Will’s Monthly Platform Update - February 2021

As more and more performance marketers and creatives are trying Pencil to machine-generate their performance ad creative, we’ve heard three things loud and clear from you all:

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• Setting up my brand and brief is important, but can it be made less subjective to get right?
• Generating video ads in 1 minute is amazing, but can human edits be made just as easily?
• Predicting what’ll work is seriously powerful, but can the AI explain what it’s learned?

1. “Does this look right?” brand setup

Every marketer cares deeply about their brand. But branding can be subjective. Using the right logo, font and colors is just the beginning. Coca Cola is white on red. Coke Zero is red on black. Details matter. Especially for non-creative folks, it’s much easier to see it than specify it. So we’ve changed the way we ingest your branding.

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Now, instead of telling us about primary colors, secondary colors and giving all the details, we’ll just mock it up and you select “what looks right”. Pencil then generates ads using only the specific brand applications that look right to you.

2. One-click video editing for swapping copy, visuals, colors, layouts & animations

Pencil is fundamentally designed for performance marketers who are looking to make data-driven creative decisions. And creatives looking to add more automation to high-volume performance advertising. Both of these groups of users agree - the less time writing copy, editing video and scaling across formats for “weekly batches” of performance ads the better. This is why we’ve changed the way our editor works.

Now, just click on copy, video, graphics or layouts you want to change and swap for something else the AI suggests, or something you have in mind. All changes apply to all formats. No timelines, no toolbars, no complexity. Just in, out, job done.

3. Insights into what’s lifting ROAS: messaging, visual tags, branding, first few seconds

‍Although we’ve used predictions in Pencil for a while, the explanation behind the predictions has always been minimal. We’ve heard loud and clear that understanding what’s driving the predictions builds trust in the AI and helps you leverage your performance learnings in other areas - whether it’s briefing agencies or influencers on new raw material or making strategic decisions about your pricing, packaging or proposition.

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Coming soon, our new Insights section explains exactly what is working - or not working - across every ad you run. Should you include a product image in the first few seconds? Talk about ingredient A or benefit B? Go branding-heavy or more organic? Find out soon using Insights.

BONUS! Also coming soon: 100+ new animations and 40+ new popular Facebook ad layouts

We’ve gone ahead and upped the quality level of Pencil’s generated ads by adding over 100 new animations and dozens of popular layouts used in high performance Facebook ads. Stay tuned as there’s a lot more where that came from!

‍We are super excited by these latest features and hope you find them useful in scaling your Q1 campaigns. If you’d like to try it out, sign up for a free trial to get started.

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And please keep letting us know what else you need in 2021!