DreamWorks Co-Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg Talks AI Advertising

Artificial intelligence avatars. The Arizona Supreme Court is using the tech to simplify and report on court rulings with the public now. These avatars avatars were made by a company called Creati five.

It's an AI video.

Ad platform that just raise about fifteen point five million dollars in a series a funding round co led by Wonderco and Kindred Ventures. Please to say, joining us now to discuss that is Jeffrey Katzenberg, founding partner at Wonderco, and enon Na, the co founder and CEO of Creati five.

Welcome to both of you.

Great to see you, Jeffrey and enon I want to start with you because I'm absolutely fascinated by what you're doing. When somebody told me about Creative five, my first thought was why would.

I need this? This is for playing games?

And someone pointed out this Supreme Court, the Arizona Supreme Court using this as a way to sort of explain these rulings, explain what's on the public docket. Can you just say, explain to me how you came up with this idea and did you expect it to be used in that type of application.

Thanks for having me, so we started this idea of experience working as snaptats or help build a Snapchat video platform cos small line. So we realize there's a tremendous demand for this short from video parrel right like there's all the advertisers want to run on as with the short from video platform formats. And so we inspire us to pre this idea, to use AI to radically make the video preation easier.

And I mean, to be honest, we didn't.

It's back the use case you just described, but we are actually applying our video technology to different use case right starting from advertising. Now we're seeing new use case like what you just mentioned, and it's very pascitating us.

So, Jeffrey, I am curious as to how you came about this. Of course you've been investing in a lot of companies in the entertainment and the tech space, and it's all kind of of course, we now see this is all kind of merge together calling the tech media. It's kind of a mood at this point when you came across what non was doing. What was it about it that made you take interest?

Well, I think a couple of things.

So One, storytelling tools have always evolved, and I've always been looking for whatever the best tools are to put in the hands of storytellers, and great technology turns storytelling into really a creator and a business success, which is in fact what Creatify does. The thing I keep coming back to and just feel so strongly about is the human touches everything AI. It follows a vision, direction and feedback, and so Creatify isn't replacing the marketers, it's actually amplifying them.

Does it worry you, Jeffrey, that at some point it's going to just take away jobs on the creative front. I mean, I know this is just one slice, and it's not necessarily like writing or directing a movie, but you can see how we'd get there.

Again, I come back to the human touch here, I think is just absolutely essential and fundamental. And so the

And so what that.

Means is is that you have the best tools in the hands of more people than ever before, and out of that is going to come great work, great creativity, and I think ultimately business success, you know.

And Jeffrey brings in that human touch element which always raises the question of the inputs, right like the lms, the large language models, where you're getting the source rum to then fuel the AI and the copyright issues surrounding that, how are you guys thinking about it?

So we actually.

Take a lot of data from the brand itself and we augmented using our AI. So the way it works is we'll take the information from the brand and we'll ingest into our video generation model, and our video generator be able to analyze all the information and be able to general very personalized, tailor made advertising content.

For each brand.

And we take like data privacy and trust safety very seriously and we have very strict content moderation rule to make sure all the data are used properly.

Is there a sense though, and when we talk about the use case for this, what do you think the trust level for users are going to be? So we use as an example of the Arizona Supreme court, and it's a certain practical application. There's been other cases where people have tried to use AI avatars in court room functions without necessarily informing the court that they were using them. That's led to a lot of laughs, but it's also reason about a question about what I can believe with

Yeah, yeah, definitely like making a lot of like change to how advertising world works and the way we use is we use like to really empower a lot of business because traditionally, like for a small business.

Owner, if they want to run video advertising.

It's costs like thousands of dollars two to four weeks and it's very cost prohibited. We qualify, we actually can empower them to be able to create a video ass within minutes and be able to grow their business.

So what we do here.

Is really to empower like entrepreneurship, empowered business so they can actually focus what matters to grow their business.

So that's also the vision of really.

Five and remain it does it does well? Listen, It does raise a point here which is should there be guardrails? And the answer I believe is yes. But of something that is so young and is evolving so quickly. The balance here is between extraordinary speed of innovation and protection and whether it's protection around copyright or it's for protection around.

Truth in fact.

You know, these are super important issues and I don't know that we have the answers yet, but clearly there need to be some guardrails.

I want to well, let me go in the creative space, particularly given your background, Jeffrey obviously founding dream Works and your time as a chairman of Disney Studios back in the day kind of when movies were made still the old fashioned way, and we've seen the evolution of technology and now artificial intelligence in movie making as well.

It was interesting use case, particularly in.

The latest release of Fortnite and the use of AI with some of the voices in there. Uh. You know, I don't know what the business terms of that were, what sort of contracts were signed, but it seemed to raise a lot of hackles about fair use, about transparency of use. And I am curious, and particularly in the creative fields, how you see this evolving. I know it can be complementary to the human.

Creative but will it be will we as humans be willing to accept that.

Well, you know, that's on us. I mean I would say to you yes. And you know, it's interesting because if you go back and you look at how uh, you know, the the evolution of these uh, you know tools, you know, you look at animation going from a two D business into you know, a CG business hand drawn into state of the art computer animation was an amazing disruption and uh.

And yet animation today is.

Bigger than it's ever been, and there are more people employed working in it than ever before. The jobs, some of which have been reinvented, some of which are new, some of which.

Have gone away.

But it has absolutely been a tremendous positive impact on the business. And so I look at what's happening today. I don't think this is an evolutionary moment. It's a revolutionary moment. It's impossible to see these incredible new releases, whether it's Vo three coming out of Google or the things that we are seeing coming out of Open AI and Anthropic, and it is breathtaking. It's happening so fast that I think there is anxiety of can we keep up with this? Can we manage it in a productive way?

Well, Jeffrey, to that point, no one would have seen this evolution coming in Hollywood for example, right, It's been quite a ride. And COVID totally disrupt the industry also, so.

You got to add that.

On to it.

Fast forward for me five years, what does Hollywood and the movie industry look like in the AI world and in reality like it we're all gonna be watching bots on YouTube?

Like what is it?

I think it's many things, is the answer to that, Alex. I don't think it is just going to be one size, you know, fits all here do I think there are going to be movies and movie experiences. Absolutely from anybody that went to the movie theaters this past weekend, the biggest you know, Memorial weekend in the history of the business with two incredible movies, you know, Yes, there's a future for that. People love that communal experience.

On the end of other end of it.

You see TikTok and you see what you know creators are doing today and YouTube has never ever been bigger than it is right now, and so I'm very optimistic. I do think there are new forms of storytelling, of which these tools are going to be accelerants to that, if not catalysts to them occurring. I don't believe it's the end of Hollywood, not even a little bit. I think probably just the opposite.

Will it function in the way.

That it has in the past, Absolutely not.

You know, at the Walt Disney Studio, we had one hundred and thirty thousand frames of film, every single one of which was drawn by hand with a pencil and then inked and painted by hand. And then toy story comes along, changes everything, and the outcome of it ultimately was great success for Hollywood, for storytelling, for creators.

For business.

As long as we all know that we still need financial anchors on television. That's that's the important part.

We never want to lose that.

You know, that's existential. It's not essential, it's existential.

That's right there.

You go, Thank you, Jeffrey.

I appreciate that back that I have good skincare, which I learned about while we were waiting for you. I think that's an important perk that needs to go with the job.

I think it's important. I think there should be a budget for that, you know, and to put this into perspective talking about utilizing AI in many different forms. Yes, and it's not an or. Who are some of your customers right now? What kind of brands use your product and how are they using it?

Yeah, we have a range of different customers from like SMB owners to like marketers to agencies, and recently we also got amazing traction from like very big brands like Ali Baba, like sound Perks, like Hotspots using our tools, so really serving them with their marketings and also all their performance marketing team.

Are you using on our tools and how do you like that to grow?

Like what of the kind of brands are you targeting and what's your pitch to them?

So basically we started involved by building this like yeah, ad Maker, which is a video question tool, but now we're actually evolved into an end to end video ass solution, not only helping brand with just app creation, also help with the head research which is before the quation and after creation, we help them to deploy to a different platform and doing an organization. So really it's a one stop shop for all your performance marketing needs.

So you just tell us here, I mean, just so I'm going to give you the final word here, I mean where does this go next? I don't mean just for a creative five but overall, I mean you built something cool, You've raised some good money. Obviously you got a long way to go to sort of get up to the heights that we've seen with other companies in this space. But when you look at the foundation that you have, you look at the adoption of AI and AI adjacent technology.

What do you see as the future?

We see the future is they're going to be like a very intelligent ad agents which pretty much can automate everything along the performance marketing journey.

Right.

You can think of like the best teammates we specialized in paid asks can take care of everything from like the inspiration to decreation to the delivery and the final automatician and they can do it continuously. So really we're going to create like marketers, like brands from like the manual tedious work and let them to focus more higher, hire all their tasks right doing the designing, messaging, or grow their business.

I think that's the vision we are in vision out of thirty five.

We really appreciate your time today, both of you. Thank you so very much. Good luck with all of that. Please come back and let us know how all of it is progressing. Jeffrey Katzenberg, founding partner of Wonder Code. He's gonna go out and get some skincare in just a second. And in and A co founder and CEO of Creatify as well,