Season 6, Episode 21: Does GenAI outperform humans with ad creative production? (with Anindya Ghose and Vilma Todri)

In this episode of the podcast, I speak with Anindya Ghose from NYU and Vilma Todri from Emory University about their recent paper, The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness, which is available in pre-print. In the paper, Anindya, Vilma, and the other authors assess the performance efficacy of three types of ad creative:

1. Creative entirely crafted by humans;
2. Creative crafted by humans but modified by generative AI;
3. Creative entirely created by generative AI.

The authors also quantify the impact of disclosing that creative was produced by generative AI tools. In the paper, the authors run a field experiment (buying display impressions on Google Display Network) as well as a lab study where they collect qualitative data. We discuss the results of these in the podcast.

In addition, we cover:

• The genesis of this paper and the motivation to explore this topic;
• The four research questions the authors pursue in the paper;
• The methodology used to interrogate those questions;
• The principal conclusions from the studies the authors ran;
• The authors' finding that lower creative constraints on the genAI tool led to better results;
• Possible explanations for why a Generative AI tool benefits from total control with the visual modality whereas textual generation performs better with a structured, chain-of-thought process.

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