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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"

With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI. A lot of companies will over invest, just as they did during the dot-com bubble. But some of those investments will actually pay off, because this technology is not going anywhere.

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Regarding your first paragraph, I've even talked with people who go out of their way to actively _avoid_ said product after encountering AI-generated advertising. So that'll probably continue to have an effect for as long as average people with good eyes can still distinguish "AI"/generative media from "real"/traditional footage.

I have observed this as well, and we've already seen some pushback when major brands use AI in their creative. I wonder if we're entering an era where AI will actually taint a brand.

> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics.

I'm sure that firing tonnes of marketing people for prompt engineers will be a good return on investment... Perhaps it reveals something deeper - which is that a 30 second Youtube ad doesn't generate that much revenue at all.

> With that said, I'm long-term bullish on AI

In the long run, yes. But a lot of people will end up losing their shirts over this.

> But a lot of people will end up losing their shirts over this.

Oh absolutely. In particular, it's hard for me to see a path forward for OpenAI. If they implode, it will be a tsunami.

> Having seen a lot of AI-generated ads, I'm so skeptical that AI is actually improving marketing metrics. Every time I see one of these abominations on YouTube I think "is this working for you?"

they likely track conversions, so someone is clicking and buying.

Measuring the effectiveness of ad campaigns, particularly in the short term, is notoriously difficult. They likely mostly don't _know_ if it's working at this point (though, yeah, I'd kind of assume it isn't.)

Really? It shouldn't be difficult to measure the performance of a YouTube campaign. There are very clear metrics related to watch time, CTR and conversion rate (if applicable).

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