For the past several years, video has been the gold standard for advertisers. It delivers higher engagement and conversions and, more than any other medium, provides the ability to create an emotional connection with viewers. Nothing taps into the human need for storytelling quite like audiovisual communication.
But there have always been challenges. High costs. Long production cycles. Complexity. You might want to do video advertising, but sometimes, with those obstacles, it’s just not feasible.
That’s how it’s been for us, too — ironic, given we’re a video company, but more on that below. However, now that we have Lucas, our AI video creator, anyone on our marketing team can create a video ad in minutes, no need to crack open Adobe Premiere Pro, or worse, After Effects.
So that’s exactly what we did. We started using our own solution (dogfooding, as we like to talk about) to create conversion-optimized video ads. This did 3 things:
- It allowed us to use video ads where we previously wouldn’t have.
- It radically cut down production time and cost.
- It beat our benchmark conversion metric.
Let’s dig into the data.
Video Ads in Minutes, No Studio Needed
But wait, you ask, why didn’t you use your own award-winning studio? That’s a fair question and has an easy answer. Truth is, our studio stays pretty busy creating showstopping videos for our clients in banking, travel, telco and more.
It’s not that they don’t want to make ads so we can promote how amazing Next Gen Video is — it’s just that they don’t have spare time to create multiple variations of ads for our Marketing team to experiment with on YouTube.
Luckily, Lucas has unlimited bandwidth, and he can create a perfectly branded, ready-to-use video in minutes. Usually, to create a video, you need a whole team of pros, ranging from a scriptwriter and videographer to a voiceover artist, animator, video editor and more.
Now, all you need is one person who has access to Lucas. That we had.
So our in-house lead gen guru, Nick, opened up Lucas, put in a prompt and pressed generate. I’ll share more of the details on that process below, but here’s one example of a video ad he created.
How the AI Video Ads Performed
Nick made a few versions of the video. He estimates it took 3-5 minutes to prompt, render and handle a few edits. (Yes, Lucas is more than willing to take edits. If you want to tweak the script or swap media, it’s easy.)
Here’s how he explains it: “I’ve been working on ad campaigns for the past 10 years across various industries, in-house and for agencies, and I’ve never been able to create video content that performs this well so quickly. I’m used to weeks and weeks of iteration processes and touchpoints to get a video done, not to mention insane video budgets, but this was all done and live within 10 minutes.”
This massive time and cost savings was a game-changer for us — as it would be for anyone using AI Video Ads for the first time. With Lucas, upfront production costs and time drop by over 99%.
Post on
Let’s put some numbers behind that. Consider the last video ad we made. We hired a freelancer (rather than a studio, where budgets really hit the roof) and we set up what looked like a reasonable delivery timeline of 4 weeks: a January kickoff and a February launch.
In the end, it took 4 months as timelines slid (it’s often this way with video). We went live in June, and it cost us $2,800. And that doesn’t even include the substantial costs associated with dedicating internal resources to create the brief, edit the script, review the video over multiple revision rounds, correct human error, etc.
Contrast that with Lucas, and it’s night and day. Lucas knows your brand. Lucas is fast. And, even better, Lucas easily scales for A/B testing. The ability to create unlimited variants for each — and test it — ensures the best creative is always what the viewer sees.
Our AI ads outperformed benchmarks too.
- After the first month, we saw a 1.9% click-through rate for the AI Video Ads. That’s compared to a benchmark of 0.65% on average for YouTube ads.
- Our cost per click was $2.81 CPC, compared to $3.56 on average for YouTube ads.
- Looking at completion rate, we could see 18% of viewers finished 75% of the video. Usually only 10-15% get that far for a video of this length.
Getting 2x higher CTR for 20% less CPC was more than we had hoped for. We would have been happy just hitting the benchmark because, again, the win for us here was the time saved and ease of video creation.
The Takeaway
Overall, the campaign was a success. Here’s another video ad Lucas made, just to show you how they varied.
Our AI ads easily saved us a couple thousand dollars and weeks of back-and-forth with an agency or freelancer if we’d had to outsource this. And we surpassed benchmarks in both CTR and CPC, which makes sense because we’re leveraging Lucas, who’s been trained to optimize for conversions.
But even without improving CTR or CPC metrics, it would be a win for us. Even the same ROAS with lower costs for making the video nets a higher ROI.
Or, said another way, if you get the same results from your AI ads that you got with your super-expensive, agency-produced ads, then congratulations — you spent a lot less to make the same amount of revenue. That’s huge.
It’s why businesses are excited about this technology. In this year’s State of Video Technology consumer study, 74% of employed respondents said they would start or increase their video advertising if they could easily create video ads using AI. That jumps to 86% for executives. (Translation? Your boss wants you to use AI Video Ads.)
This isn’t just a pipe dream. The technology is here. Let’s set up a demo, and we’ll show you how it works.
