictions of actual events.”
But outside of Google’s ecosystem, there’s no clear line and that should be concerning for practitioners as they look to deploy generative AI tools in their creative.
