Will’s Monthly Platform Update - April 2021
This month was all about those behind-the-scenes things that make Pencil “just work”!
Growth marketers who use Pencil need to be able to rely on the platform while under pressure from their brand teams, creative teams, CFOs, founders and the clock. We’ve spent a lot of time revisiting every step of the process of generating ads to make it smoother, faster and more reliable.
1. Platform reliability
Editor speed and stability. Our data has shown that human-edited AI concepts can perform 26% better than human-only concepts and 7% better than AI-only concepts. For power users, making small edits to MGC gives them an edge and helps achieve the total brand compliance they need. To help with this, we’ve reduced loading times throughout the editor, made saving more reliable and provided priority access to key editing features in the navigation.
Export speed & stability. Nobody enjoys waiting for MGC video ads to render and export to Facebook! Our users like to generate their weekly batches of ads and launch them in single sessions… and we’ve made exporting faster to help with this. Previously rendering a 15s video for export might take 10 minutes, now it can take as little as 10 seconds.
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2. Algorithm reliability
Copy generation. Everyone loves the weird & wonderful side of GPT-3 copy generation. We’ve made some improvements that standardise loading times for copy to <20 seconds.
UGC soundbites. Detecting and slicing soundbite phrases out of your influencer or customer UGC can be magical, but often the beginning or end of soundbites wasn’t snipped perfectly. We’ve made some adjustments to detect the transitions between sentences more accurately, resulting in more elegantly mixed vocal tracks and music tracks in your generated ads.
Revealing insights BETA. We’ve launched a beta “Insights Dashboard” for a select group of test customers. It shows you what the AI has learned to work across all the Pencil ads you’ve run in 5 categories → copy, visual tags, assets, branding and intro scene. You can use these insights to inform your photo shoots, agency briefs and even product strategy. We’ll be rolling this out to all customers soon, and if you’d like to participate in the BETA just let us know.
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We are super excited by these latest features and hope you find them useful in scaling your Q2 campaigns, despite the iOS14 changes. If you’d like to try it out, sign up for a free trial to get started.
And please keep letting us know what else you need in 2021!
